The City of Portland Oregon Strikes a Blow Against United States Extreme Income and Wealth Inequality

Portland Oregon opened up a new front in the battle against income and wealth inequality. On December 7, 2016 local officials voted to slap a surtax on corporations that pay their chief executive officers more than 100 times what they pay their typical workers. The bill was sponsored by outgoing City Commissioner Steve Novick.

According to the Nation, “The Portland move will be the nation’s first tax penalty on corporations with extreme CEO-worker pay gaps. But it’s unlikely to be the last. Much like the Fight for $15, this bold reform could well spread like wildfire.

Indeed, we may look back at the Oregon vote as the dawn of a new “pay ratio politics.” Thanks to a new Securities and Exchange Commission regulation, publicly held corporations will this year have to start calculating the ratio between their CEO and median worker pay. The first of these ratios will go public in early 2018.

These federally mandated pay ratio disclosures will make it easy for states and cities to adopt Portland-style surtaxes—if they have the political will to do so.”

For Novick the bill was all about striking a blow against our nation’s skyrocketing inequality. “CEO pay is not just an eye-catching example of, but a major cause of, extreme economic inequality,” he said in a statement after the council vote. “Extreme economic inequality is—next to global warming—the biggest problem we have in our society.”

Currently, the top 1 percent steal via federal legislation anywhere from 24 to 37 percent of all income produced in the USA every year, compared to just 8 percent 36 long years ago. The top 1 percent now own more wealth in the USA than the bottom 90 percent as of a few years ago, and that is sure to have grown since then.

Click here for the entire story in the Nation.

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Five Things in Which the United States Is Number One

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Since Corporate CEO’s Have Wrecked the Economy and Corrupted Our Government With Showers of Money, What’s Wrong With This Picture? Historical Graph: CEO Pay

CEO’s have shipped tens of millions of our jobs away, on an average of one to three million a year, which has severely weakened our tax base, and redistributed trillions of dollars from the 99 to the 1 percent, leading to the greatest maldistribution of income and wealth in US history, and a nation teetering on third world status. They’ve poisoned us with genetically modified food, led us into wars with lies, polluted our air and caused an outbreak of Autism in the process, and gutted the US economy as badly as any butcher would a deer.

They’ve corrupted our government to the point where it is now a government of the rich, by the rich and for the rich.

They’ve corrupted both the conservative and the liberal wings of the US Supreme Court so that only one of the two wings of the 1 percent are represented and big money will almost always win in that court against the people and the US Constitution.

CEO’s have run their businesses into the ground and have been forced to take trillions of dollars in bailout money from the US government and the Federal Reserve.

Something corrupt and rotten is going on here. The graph below suggests the average CEO pay rate has been heading in the wrong direction for sixty-three years. The graph is also in error. This morning a new study by the Economic Policy Institute came out that shows CEO pay to be 273 times greater than average worker pay, and not 204, which the graph below shows. Perhaps CEO pay compared to average worker pay should be closer to 1:1, or better yet, 1/4:1.

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ExxonMobil’s Tiller, Tiller the People Killer

Tiller, Tiller the People Killer

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The Costco Business Model: Opt out of the Wall Street Business Model

In other words, the Costco CEO has decided that redistributing income from his employees to his shareholders isn’t good for the employees or for the shareholders. It also isn’t good for the nation. The truth is simple. When you have a massive income redistribution from the 99 to the 1 percent via federal legislation, as in the last thirty-two years, you have a government and an economy that are sick with massive corruption. Costco has opted out of that business model. Thirty-two years ago, the 1 percent took home about 8 percent of the nation’s income, now it’s over 30 percent and growing, and it’s been stolen from the rest of us. Thirty-two years ago, the 1 percent owned 7 percent of the nation’s wealth, now they own over 40 percent, and it’s growing at the expense of us all.

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Costco’s CEO Explains How They Make Record Profits

Costco’s CEO Explains How They Make Record Profits

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The Swiss Vote Overwhelmingly For Executive Pay Curbs

Last Sunday, 67.9 percent of Swiss citizens voted to “impose some of the most restricting rules on executive compensation. All of Switzerland’s 26 cantons passed the initiative.” Such agreement is rare. The new law “will allow shareholders to veto executive pay proposals and will give them the power to ban big rewards for new and departing managers.”

“67.9 percent is one of the highest approval rates that Switzerland has ever seen for a popular initiative. It goes to show that the built up anger and plain outrage, caused by multi-million payouts for executives, can translate into decisive and convincing action in Switzerland’s direct democracy.”

“The opponents of this initiative argued that the executives who are offered better pay elsewhere would leave the country. They also argued that these new measures would damage the country’s competitiveness and possibly scare away international talent.” These are pretty dumb claims since most corporate executives are clueless about what goes on in the companies they allegedly manage. In addition, curbing CEO compensation will make Swiss corporations more competitive with international competition, not less, because reducing CEO pay improves their bottom lines. In addition, curbing CEO compensation gives those guys and gals less money with which to purchase the favors of governments, which, more often than not, are not in harmony with the needs and desires of the vast majority of most populations.

 

 

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CEO Pay and the Bankruptcy of Hostess

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Average CEO Pay Compared to Average Worker Pay By Nation

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CEO’s Make More Than 200 Times What the Average Worker Makes

In 1965, the average CEO earned 18.3 times what the average worker earned. Nowadays, CEO’s steal over 230 times more than the average Joe or Josephine. That’s how bad financial and political inequality has become in the US, the government of which is now no more than a plutocracy of the rich.

Take Wall Street Senator Ron Wyden, for example. He poses as a man of the people, and the people he is supposed to represent are in the state of Oregon. To keep their eye off the ball, the senator continues to champion liberal social causes, because it’s mostly a liberal state, but Wall Street Ron bends his knees to his Wall Street masters and screws the people of Oregon on economic matters. He habitually champions federal legislation that redistributes income from the 99 to the 1 percent, such as free trade income redistribution treaties. That’s exactly what Wall Street Ron Wyden champions. As a congressman, he voted for Nafta and every single income redistribution trade treaty that he’s had a chance to vote on.

Take a look at the chart below. CEO compensation began to rise massively after that traitor to the people, President Bill Clinton, signed the Nafta treaty. This isn’t a coincidence. A CEO only has to ship jobs overseas, lower labor costs, and divert much of the difference between the old wages and the new to themselves to get richer. That’s why CEO pay went from roughly 100 times the average worker in 1994 to over 400 times six years later. Nafta was never a free trade treaty; it was an income redistribution scam, negotiated and written by corporate interests with the intention of financially raping the 99 percent on behalf of the 1 percent. They were successful.

The Guardian newspaper calls the Trans Pacific Partnership “Nafta on steroids.” This income redistribution scam is being thinly disguised as a free trade treaty; but aren’t they all? Eleven nations are negotiating the treaty in secret, aided by 600 US corporate lobbyists. The citizens of the US will get no details on the agreement until it’s already signed by the latest traitor-in-chief, President Barack Hussein Obama. And then it will be too late.

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