MSN Money - 5 lousy CEOs include AT&T and BS

So maybe I'm feeling grumpy but...for all those who believe that telecom is one of those areas in which "free enterprise" makes for effective, efficient corporations with enterprising leadership MSN Money notes that AT&T and BellSouth are two of the five worst CEOs with the best pay packages. The gory details:

As chairman and chief executive of AT&T and of SBC Communications before it merged with AT&T, Edward Whitacre earned $85 million during the past five years, or about $17 million a year on average. [list of perks and golden parachute items elided]...Shareholders have a five-year loss of 40% to show for Whitacre's efforts, as the stock has fallen to $23.50 from $39.30.

Rich pay packages for poor performance seem common in the telecom sector. BellSouth chairman and chief executive F. Duane Ackerman, for example, made about $46 million in the past five years. That works out to over $9 million a year. But shareholders lost 23% as stock fell to $27.40 from $35.60

I guess that you could say that these leaders are "enterprising," but not in the sense we usually mean the term.

The market's loss of confidence in BellSouth and Cox is in no small part due to its judgment that their fiber to the node/curb XDSL plan to enter the triple play market simply won't give them the tools they need to compete against the cable companies.

There's no reason to believe that merging these two bloated, misguided corporations will make the resulting behemoth any closer to competent.

Lafayette will be a lot better off with LUS giving these guys some competition.