t is one of the oldest buildings in Brooklyn, a weighty stone edifice built with the mid-19th century’s mix of optimistic excesses and get-ahead practicality. It echoes a time when construction followed the principle that the total tons of the stone used should produce a rough approximation of the status of what lay within. Like a medieval cathedral or castle this monument to America’s expanding economy was built to last far into a future that seemed boundless. For over a century it didn’t take a very sophisticated scale to deduce that this particular building stood for prosperity in this borough of a city that legitimately could claim to being the world’s business center. Even as Brooklyn’s fortunes changed with the economy, this building seemed to project a certain Gibraltar-like immunity to conquest, for within it lay no rust belt dinosaur but the guts of one of the most profitable sectors of the American economy, one that seemed to possess a certain immunity to the normal economic ebb and flow because what it produced had always been needed and for much of the last half century had been consumed in such prodigious quantities that it gave Wall Street stock brokers wet dreams. The original building was constructed in 1849 by German immigrant cousins Charles Pfizer and Charles Erhar, entrepreneurial pioneers on the order of Goodyear, Westinghouse and Ford who like the others hitched their fortunes to a new product, in this case chemicals and drugs. Within 10 years the fledgling company was making more than a dozen chemicals and medicines. A firm that started out producing the equivalent of snake oil by the thousands became an internationally-respected corporation that created elixirs that literally saved lives by ending what formerly had been certain death sentences. During World War II, Pfizer played a major role in helping to win the war by gambling their resources to produce penicillin by deep tank fermentation, a process that enabled them to mass produce the drug and thereby make it widely available to Allied forces. Arguably, without this advance the course of the war might have gone differently. In 1950 Pfizer launched the broad spectrum antibiotic Terramycin which became the next “wonder drug.” On January 23–a week ago–the unthinkable happened in Brooklyn and in Pfizer facilities across the United Sates as the company announced it would lay off 7,500 workers and turn the stone edifice into a museum. That the announcement?s timing placed it squarely in the middle of the ruckus of Iraq guaranteed it would receive little notice save by those directly affected and the troll-like figures who spend days hunched in front of computer screens manipulating billions as if they were playing video games. Years from now we may realize the Pfizer layoffs and plant closings symbolized something more important than whether Prime Minister Maliki would finally crack down on the Iraqi militias. Currently, the financial sections of newspapers across the country can scarcely contain their giddiness as they herald that America faces an economic revival in which the average worker is doing about as well as any worker has in the history of the world. The New York Times reports that in 2006 the average hourly pay of rank-and-file workers “was a bigger annual raise than any that workers received from the late 1970s to the mid-90s.” The GOP likes to take credit for this by claiming this prosperity grew from the Bush tax cuts which spurred investment and expansion. Yet the Pfizer layoffs reveal much of this overly-enthusiastic optimism has the feel of smoke and mirrors, something the average worker intuitively knows as she or he drives to their job each day wondering if what happened at Pfizer will happen to them. In fact all of us should be asking, if what has been the most profitable area of the American economy is not immune to layoffs is anyone safe anymore? A good deal of the significance of those layoffs lies in Pfizer’s recent history, for the company became exhibit “A” in the growing discontent with excessive executive compensation. What especially drew the ire of even staid publications like Forbes was the compensation paid to recently-fired Pfizer CEO Henry McKinnell which included a phenomenal 72% raise in 2004 over his $9.7 million 2003 salary. At Pfizer?s annual meeting last year, union protesters chanted, “Give it back Hank.” This was among the events that precipitated a large public outcry over executive compensation which resulted in several states passing laws to require companies to disclose executive pay. In January 2006, SEC commissioners voted unanimously to overhaul the way companies report CEO salaries and bonuses. McKinnell”s windfall came even though Pfizer?s stock performance caused The Street.com. to headline a story on the company, “Few Fans for Pfizer,” after its 2004 performance failed to meet expectations and its stock fell near a 52-week low. McKinnell’s outrageous raise prompted a rare agreement between both the AFL-CIO and Warren Buffet. Buffet has identified the ability of corporations to rein in skyrocketing CEO pay as the “acid test” of corporate reform. AFL-CIO Secretary-Treasurer Richard Trumka agreed: Outrageous CEO pay and pensions hurt working families, whose life savings and retirements are invested in companies like Pfizer. At a time when working Americans are losing their pensions left and right, working people are shocked by the size of these CEOs’ unjustified golden retirements. The Center for Corporate Policy has pointed out ?between 1970 and 2001, median pay among the top 100 executives rose from 35 times that of the average worker to more than 500 times as much.? They might