"Only dull people are brilliant at breakfast"
-Oscar Wilde		 Brilliant at Breakfast title banner "The liberal soul shall be made fat, and he that watereth, shall be watered also himself."
-- Proverbs 11:25
"...you have a choice: be a fighting liberal or sit quietly. I know what I am, what are you?" -- Steve Gilliard, 1964 - 2007

"For straight up monster-stomping goodness, nothing makes smoke shoot out my ears like Brilliant@Breakfast" -- Tata

"...the best bleacher bum since Pete Axthelm" -- Randy K.

"I came here to chew bubblegum and kick ass. And I'm all out of bubblegum." -- "Rowdy" Roddy Piper (1954-2015), They Live
Wednesday, May 11, 2005

This is for everyone who thinks Bush policies benefit the little guy
Posted by Jill | 7:04 AM

Here's what Bush's "ownership society" looks like for most of us:

Real wages in the US are falling at their fastest rate in 14 years, according to data surveyed by the Financial Times.


Inflation rose 3.1 per cent in the year to March but salaries climbed just 2.4 per cent, according to the Employment Cost Index. In the final three months of 2004, real wages fell by 0.9 per cent.

The last time salaries fell this steeply was at the start of 1991, when real wages declined by 1.1 per cent.

Stingy pay rises mean many Americans will have to work longer hours to keep up with the cost of living, and they could ultimately undermine consumer spending and economic growth.

Many economists believe that in spite of the unexpectedly large rise in job creation of 274,000 in April, the uneven revival in the labour market since the 2001 recession has made it hard for workers to negotiate real improvements in living standards.

Even after last month's bumper gain in employment, there are 22,000 fewer private sector jobs than when the recession began in March 2001, a 0.02 per cent fall. At the same point in the recovery from the recession of the early 1990s, private sector employment was up 4.7 per cent.


But for "the haves and the have mores", who Bush has admitted constitute his base, happy days the likes of which haven't been seen since the era of the robber barons are here again:

How would you like a 54-percent pay raise? That's how much pay jumped last year for the chief executives of the 500 largest U.S. companies, according to Forbes magazine.

Worker pay is shrinking, the economy is stalling, the trade deficit is growing, and the stock market is below 1999 levels -- but CEO pay is still on steroids. The highest-paid CEO in 2004 was Yahoo's Terry Semel, who hauled in $230.6 million. That's more than $4 million a week.

Yahoo is on the Lou Dobbs Tonight list of companies "sending American jobs overseas, or choosing to employ cheap overseas labor, instead of American workers." It would take the pay of 7,075 average American workers to match the pay of Yahoo's CEO.

William McGuire, of UnitedHealth Group, the nation's leading insurer, was the third-highest-paid CEO on the Forbes list. His pay of $124.8 million could cover the average health-insurance premiums of nearly 34,000 people.

"While executives are richly compensated, patients are tightening their belts," Dr. Isaac Wornom, chairman of the Richmond (Va.) Academy of Medicine, wrote last year. "Premiums, deductibles and co-pays are up, while benefits continue to shrink. One million Virginians -- that's one out of seven -- have no health insurance at all, and this number is increasing. . . . Half of the uninsured work full time for small businesses that simply can't afford the inflated rates."

CEOs can win big even when the company loses. Merck, for example, had to pull its Vioxx pain medication off the market, because it increases stroke and heart-attack risk, and Merck stock was down 28 percent last year -- but CEO Ray Gilmartin got a supposedly performance-based bonus. His total 2004 compensation was $37.8 million, and he received a new grant of 250,000 stock options.

CEO pay of Fortune 500 public companies averaged $10.2 million in 2004, counting salary, bonus, and other compensation, such as exercised stock options and vested stock grants. Full-time-worker pay averaged just $32,594. That's 11 percent less than 1973's average worker pay, of $36,629, adjusted for inflation, although worker productivity rose 78 percent between 1973 and 2004.

In 1973, CEOs made 45 times as much as workers, according to pay expert Graef Crystal. In 1991 -- when Crystal said that the imperial CEO "is paid so much more than ordinary workers that he hasn't got the slightest clue as to how the rest of the country lives" -- CEOs made 140 times as much as workers. Last year CEOs made more than 300 times as much.

Executive pay now takes more than double the bite out of company earnings that it did a decade ago, according to a recent study by Lucian Bebchuk, a Harvard professor of law, economics, and finance, and Yaniv Grinstein, of Cornell University's School of Management. Looking at data for thousands of publicly traded companies, Bebchuk and Grinstein found that pay for the top-five company executives rose from 4.8 percent of aggregate net company income during 1993-95 to 10.3 percent of aggregate net income during 2001-03.


I wonder: If presented with this information, how many people who support Republicans would think that preventing gay marriage is so important that it's worth allowing corporate executives to dip even deeper into the worker pay pool and the health care system in order to further stuff their own pockets?
0 comments
Bookmark and Share