OMNI
ECONOMIC INEQUALITY/POVERTY USA, AND SOCIAL, ECONOMIC, RESTORATIVE
JUSTICE ANTHOLOGY #2,
November 13, 2022
Compiled by Dick Bennett for a Culture of Peace and Justice.
(#1 July 13, 2013)
"...if way to the Better there be,
it exacts a full look at the Worst."
—Thomas
Hardy
Contents: Social and Economic Justice #2
Struggle for Justice USA
Campus
Equity Week UAF 2013
Peace
Alliance
EPA,
Environmental Justice
Economic Inequality USA
Chris Hedges. Father Michael Doyle
in Camden, N.J.
Unequal
Pay
Bryan
Stevenson. Just Mercy
Taibbi. The Divide
The
Rich: 12 Own $1 Trillion
TEXTS
GLOBAL
JUSTICE HISTORY OF STRUGGLE
Roth,
Review of Galeano, Calendar of Human
History
STRUGGLE
FOR JUSTICE USA
Campus Equity Week Thank You
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Hello CEW Forum Attendees,
I wanted to thank you for participating in the Campaign for the
Future of Higher Education and the New Faculty Majority’s awareness campaign
forum on the pervasiveness of the for-profit mentality in higher education.
Of all we said yesterday, I think Dr. Wade’s comment was most significant: What
can we do?
Dr. R. Madison pointed out that it is impossible for someone
teaching four classes a semester or at various institutions to have the time to
be the same sort of teacher as one who teaches two classes a semester and
therefore has time to research and work individually with students.
Yet, students pay the same tuition for a class taught by either faculty member.
New Faculty Majority believes that teaching conditions are student learning
conditions, and that students deserve better.
So what can we do? Students can demand transparency about what the profit is
and where it is going—the difference between what they pay for a class and
their return. They can let their parents know what is going on, and, in
turn, parents can contact their legislators to find out why the “consumer” is
getting the “bait and switch” treatment.
Teachers can become more knowledgeable about the financial mire that too many
of their students are becoming trapped in and talk openly about the system and
its dangers. And together, as Aaron Calafato and Robert Kennedy said, we can
raise our hands and say, “This is not right.”
Campus Equity Week comes once a year, and this was our first year at UARK to
participate. I hope you will join us next year and send me ideas about what you
would like to see as a CEW activity.
In the meantime, join OMNI UA and OMNI locally and New Faculty Majority
nationally. All three groups care about issues concerning UARK students and
faculty alike and are inclusive of anyone who believes in equity.
Thank
you Alex for this terrific link: Robinson, Robert. Changing Education Paradigms. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zDZFcDGpL4U.
And thanks to Robyn and Michael from OMNI UA who gave me great links, but I
can’t find them now to send you (sorry!). Thanks to Gladys Tiffany and Dr. Dick
Bennett from OMNI who brought snacks and, most importantly, their support.
Attached is a list of the books I displayed yesterday, should you be
interested.
Regards,
Karen
Madison
K. L. Madison, Ph.D.
MLA Committee on Contingent Labor
in the Profession, Chair
New Faculty Majority, Board Member
College English Association, Past President
OMNI UA, Faculty Advisor
UARK Department of English, Honors Undergraduate Advisor
"Still nursing the unconquerable hope, / Still clutching the inviolable
shade. . . ."
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YouTube - Videos from this email
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Bryan
Stevenson, Founder of the
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The Peace
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ENVIRONMENTAL
JUSTICE
EPA PLAN EJ 2014 AT A GLANCE, GOV for the People
Plan EJ 2014 is the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency (EPA)’s roadmap
to integrating environmental justice into its programs and policies. The year
marks the 20th anniversary of the signing of Executive Order 12898 on
environmental justice. Plan EJ 2014 seeks to:
Protect the environment and health in overburdened communities.
Empower communities to take action to improve their health and
environment.
Establish partnerships with local, state, tribal, and federal governments and
organizations to achieve healthy and sustainable communities.
MORE http://www.epa.gov/environmentaljustice/resources/policy/plan-ej-2014/plan-ej-rulemaking-2011-09.pdf
UNJUST
LEGAL SYSTEM
BOOK REVIEW
Just Mercy, by Bryan Stevenson
Reviewed By TED CONOVER OCT. 17, 2014
Continue reading the main story
Unfairness in the Justice system is a major theme
of our age. DNA analysis exposes false convictions, it seems, on a weekly
basis. The predominance of racial minorities in jails and prisons suggests
systemic bias. Sentencing guidelines born of the war on drugs look increasingly
draconian. Studies cast doubt on the accuracy of eyewitness testimony. Even the
states that still kill people appear to have forgotten how; lately executions
have been botched to horrific effect.
