STOP SWINE CEO PAY: RETURN TO BEST SALARY LEVELS: TAX CEO PAY ABOVE 30Xs HOURLY WAGE AT 70%: JUST LIKE THE 70s!
The 100 year-war against fair hourly wages has culminated in devastating the middle class and creating mountains of wealth for the corporate executives that have fought this war.
Corporate Accountability and WorkPlace Too Much: A Commentary on Excess and Inequality / By Sam Pizzigati
Meet the CEO Who Cut Worker Pay in Half While Pulling in $21 Million Last Year…CEOs these days aren’t just slashing worker jobs to add on to their own rewards. They’re slashing worker pay as well.
It is time the politicians in the US started to represent the best interests of the public good in lieu of creating a vast chasm of economic inequality.
This is a no brainer, if you look at how there are now two levels of America, just like a dictatorship 3rd world country, or a left over caste system. And just like dictators do, now scions of American Capitalism bury hoards of their filthy lucre, obtained from screwing the middle class out of jobs and tamping down incomes, in Swiss banks and offshore “banks” in the Caymans, to avoid taxes and scrutiny. I am not against Capitalism, but Capitalism gone awry!
Where is the outcry and where is the American dumbed-down public to fight back? Fighting back is not socialism, but a fight for fairness. Tax laws, not so long ago, were concerned with a modicum of fairness. After the top income tax bracket remained at a very high level in the aftermath and recovery from the Great Depression – reducing upper tax brackets from 70% to 50% worked to stimulate a stronger economy for the middle class, as the upper class did have more incentive to invest in real investment.
This is the basis for the job creator myth.
The concentration of wealth has never been greater than today with the huge redistribution of wealth to the wealthy during the past 30 years. And Congress cannot get its arms around raising the minimum wage?
It has been reported that a majority of the most profitable corporations have parked THREE TRILLION DOLLARS OF PROFITS OFFSHORE TO AVOID PAYING TAXES, AND ARGUE THE RATE IS TOO HIGH?
Everyone who is not suffering from mental rigor mortis must get more involved, and stop listening to the lying excuses about how raising the minimum wage will be bad for business. Additionally it is imperative to understand the distinction between who the so called job creators are today, and who they were in the 70s.
The basic difference is simple – there is a distinction between real investment and financial investment – real creates companies and projects that create jobs and incomes which provide revenue for the Government. This is called capital formation. In the 70s and before, Corporate CEOs invested profits in expansion in the U.S. and exhibited a concern for the welfare of employees; and Wall Street raised capital for new businesses and for expansion. However, Wall Street became enamored with how much it could charge to take a company public (so the founders could make piles of money), LBOs, then CDOs CMOs; and now with how much more it can make from creating markets to trade in virtual portfolios of unmitigated leverage – a market with $700 trillion to $1.2 quadrillion swap derivatives without any foundational value. So capital formation is now net worth formation.
Financial Investment is what Wall Street Banks now specialize in because financial manipulation as a function of crazed leverage creates a huge velocity of fees to create personal net worth.
And the swine pay syndrome has emerged with too many Corporate CEOs willing to extract as much as possible from public corporations, which is why Congress choose to prevent this situation in the 70s with a best salary level as well as taxing dividends above a certain level at a top rate of 90%.
This is part of the backdrop to the 100-year war against fair wages, and must be understood in its proper context to know why Elizabeth Warren is on the war path. Everyone needs to support the one member of Congress who knows enough to fight back. There are other senators who know some of what she knows, but the more knowledge we all have of the root cause the better the war can be to establish a new ethic for the people – THE DOCTRINE OF FAIRNESS, which I have called for in the last chapter of How We Got Swindled.
It is time to fight back, to fight the brain dead Teapublicans – and any Democrat who gutlessly supports the proliferation of sociopathic greed, and make Congress stop supporting the best interests of the sociopathically greedy instead of we the people.
Buy my book from Amazon, about which David Satterfield, former Business Editor of the Miami Herald, 2 times Pulitzer Prize Winner, said this:
“This should be must-reading for every policy maker in Washington and every student of economics and finance.”