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Not that it will give the 1% folk much pause to re-think their long term strategy, but The Gadfly would venture to postulate that once you have a clear majority of self-identified Republicans questioning the fairness and wisdom of the widening income inequality and pay gap between corporate officers and rank and file employees, then Houston - you most certainly do have a problem.
The rise in U.S. income inequality in recent decades is largely due to massive wealth accumulating at the top of the income scale. The press and popular culture treat this phenomenon almost as if natural forces were guiding it -- an invisible hand dealing out different shares to different people.
But the hands doing the dealing are in fact quite visible. They belong to the directors of the boards of the major companies in the U.S. and around the globe. One key source of wealth at the very top is the pay of the executives of our largest companies. That pay is approved by corporate directors, who are themselves paid for their service. Many of those directors are also executives at other companies, meaning they sit on both sides of the arrangement.
Some argue these executives' pay is the just dessert for their talents and hard work. They're at least partly right: It's reasonable for a CEO, responsible for the fate of the company, to make more than, say, her assistant.
Since 1950, however, the ratio of CEO to employee pay has widened by 1000 percent,according to Bloomberg data. Across party lines, the American people believe that corporate execs make too much. A new HuffPost/YouGov survey found that two-thirds of people say the payouts are too high, with even 58 percent of Republicans agreeing.http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2014/02/13/data-ceo-pay_n_4780937.html
The Gadfly and many other dirty fucking hippies wouldn't be harping on the wealth inequality issue so much if in fact these people, whom Mitt Romney and the economic Einsteins of the vulture capital crowd assigned the moniker of "Job Creators" to, were in fact living up to that name and actually creating -- you know -- fucking jobs.
Instead, what they are doing is extracting ever more productivity from their workers via longer hours for lower wages, cutting back benefits or even outright eliminating them, off-shoring a lot of what used to be decent paying work to low wage, third world countries, and consolidating and merging to create controlling, less employment opportunity monopolies - and all the while they are recording record profits, escalating CEO and officer salaries and bonuses, and handing out handsome payouts to the investor class.
And what is frightening is that these, supposedly intelligent, business "leaders" have convinced themselves, hardly a task considering they themselves are the only people who's fortunes are rising right now, along with the majority of the hapless and gullible Tea Party, that this is a sustainable model for equitable economic growth throughout the country, and that the American people and economy will benefit from it. In fact - many of these morons truly are of the belief that transforming the American working class infrastructure in to one giant red, white and blue version of a Bangladeshi sweat factory is the way to a prosperous economic future and a democracy that the rest of the free world will admire and wish to emulate.
And as far as all of the baleful weeping and rending of garments by some of these billionaire hedge fund, vulture capitalist jagoffs over the unwashed masses not showing enough love toward them, The Gadfly's most simplistic response to that is -- "oh boo-fucking-hoo!" Perhaps if you fuckers weren't working so consistently and so diligently hand in hand to increase your already obscene wealth gap, while destroying the middle class and consigning millions of your fellow citizens to a life of perpetual poverty and near indentured servitude - perhaps - you might be looked upon with some reasonable semblance of respect and veneration.
"Thus did a handful of rapacious citizens come to control all that was worth controlling in America. Thus was the savage and stupid and entirely inappropriate and unnecessary and humorless American class system created. Honest, industrious, peaceful citizens were classed as bloodsuckers, if they asked to be paid a living wage. And they saw that praise was reserved henceforth for those who devised means of getting paid enormously for committing crimes against which no laws had been passed. Thus the American dream turned belly up, turned green, bobbed to the scummy surface of cupidity unlimited, filled with gas, went bang in the noonday sun."
~~ Kurt Vonnegut, 'God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater'
----TFG
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