This news reaches citizens in articles and television spots
about mistreated individuals. But Just
Mercy, a memoir, aggregates and personalizes the struggle against injustice
in the story of one activist lawyer.
Bryan Stevenson grew up poor in Delaware. His great-grandparents
had been slaves in Virginia. His grandfather was murdered in a Philadelphia
housing project when Stevenson was a teenager. Stevenson attended Eastern
College (now Eastern University), a Christian institution outside Philadelphia,
and then Harvard Law School. Afterward he began representing poor clients in
the South, first in Georgia and then in Alabama, where he was a co-founder of
the Equal Justice Initiative.
“Just Mercy” focuses mainly on that work, and those clients. Its
narrative backbone is the story of Walter McMillian, whom Stevenson began
representing in the late 1980s when he was on death row for killing a young
white woman in Monroeville, Ala., the hometown of Harper Lee. Monroeville has
long promoted its connection to “To Kill a Mockingbird,” which is about a black
man falsely accused of the rape of a white woman. As Stevenson writes,
“Sentimentality about Lee’s story grew even as the harder truths of the book
took no root.” Walter McMillian had never heard of the book, and had scarcely
been in trouble with the law. He had, however, been having an affair with a
white woman, and Stevenson makes a persuasive case that it made McMillian, who
cut timber for a living, vulnerable to prosecution.
. MORE http://www.nytimes.com/2014/10/19/books/review/just-mercy-by-bryan-stevenson.html?_r=0
ECONOMIC INEQUALITY
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The Good Priest” by Chris Hedges. Nov. 13, 2022
Father Michael Doyle, who died on November 8 at his
parish house in Camden, New Jersey, infused his Christianity with his
goodness. That goodness showed us what it means to live a life of faith.
During the two years the cartoonist Joe Sacco and I spent on
our book Days of Destruction, Days of Revolt, written
out of the poorest pockets of America, we invariably encountered heroic men
and women who — against overwhelming odds — rose up to fight lonely and often
losing battles on behalf of the oppressed. Bill Means, Charlie Abourezk and
Leonard Crow Dog in Pine Ridge, South Dakota. Larry Gibson and Judy Bonds in
the coal fields of West Virginia. Lucas Benitez, Laura Germano and Greg Abbot
in the produce fields of Florida. The men and women in Zuccotti Park during
the Occupy Wall Street movement. When set against the crushing poverty, environmental
degradation, corporate abuse and despair they opposed, the victories they
amassed were often miniscule. And yet, to them, and to the people they were
able to support, these victories were immense. They kept alive kindness,
community, decency, hope and justice. They provided another way to speak
about the world. They reminded us that our primary task in life is to care
for others. These moral giants, by their very presence and steadfast refusal
to surrender, damned the avarice, lust for power, hedonism and violence that
define corporate culture. Joe and I met Father Michael Doyle in Camden, New Jersey,
one of the poorest cities and most dangerous in the United States.
Father Doyle, an Irish priest and poet with ruddy cheeks and snow white hair, ran the Sacred Heart Church in one of
the city’s bleakest corners. He died at the age of 88 on November 4th in the
church’s parish house. “I haven’t heard God speak in a burning bush, but I hear Him
speak from the burning issues of the day, and they are all in Camden,” he
told us. [To read the entire essay click on title or link at end.] Father Doyle was a member of the Camden 28,
a group of left-wing Catholics and anti-war activists who, in 1971, planned and executed a raid to destroy
draft files on the Camden draft board. The defendants were arrested but
acquitted when it was found that the FBI, which had an informant in the
group, had provided tools for the break-in and facilitated the
logistics. “What do you do when a child is on fire in a war that was a
mistake and you can’t extinguish the flame — the napalm flame — with water or
anything else?” he said in his closing statement at the
trial. “What do you do about that? What do you do with an old man whose bones
are splintered by anti-personnel weapons in a war that was a mistake? We have
no answer to that. There is no answer in the law for a child on fire in a war
that was a mistake.” He organized a memorial service for 300 young men from South
Jersey killed in the Vietnam war. Years later, he would still carry a card
with the name of one of those killed, Lawrence J. Virgilio from Camden. The bishops were not pleased. He was fired from Holy Spirit
High School near Atlantic City where he taught and transferred to Sacred
Heart, a run-down and neglected parish, in 1974. He had to chop firewood to
heat the church. It was meant to be a punishment, a demotion, but Father
Doyle saw it as the greatest blessing of his life. “I’ve failed…nicely,” he joked. He called Camden “a concentration camp for the poor” and
saw the city as a template for all that had gone wrong in America. He likened
the suffering around him to the crucified Christ, nailed to “the cross of
awfully polluted air” and “the broken sidewalks, the broken lives, the ugly
scenes that wail for beautification, the dilapidated houses that must be
restored for the children.” “Camden is a casualty of capitalism,” he said as we sat
drinking tea one afternoon. “It’s what falls off the truck and can’t get back
on the truck. It is a sad stage we are in. There is a meanness that has
raised its ugly head in the soul of America. Bobby Kennedy, even Lyndon
Johnson, spoke about the poor. Now you can’t say the word poor and get
elected. Let the poor suffer. They’re not important. Let the train roll over
them.” “Today’s a very hard time to be poor,” he went on. “Because
you know you’re poor. You hear people my age get up and say, ‘We were poor.
