Class Warfare - The War Is Over. The Good Guys Lost.

[tucsonlib]

(Not for the fainthearted......)


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/les-leopold/obama-and-the-incredible_b_196863.html

In 1970 the gap between the top 100 CEOs' average pay and the pay of average workers was 45 to 1 ($296,170 to $6,542), reflecting the restraints of lingering New Deal financial controls and mores. As those controls weakened, the gap increased to 127 to 1 by 1980. As deregulation, tax cuts, and the union bashing of the Reagan era took hold, the gap jumped to 321 to 1 by 1990. In 2000, as "financial innovation" pumped up fantasy finance, the ratio of CEO pay to the average workers' pay hit an obscene level of 1,510 to 1. And then by 2006, at the height of the fantasy finance boom, it climbed to a whopping 1,723 to 1 ($50,877,450 to $29,529). The financial sector soaked up trillions of dollars of wealth accumulated by the very rich, while average real wages remained stagnant.

:banghead:

[ThirdWorldJohn]

1. Yea but we are about to get thrown a bone called affordable Health INSURANCE

[d_b]

2. heh

[livefreest]

9. "heh" is right

[Political Heretic]

21. How many democrats in Washington right now are as much a part of the problem as anyone else?

There's a "gang of twenty" we can think of right off the top of our heads...

The whole corporate-dominated political system is so fundamentally broken. :(

[ejpoeta]

20. yeah, 'affordable'.... that could mean so many things. affordable to whom?

[Demeter]

3. Winners Never Quit and Quitters Never Win. Ask Susan B, Anthony

It ain't over. It's just out of the boardrooms and out on the street now.

[tucsonlib]

4. Yeah...

....with us in our boot heels and them in their limos.....
:toast:

[Demeter]

6. there's more Power in Numbers of Enraged People Than In Piles of Worthless Paper, My Friend

and more strength in a belief of protecting family and community than in hoarding. Hoards can be taken by mobs (and will be).

[tucsonlib]

7. Hey, I'm On YOUR Side!

:pals:

[truedelphi]

5. I love the expression "fantasy finance" -- K & R n/t

[struggle4progress]

8. It's true we've been losing for years. We'll start winning when we start learning from experience.

[livefreest]

10. this gap of income is outrageous.

until maybe a few years ago i thought this income gap was not something to worry about. however i realized that even if one compares a CEO's salary to ....let's say a successful cardiac surgeon earning a handsome income in the range of 500k to 1 million the gap is still humongous. What in the world does a CEO do in order to earn 50 times what a practicing surgeon would make?
This really convinced me that CEO salaries are really out of control. It's not income but rather theft that the CEO's and their board-rooms friends have been perpetrating. simple, common THEFT

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

14. It is that simple. Open, Board approved embezzlement, conversion of corporate assets

malfeasance, breach of fiduciary duty to shareholders= plain old garden variety theft.

The insanely bloated salaries should have been spread across the company workforce, plus higher dividends should have been paid to shareholders. My theory is that this will only end will people across the board reject buying any stock from any company that has this kind of top-heavy compensation. One good thing that has happened recently is that when you look at a company's particulars on a site like MarketWatch, executive compensation is now a commonly reported statistic.

[bertman]

17. I wish I shared your optimism, Phoebe. Unfortunately, the same disease afflicts the

investors that affects the executives--greed.

Most investors, whether they are investing millions, thousands, or hundreds, are looking for return on investment and don't really care how their rising stock prices are produced, and don't look deeply enough into a company's workings to figure out if its earnings are "ethical" or not. Everyone I know, with a few exceptions who use the socially-responsible investment route, goes by how well the stock is doing. So, if a company's stock prices are showing good movement that's where their money goes.

This is my biggest beef with the whole 401k approach to retirement savings/investments. We are buying in to a system where generating profit is the only concern. So we don't really know who is treating their workers fairly and which companies are investing for the long term or which companies are trying to be responsible environmental stewards of the Earth. I always feel as if I'm turning my money over to some unknown CEO/CFO's who I'm expecting to make money for me. I have no control over them and no time to investigate how they operate. So, I'm really operating on faith.

I realize that I'm in the minority when I'm concerned about HOW my 401k earnings are generated.

[barbtries]

22. a minority, probably,

but you are definitely not alone. i agonized over signing up for my first 401k ever...and was tagged as a "reluctant" investor. well, it's pre-tax, i have a safe harbor that almost matches my contribution dollar for dollar, and it was not fear of losing money. it was distaste at where that money was going.

[Merlot]

11. If the CEO's income has increased, and the workers income hasen't

then it'e pretty obvious that the difference is coming from the workers salary. It's not coming because the CEO has mad some magical "profit" appear out of thin air. Nope, it's from the salarys and benefits of the workers.

[bertman]

16. Not necessarily, Merlot. There are lots of places the additional dollars could have come

from even if the workers' wages remained the same: increased profit from the same dollar amount of sales; reduced overhead costs (sometimes this can be done without cutting the workforce); reduced costs of raw materials, to name three.

[Blue_Tires]

12. k+r

[Wednesdays]

13. K&R

:kick:

[dem mba]

15. do those figures include the CEOs stock options

and golden parachutes and all that? Or is it just base salary? The author is quoting some book I don't have and don't have the time to research right now...

[Hawkowl]

18. Vive La Resistance!

Fine. We are economic guerillas now.

[Captain Hilts]

19. Franklin and Eleanor would be pissed.

ER: Darling, what kind of shit is this?
FDR: Those economic royalists acting like...economic royalists - merciless bastards! Let's go get 'em, old girl!
ER: Then move over, it's my car, dear...

[earth mom]

23. Is it pitchfork time yet or what?!

:argh: