First a direct comparison
Then
It was the 1970s, and the chief executive of a leading U.S. dairy company, Kenneth J. Douglas, lived the good life. He earned the equivalent of about $1 million today.
Douglas even admitted
He said making too much was bad for morale.
Now
The current chief executive, Gregg L. Engles, averages 10 times as much in compensation as Douglas did, or about $10 million in a typical year.
Plus perks
When Engles leaves town, he takes the company’s $10 million Challenger 604 jet, which is largely dedicated to his needs, both business and personal.
No mention of the fact that he is treated as royalty might influence company morale however, in fact he refused to comment.
Through a spokesman, Engles declined to be interviewed. Company officials threatened to call the police as a reporter was interviewing workers outside one of its dairies.
Sniff.... how dare the press interview the plebs? Actually if the MSM had been awake over the last forty years we might not have got to this point.
If his father had seen how much executives were making today, Andrew Douglas said, he’d be “spinning in his grave. My dad just believed that after a while, what else would you need the money for?”
That mentality died in the 1980's with "greed is good" I'm afraid, it was the mentality that made America however.
The uneasiness arises out of the fear that extremes of wealth can unfairly reduce the economic opportunities and political rights of everyone else, according to sociologists
No kidding, the best schools, health care and services money can buy, whilst all the time they talk about productivity and wage control of the workers; and how they must be competitive.
Well at least the US leads the world
Income inequality has been on the rise for decades in several nations, including the United Kingdom, China and India, but it has been most pronounced in the United States, economists say.
A little confirmation of our gut feelings;
What the research showed is that while executive pay at the largest U.S. companies was relatively flat in the ’50s and ’60s, it began a rapid ascent sometime in the ’70s.
As it happens, this was about the same time that income inequality began to widen in the United States, according to the Saez figures.
The reply to this:
“It’s a different company today,” company spokesman Jamaison Schuler said. He declined to comment further.
You betcha it is, the mentality of those who run it is that they deserve the best, their workers not so much.
Outside one of the Dean Foods dairies recently, the workers at the plant for the most part only rolled their eyes when asked about Engles’s salary. But they spoke admiringly of Douglas.
“People back then thought enough was enough,” said Ron Smith, 63, who maintains the machines at the plant.
The reason they keep going?
The employees said they only occasionally dwell on Engles’s riches, anyway. Their primary focus is on making ends meet, they said.
Forty years of neglect and grinding down of the workforce has lead to where we are now; the lack of fight by our politicians for the middle class has given us an unequal society. The near complete abdication of the MSM keeps it from the news.
99% of Americans are excluded from this club and every day the divide widens, and we are asked to carry the burden of shared sacrifice and austerity caused by the excesses of their greed.
The right laud the successes of this tiny few and do all in their power to amplify the divide by fooling the other 99% that they to can participate in this feeding frenzy, the center left appear not to care, and the left is ostracized.
Unions both rightly and wrongly criticized for corruption and excess in the past are in but a few notable cases been reduced to mere talking shops and can be safely ignored.
We need to organize and hold our elected representatives accountable; but with the power and influence we face from corporate money and a fully owned MSM this is proving increasingly futile. Broken promises are merely treated as being part of the political reality and defended from a partisan view as being the only way forward, the fact that it has been going steadily backwards for over forty years appears to be beside the point.
Campaign finance reform is readily mocked and garnering even more money into the political process seems to be the common wisdom. We have been reduced to a bought and sold representation at a national level and increasingly so at a state level. Only the rich and their tools can afford to run for office [bar the rare exception] and hence two parties hold us to ransom with the stirring revolutionary phrase "but, but the other side are worse".
It is stirring to have such representation it is no wonder we are in such straits.
I can understand the tea partiers, but the sad thing is that their "movement" is a fully owned subsidiary of the Koch brothers.
I can understand how many turn to fundamentalist religion and the special form of sanctimonious fear mongering [Islam] and blatant bigotry [women, gays, people of color] that they generate.
It all comes down to trying to find a place where we belong and to shelter us from our problems rather than actually doing anything about those causing our problems in the first place.
Turning the population against itself has worked out very well for a tiny minority "Divide et impera" is as true today as it ever was and has proved to be an unqualified success. The perversion of the American Dream appears to be complete, both parties protect the privileges of the few by any means possible.
Now to cut Medicare, Medicaid, Social Security, Education whilst all the time handing out tax cuts to the fortunate few. Our own "tax cuts" wont cover the extra costs of providing these ourselves.
Are you ready for austerity and the biggest heist of all time just after the one where the bankers walked away unfazed and enrichened?
If not; then you really haven't been following the plot.
4:25 AM PT: Take this piece of advice from the "left" in the UK
http://www.bbc.co.uk/...
He said Chancellor George Osborne was "desperate" to provoke industrial action so he could blame them for the weak economic recovery.
Keep your nose down and let them fail, meanwhile they will pass any law they like.
Brilliant! Lay down and get run over without a whimper
No wonder the "left" is losing the damn plot.
So don't fight back because..... you will only hurt yourselves.....genius