Yesterday David Cobb, one of the Board Members of Move To Amend I serve with, sent me the article “Study Busts Myth Corporations use to Justify Skyrocketing CEO Pay” posted on the NationofChange website.
To say it got my blood boiling inasmuch as I pretty much presumed the information, would be a mild description of my emotional state after reading and digesting the article and its corroborating information.
There are two premises to the article that I want to put in context.
- Executive pay has increased 725% over the last 30 years while worker pay has remained essentially flat.
- The second statement is that companies have been escalating executive pay because absent this these executives would go elsewhere.
- I want to debunk the 2nd argument first. The article references the New York Times article “C.E.O.’s and the Pay-’Em-or-Lose-’Em Myth” that pretty much debunks it. That said common sense alone should have sufficed. There are thousands of MBAs leaving great business schools. Do you think there is a shortage of paper pushers? Are these executives the real drivers of their industries? Exxon has been in business for decades. Do you think the marginal business knowledge provided by anyone placed in that executive seat is worth the increase in pay they have received over the last 30 years even as their employees, the actual ones that do the work have remained stagnant? The answer is simple. HELL NO.
What we have in America now is a 4 tier class system. We have the poor class. We have the working middle class. We have the professional class. And we have the wealthy class. The wealthy class controls our media and our politicians. They have effectively used both to control the entire country. It is the definition of a growing Plutocracy.
Inasmuch as the wealthy class is very small (the top .1%) they have given the professional class the semblance of wealth in this system that is worth fighting for by making their lives comfortable and fairly luxurious. We are talking “affordable housing” in exclusive suburbs and/or gated communities, great vacations, company perks, etc., a lifestyle worth defending at all cost including at the cost of one’s own morals.
The working class is busy working. They are busy taking care of their kids the best they can. They do not have much time to do anything else except a periodic vacation. They want life to be better but how? After-all their wages are stagnant, their healthcare is taking a bigger bite, and their children’s higher education is taking a bigger bite if they can even afford one.
Many in the working class are falling into the poor class inasmuch as they are working because of wage stagnation as the cost of a middle class life continues to increase. These folks get some government assistance but they see access to the middle class fading.
This dilemma did not occur in a vacuum. It has always been about power. It has always been a group who wanted power over the many. This is how America was in many respects pre FDR and how America has become post-Reagan. While FDR championed a 2nd Bill of Rights that guaranteed the moral existence of a society where everyone was entitled to equal access to succeed, Reagan as the god of supply side economics instituted the effective destruction of a growing middle class as these policies transferred the wealth of the many to the few.
Reagan’s famous phrase was the opening salvo on the attack on the middle class when he said government was not the solution but the problem. It was imperative that he unpatriotically disassociate government from the people. Once people no longer saw government as “we the people” the decimation of the fabric of America could begin.
Keeping a policy in effect for more than 30 years that decimates the masses is no easy task. It requires a war. It requires a covert and deceptive war. It requires pitting the working middle class against the poor. It demands the professional class be guard at the gates of the Plutocracy.
That is exactly what we got. We got think tanks like the Heritage Foundation and others that could effectively corrupt data to give supply side economic policy the semblance of a policy that works. We got a corporate controlled media that no longer did investigative journalism or research lest they upset the wealthy class that pays the bill. We got the decimation of the unions which was the only body with enough clout, the American worker, to fight against industry and purchased politicians.
We have had class warfare for some time now. Many just did not realize it until now. When I wrote my book “As I See It: Class Warfare The Only Resort To Right Wing Doom”, I took a lot of flak for using the term class warfare. I do not back down from that tenet in the least. In fact until we understand that not only have we been in class warfare for the last 30 years, but that a Romney/Ryan victory would effectively terminate the war with an ambush on the working middle class and the poor, we will continue our path to indentured servitude with no path to independent success.
Let me be clear. We should not want wasteful government. We should not want a bloated government with a defense budget to protect the world by lining the pockets of the military industrial complex. We should not want a government that encourages a bunch of free loaders. We should not want a government that inhibits free enterprise, the idea that anyone that wants to innovate has the ability to do so and profit from doing so. We do not want a government that allows corporations to pollute at will, marginalize workers, and inhibit free enterprise.
In my book I illustrated how our corporate controlled government is eroding our freedom by design. Corporate control of society have allowed corporations to patent genes and seeds that prevent the little man from innovating and forcing the farmer to buy seeds he once grew for himself. Corporate control have inhibited policies that give the individual the freedom to leave the corporation and fend for him/herself as they continue their fight against affordable healthcare reform that frees many from their corporation allowing them to innovate on their own.
Corporate media and corporate politicians push small government for one reason. A small government is a weak government. A weak government means a weak people. Remember government is “we the people”. A weak people will be subservient to the new government, the corporation. Only problem is that unlike “we the people” that is the government of the constitution, the corporate government is “we the wealthy few”. WAKE UP AMERICA.
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