have cited William Jennings Bryan’s remark, “No one can earn a million dollars honestly.” Yet McKinnell continued at Pfizer until finally in July of last year he was sacked, falling from the height of power with the aid a golden parachute worth $200 million even though Pfizer’s stock dropped 40% during his five-year reign, a reign he opened by proclaiming to Business Week he would raise Pfizer’s earnings by 15% a year. This is the same McKinnell whose business acumen earned him a position as chair of the Business Roundtable that worked with President George W. Bush on issues such as the infamous tax cuts and privatizing Social Security. What the workers received instead was pink slips, pink slips that were the direct result of McKinnell’s mismanagement. Divided among the 7,900 laid off workers McKinnell’s golden parachute would be worth an additional $25,000 per worker. His pay raise would add another $900 to their “severance packages.” But McKinnell isn’t the only one at Pfizer making big bucks at the expense of regular workers. A revealing table in Pfizer’s proxy and information packet for its 2006 annual meeting had a revealing table on page 57 that showed the top four officers under McKinnell earning from $1-3 million if stock incentives are included. Their salaries range from $677,000 with a bonus of $596,000 to more than a million with a bonus on $1.4 million. The total in the bonus column for these four alone over the past three years is an astounding $12,204,000! Now instead imagine those egotistical expenditures invested in something useful, something that would increase the company’s earnings. A new CEO would have somewhere near a quarter of a billion dollars to use to pull Pfizer out of the tail spin that has it laying off workers. Clearly the concept of investing that amount of money in executive salaries has done nothing for Pfizer but lower its stock values. The idea that corporate executives should receive such ridiculous salaries at the same time they are laying off workers because of bad decisions made by these very same executives helps explain why the playing field in America has become so tilted. It also explains why this country’s business performance is becoming a national crisis. The chief symbol of this is that Toyota is now poised to become the world’s largest auto manufacturer. Republicans and the business community in particular like to continually talk about “accountability” in the public sector. “Schools need to be accountable for their performance,” say the CEOs and GOP fat cats. “Government aid programs for health care, child care, job training need to be accountable,” they preach in media interviews and political speeches. And then there is the grandfather of them all dating back at least to the McKinley years, “Government needs to be run more like a business.” Well if government had been run by the likes of the folks who ran Pfizer into the ground, God help us all! If one can’t even make money running a drug company how do they propose to take care of more intractable problems like student performance? The question everyone should be asking is not merely the obvious one of “are these people worth it,” but the more serious one of whether in fact are the high executive salaries paid by American corporations counterproductive? If one accepts the GOP mantra that competition, hard work and a bit of hardship produce results then the idea of high executive salaries runs totally counter to that. Why should I work hard or even care what the results are if I know that no matter what I do I can walk away with $200 million in severance pay, a sum so astounding that those of us who labor this time of year over finding even a few hundred more in deductions on our 1040s simply cannot comprehend it or how one could possibly spend it? But just for the heck of it let’s try to spend it: new car, not just a Chevy or a Toyota, not even a Lexus, let’s go all out and buy a $175,000 Lamborghini Gallardo; new house, how about one of those estates they advertise in the back pages of the New York Times Magazine for, say ten million; clothes, how about $5,000 a month; and then there are the toys, yachts, expensive home entertainment systems, etc. that might get you up to $30-50 million. There’s more: all those tax deductions for rich folks would lower that total, like the Lamborghini “company car” and the estate needed for “entertaining clients.” Even more pointedly, do these executives really need all those millions? Does the Lamborghini allow them to make better decisions? Or the estate? Is there a single neuron in any of them or even a byte or bit that solves problems like Pfizer’s poor performance? As if we don’t need another negative aspect in the Pfizer case, we now come to the outrageous prices Americans are paying for drugs manufactured by the likes of Pfizer. The next time Congress conducts a hearing on the high cost of drugs you might ask your Senator or Representative to grill one of those drug company executives about his or her salary. Meanwhile, every time you go to the pharmacy to fill your prescription, think about Mr. McKinnell’s $200 million golden parachute or the bonuses paid to him and those directly under him and when you hand the cashier your payment think of it as not merely making a payment to your HMO but as a payment to Mr. McKinnell. I call it High Way robbery because the High (and mighty) rob the rest of us in a Way that is inexcusable. However, instead of occupying a cell somewhere, McKinnell is probably relaxing on his yacht in the Caribbean with a drink in his hand smiling about what he managed to pull off, like a bank robber who has masterminded the heist of the century.