Millennium II: The Rich and the Poor of It

(In the backward world of Blogs, Part I follows Part II)

by Theron Dash

Now here are some additional facts, courtesy of Kevin Phillips, author of "Democracy and Wealth": A periodic Business Week survey showed that the ten best paid executives in 1981 made an average of $3.4 million. In 1988, the top ten averaged $22 million. In 2000, they averaged $155 million.

According to the Congressional Budget Office, the average after-tax, inflation-adjusted cash income for the top one percent of Americans in 1979 was $256,000. By 1997, it had more than doubled, to $644,000. But rising tides lift all boats, right? That big money trickles down. The middle one-fifth made an average of $31,700 in 1979. In 1997: $33,200. That's a big $1500 gain.

But they should count themselves fortunate. In 1979, the bottom fifth got an average of $9300. In 1997: $8700.

So it's little wonder that a new study of 13 industrial nations (I found this one myself, in Scientific American) shows that the best country for a rich child to grow up is the good old USA. For a poor child, the worst countries are the U.S. and the U.K.

Phillips writes and talks about the distortions of democracy caused by such immense disparity, and the behavior of the rich that goes along with it. But let's keep our eye on the money for a moment.

I personally am still mystified by what people who make hundreds of millions a year do with that money. But I am not confused about where that money comes from. It comes from everybody else.

You don't have to draw diagrams for people who have seen their retirement funds disappear because of recent corporate corruption and burst bubbles of one kind or another. They know their money ended up lining the golden pockets of executives.

Unionized industrial workers have known for more than a century where the riches come from: their blood, sweat and tears. Sure, there's technology, innovation, smart management, business acumen and all that—--but those are neither rocket science nor exhausting, life and health threatening labor. Nothing gets made and nothing runs without the contributions of skilled and unskilled labor.

But what about the rest of us? It's been fashionable for several decades now for TV stations and newspapers to run some regular feature exposing practices which waste government funds: taxpayers' money. Government mismanagement, waste and corruption. This has become so reflexive that I saw a series exposing Medicare and Medicaid fraud—the fraud was perpetrated by sleazy subcontractors and doctors—that is, people in the private sector—--but the blame was on government regulators (the few that were left) for not spotting the fraud sooner.

Anyway, the tag line for this kind of report is usually something like: It's Your Money. Well, guess what. That money that disappears because of corporate fraud is your money, too. And so is the money that these rich folks make by exploiting a system stacked in their favor. It's not just money you could have made. IT'S ALL YOUR MONEY.

Why is your health insurance bill so high? Why does your cable TV bill keep going up, despite the promises of de-regulation that it would go down? Ditto your electric bill?

Because costs are higher, they say. The cost of insuring the sick—all that expensive medical care, for example. Doesn't TV news say so?

Sure, medical care is expensive. Then again, if it's just the higher costs of care, how is it that health insurers are able to spend so much on political lobbying? How do they become such huge and powerful corporations? How is it that cable companies can buy up other companies—where does that money come from?

Guess.

Then there's advertising. You think you only pay for advertising when it pops up on top of the news on your computer so you can't read anything, or when up to a third of the time you're watching a TV show you're watching commercials. But you are paying for that advertising with more than frayed nerves. You pay for it all—not once, but twice, at the very least. And that's even before it does its job: getting you to buy something you don't need and didn't know you wanted.

You pay for advertising when you buy the product. Advertising costs are build into the purchase price. You pay for advertising again when the company gets a tax deduction for it, and your tax dollars must make up the difference.

And all that political lobbying and campaign money— that's part of the purchase price, too, and a lot of that is also deducted. So you are paying for all the laws that get written by businesses and passed by lawmakers beholden to corporate contributors and looking for perks and cushy jobs when they retire. A lot of those laws may not be what you favor at all. They may be against your interests, not to mention your principles. But you have no choice. If you want the product or service, you pay for a corporation's ability to manipulate the system for its benefit. Chances are, thanks to these laws you're paying for, you'll be paying more somewhere else down the line.

You paid for privatization and deregulation. So now you're probably paying more for both health insurance and out of pocket medical expenses; more for cable, more for electricity. You've paid to permit and encourage corporations to control access to more and more of the necessities of life, including water and seeds for growing food, so you'll be paying more and quite possibly getting less.

You're paying for television dramas that demonize the poor. You're paying for rich TV anchors and television news that is controlled by huge corporations, so you're unlikely to get any news or information that doesn't contribute to the riches of the rich, or any information that might threaten that power and those riches.

You may be paying for all this by working two or three jobs and never getting enough sleep, by worrying constantly about how to pay for a child's education or health care, or how to avoid being downsized into a cardboard box.

We live our lives as best we can. But let's be a little bit clear about the context. We pay for health insurance if the government does it, or if private companies do it--plus we pay their profit. We pay for political contributions even when they go to candidates and causes we don't favor. Campaign reform is a consumer issue. Corporate lobbying is a consumer issue. Paying to have our communications media controlled by private interests is a consumer issue. The current health care system is a tragedy, within the larger tragedy of what's happened to the political system and the social system, and we are the tragic saps for letting this happen. And we're paying for it. Again and again.

This is the Millennium that is

Here's how the new millennium began: In 2000, the average CEO was paid more for one day's work than the average wage earner got all year.

What about those above-average CEOs? Well, the CEOs of 23 of the larger companies the SEC and other government agencies are investigating for various skullduggeries were above average in pay by about 70%. Which is about the same percentage that their companies' market value dropped in the year and a half after January 2001. But so far they haven't had to give any of their money back. Which, by the way, added up to $1.4 billion between 1999 and 2001.

Thanks to these above-average CEOs, some 160,000 wage earners no longer earn any wages in these companies.

Those average CEOs saw their pay go up by 571% in the 1990s. So the average CEO made almost six times as much in 2000 as in 1990. Average workers' pay rose by about a third.

But fortunately, Americans are no longer dependent on mere wages—we have become a nation of capitalists, earning from investments in the stock market. Or so we're told. We heard a lot about how average Americans became stock market investors in this new millennium, proving how robust American capitalism is in spreading the wealth. Turns out that the bottom 80% of stock owners hold less than five percent of all stocks. The top one percent owns nearly half. That's consistent with the lopsided statistics on wealth in general.

So much for statistics. How about some damn lies? You've seen those lovely Wal-Mart commercials—the bouncy old folks, the smiling minorities talking about how great it is to work at Wal-Mart. After all, it's the biggest damn company on the planet! It employs more people than the U.S. military!

It's also a defendant in thirty states—that's 30 out of 50—because some of those happy employees say their managers force them to punch out after their 8 hour work day, but continue to work—not for overtime, not even for the same rate of pay (which itself would be illegal), but for NOTHING. Which is real illegal. Wage slaves? Nah. These are your old-fashioned kind. No-wage slaves.

Most of this information comes from a column by Arianna Huffington. She used to be the female Henry Kissinger—on every talk show with her relentlessly annoying yet hypnotic voice, talking the conservative line. She should have spelled her name Air-ianna. Her former husband, multimillionaire Michael H., ran for governor in California. He preferred to let his millions (and Arianna) speak for him, since it seemed he had nothing much to say. He lost, and Arianna promptly divorced him. In recent years she's become a persistent voice for that lower 80%. What happened to her? That could be quite a story.