Today’s NASDAQ has Fairpoint Communications, Inc. at $14.34 USDs. Adjacent to the figure for Total Calculated Compensation of $2,359,299 (FY 2013) to Paul Sunu, as Businessweek notes, Fairpoint’s CEO is “connected to 15 board members in 3 different organizations across 7 different industries.“
Maybe that’s not so exceptional for a business man with 25 years experience in finance, corporate management and law, with degrees in political science and Juris Doctor from the University of Illinois’ Urbana-Champaign and the College of Law. 
It sounds like a man with that kind of wealth, in both experience and compensation, gets a good night’s sleep in the proverbial bed he made. But, equally important, it’s who he is in bed with.
Board relationships are oftentimes the grease of corporate gears. Across industries, the lay of the land is by nature incestuous. It is within this excessively close world where the resistance to outside influence is bred. An executive in the corporate world must develop a thick-skin to withstand the pressures of policy governance.
So who do the director governors work for? The four top umbilicals for elite corporate officer who receives an annual compensation of 2.4 million are the product/service/customer tripartite, the shareholders, and the workers, but most of all, the incestuous ‘board relationships.’
When the question of a bad board or good board arises in arbitration, the workers and the customers are the most expendable. After all, employment is an act of coercion usually cemented by demeaning work and inadequate compensation for workers. Unions were founded, really, to nudge the workers to sometimes stand up for themselves and eke out a little more. And, customers are usually fickle, too often greedy and easily manipulated. So it is that it filters down to the customers who oftentimes share the kick in the pants with workers.
Unfortunately, the history of workers and customers is that they are herded along and only occasionally will they rebel against the overlords of their complacency safety net. The story of the little people is so bad, in fact, that, if you’re one of them, you should stop complaining, take what’s coming to you and be damn glad you have what you’ve got.
The maxim is then: if you want a good night’s sleep, be multidisciplined, leave graduate school with honors, meet the right people, gain position, power, wealth and build ‘relationships’ with other likeminded achievers (directors) to buffer your corporate self (personhood) from criticism and attacks.
It’s only when you get highly paid to do what you want to do with impunity that you can have it all and sleep tight. Ay, there’s the rub.
Buy your way out of Grid collapse
If I were wealthy enough to build my own bunker that was fully self-sustainable – food, shelter, defense, electricity, etc…stories in the media like this one might not bother me as much as it might bother the little people Vidda writes about, who’d be left with only their dreams of sugar plums…
“One of the most important aspects of our critical infrastructure is the National Power Grid. Without electrical power, just about everything in our Information Age society and economy goes dead: respirators, heaters, air conditioners, and refrigerators in hospitals and homes, perishable food supplies in markets, stock trading on Wall Street, financial transfers between banks, and much more …” {Reformer 12/19/14}