Last Sunday Pradnya Joshi wrote an alarming article titled “We Knew They Got Raises.  But This?”  It was in the Business section of the N.Y. Times.  I say “alarming” because, not only were American CEOs not particularly hurt by a recession that has hammered the U.S. middle class, they managed to eke out on average a measly 23% raise over their pay in 2009.  The median pay for top executives at 200 companies last year was reported in this article to be $10.8 million.

Why is this obscene?  Let’s assume that the hypothetical median executive really works his butt off 24/7, 365 days per year.  That’s 8760 hours.  So, $10.8 million translates to about $1200 per hour.  That’s about 165 times the federal minimum wage.  Of course, no CEO works 24/7 365 days per year, not even if his alias is Iron Man.  He enjoys his yacht, his summer home, his time on the golf course, a mistress or two perhaps—all of which take time from his job.  He puts his pants on the same as me—and, unlike me, takes them off for the mistresses while the trophy wife is in the country club (the membership is often paid as a company benefit).  Are you getting the idea?

On the other hand, someone making a minimum wage at company X might hold down extra jobs at Y and Z—they come much closer to working that 24/7 365 days per year and are likely to lose their jobs if they don’t.  The adage that all work is honorable for the poor and middle class is about the only thing they can hold on to if they have a job these days, as salaries and benefits have seen a steady decline over the last twenty years for the common worker.  It’s also hard to perform honorable work when you’re tired and hungry.

Work is honorable for the CEO too, but the honor, rather generally, is just honor among thieves.  Corporations are doing well in this economy because their workers are doing much more for less money.  It’s called the squeezing-blood-out-of-a-stone form of capitalism, the SOP in China and an increasingly popular modus operandi for Western corporations as well.  The CEOs and the boards that champion these captains of American industry love the profits—they’re basically thieves too, inverse Robin Hoods who rob from the poor and middle class to give to the rich.  Moreover, they often thumb their noses even at their own stockholders.

I can just hear a whining CEO complain that he has a preparation and management skills for his job that no one in the riff-raff belonging to the poor and middle classes possesses.  This person swallows the dogma that the poor and middle classes are where they are due to some innate failure, otherwise they too would be rich and powerful.  However, it is true that our churlish CEO has many years of preparation, many more than the poor guy, because he has prepared himself or become anointed to being a professional and legalized thief.  He has real expertise in the chicanery and backstabbing needed to rise up the corporate ladder.  The difference between him and the average Joe is not intelligence but foxiness and ruthlessness.  He has learned not to even care about his own family, let alone his fellow men and women—he has become a professional sociopath, a hit man for the modern corporation.

The worst comes to pass when some smirking and egotistical SOB is brought in by the board to tear the company asunder and sell off the parts.  It’s morally equivalent to the black trade in body parts.  This fellow has often made a career of doing dirty work, ruining people’s lives while keeping the stockholders happy as their shares split upon the company’s or division’s acquisition.  Two divisions in each company that basically do the same thing?  Just lay off one of the divisions.  All of them.  Who cares?  The board is happy.  Sometimes even the stockholders are happy.  It happens all the time and it will happen more often as we go waltzing down that yellow brick road towards Chinese capitalism.

A friend of mine complained that my most recent novel, Survivors of the Chaos, was very dark.  It portrays a possible end-game to capitalism on Earth when corporations rule the world, their CEOs becoming the senators “representing the people” of the nations their companies control.  I’ll field my friend’s comment here by simply saying that our future is probably going to be much darker than I portrayed.  Articles like the one in the N. Y. Times can be offered up as evidence.  The whole financial meltdown of 2008-2009 and how it was handled is more evidence, in case you have forgotten.

Mind you, $10.8 million is just the median—100 CEOs made more, 100 less (the median is usually close to the average, but not always).  At the higher end, we range from Mr. Rupert Murdoch, the man behind Fox News, at $16.8 million, to Mr. Philippe Dauman of Viacom at $84.5 million (what happened, Rupert?  Dauman’s just a com junkie too).  I have to confess that even at the median, $10.8 million, I’d have no idea how to spend that much money.  I have a few favorite charities—The Nature Conservancy would probably get a big chunk.

To stretch my windfall, I’d have to learn how to game the system like a good CEO.  I guess these people also invest it and make even more money.  The rich get richer and the poor get poorer is the SOP here.  I suppose this is where the GOP derived its half-baked idea of trickle-down economics.  It really is half-baked: they focus on the investment part, not on the fact that it comes back to the investor many-fold, especially with all the tax loopholes and write-offs our country has provided for the rich.  The average denizen of Mainstreet USA doesn’t get squat (or maybe IRS audits?).

This phenomenon, this disparity of wealth between the rich compared to the poor and middle class is a phenomenon more prevalent in the U.S. and Third World countries (the latter group, from this point of view, contains some European countries like Greece and, of course, both China and Russia).  It’s one of the reasons that I say we’re becoming a Third World country.  The rich here and abroad have no interest in really improving the education and infrastructure of their countries.  They just want to get theirs—rape, pillage, and run is the song they sing.  Get it while you can, man!

Nowhere is this more true than on our Wall Street.  The sociopathic bank bosses have rigged the game—Dodd-Frank is without teeth and they are all set to repeat the scamming they perpetrated in 2008-2009 as taxpayers bailed out those banks “too big to fail.”  And they’ll probably get a GOP president elected to help them do it.  This state of affairs can continue, I suppose, until the mobs start hammering at their door, an unlikely event, considering the apathy of the downtrodden.  The latter is all too common and logical—it’s not effective to spend time and energy in protest when you’re working two jobs or more just trying to keep your head above water.  If you’re working.  Unemployment is still at 9% and this doesn’t count all the people who have just given up trying to find a job.

Mr. Clinton whined on ABC News that there are three million jobs out there but no one trained to take them.  Whine, whine (Billy would just be another William Henry Harrison if it weren’t for Monica, because Billy had it easy—his presidency coincided with good times in America).  Billy, that’s pointing out the hole in the dike without doing anything about it.  Let’s get some retraining into the system—real training that takes into account what skills are needed to fill those three million jobs.  Since real training is expensive, let’s pay for it by eliminating tax loopholes and write-offs for the wealthy—yes, people like you, Mr. Clinton!  At a median pay of $10.8 million, CEOs can afford to invest in America’s future.

Want to keep Social Security and Medicare financially healthy?  Raise the top limit taxed to $250,000 and make sure there are no special benefit plans for millionaires, lobbyists and their sycophants in Congress.  At $10.8 million, the CEOs certainly would hardly notice.  And, since it’s a flat tax (which is one way to tax fairly), no one else should complain either.  Also, raise the corporate contribution level—if they’re willing to pay their CEO at an exorbitant level, they can well afford to contribute a little more to workers’ health and benefits.

None of these “radical proposals” (the quotes anticipating future tantrums from the wealthy—anything hurting their bottom line is “radical”) will ever  pass Congress as we know it.  Our illustrious senators and representatives are dedicated to keeping corporations and their lobbyists happy.  It’s always been this way, but in the last fifty years they have become more and more efficient at exploiting the American public.  Dystopia is just over the horizon for the poor and middle class, the latter soon joining the poor.  Utopia can only exist for the wealthy in this great land of ours.

And so it goes….

 

 

This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2011 at 4:00 am and is filed under Capitalism Without Control. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.