We put cardboard in our shoes’. But we didn’t know we were poor. Today
you do. And how do you know you’re poor? Your television shows you you’re
poor. So it’s very easy to build up anger in, say, a high-voltage kid of 17.
He knows he’s poor. He looks at the TV. ‘All these people have everything. I
have nothing’. And so he’s very angry. This is violence. I’m not talking
about a violent show. I’m talking about the violence that rises out of the
marketing that shows the kid what he could have. This creates a huge anger that explodes, easily.
That I discovered very quickly when I came to Camden. The anger is so near
the surface. You rub it and it explodes. There’s no respect for you if you
have no money. The constant assault of
the marketers is never-ending.” “I grew up in Ireland,” he went on. “We had the songs of our
struggle. It was clear who we were struggling against. It was the money
crowd. But people here can’t see the enemy. You can’t challenge what you
can’t see. Greed, prejudice and injustice, you can’t get at it. There’s no
head. There’s no clarity. So you take it out on your neighbor. It’s
horrendous what people do.” He saw the United
States as cursed by the war industry and American militarism, a curse
that would doom it. The billions diverted to endless wars meant those around
him went hungry. He prayed with his congregation that America will one day
“come to the front lines of our cities to protect our children, not with
guns, but hammers and saws and jobs and tools of transformation.” “A child in Camden could teach the proud missile makers a
lesson,” he said. “‘Take my hand,’ the little Camden child says, ‘and walk
with me. Walk my streets to school. Will your bombs save me? If you want to
defend me, come and live on my block.’” He knew this was the end of the American empire, but he did
not understand why it had to go out with such cruelty. What kind of a
country, he asked, allowed people to die or go bankrupt because they were
unable to pay for medical care? “Capitalists shouldn’t be allowed anywhere near the medical
industry,” he said. “What they do is evil. Greed is venomous.” “The history books are littered with the ruins of fallen
empires,” he said. “A fellow I knew, a blue-collar fellow, he worked
with the navy, had to go over with some work crew to Italy. He sent me a card
with a picture of the Colosseum. He wrote, ‘I went to the Colosseum, but all
I saw were two cats fighting in the weeds.’ It was, when you think about the
mighty Caesars, what ancient Rome had been, quite profound.” Father Doyle loved literature, especially Irish literature,
and poetry, which he wrote and included in his letters. He was close friends
with the local poet Nick Virgilio,
whose brother he had memorialized years earlier and whose haikus captured the
desperation of Camden: the prostituted women knitting baby booties on the bus;
sitting alone as he ordered eggs and toast in an undertone on Thanksgiving;
the latch key children “exploring the wild on public television”; the frozen
body of a drunk found on a winter morning in a cardboard box labeled
“Fragile: Do Not Crush”; as well as his lamentations for his older brother
killed in Vietnam. Nick wrote what could be the city’s
epithet: the sack of kittens sinking in the icy creek increases the cold In 1989, Nick died of a heart attack in Washington,
D.C., at the taping of an interview for CBS Nightwatch. Father Doyle rode in the
hearse that brought Nick’s body back to Camden, the head of his deceased
friend thumping softly against the back partition. He built him a gravestone
in the shape of a slender granite podium in Harleigh cemetery, where Walt Whitman,
who Father Doyle could quote from memory, is also buried. He had one of Nick’s haiku poems
carved on it: lily: out
of the water… out
of itself [You can listen to Martin Sheen read from Father
Doyle’s letters in the documentary “Poet of Poverty.”] Father Doyle organized and attended a soup kitchen every
Saturday where he would sit at the tables with about a hundred people, many
of whom were destitute and homeless. He recruited volunteers from the
suburbs, most of whom were white, to cook and serve his guests. “You have
dignity at a table when you’re sharing food,” he said. He spoke frequently about death, perhaps because in Camden, it
is a daily reality. He loved the story of two old men in Ireland who spent their
lives together until one fell deathly ill and told his friend he didn’t think
he would be getting up, that he had always known when he started out where he
was going, but now he didn’t. “But John,” his friend replied, “when you were
coming, you didn't know where you're going and didn't it turn out
alright?” “The same God that was there when you slithered into this
world will be there when you slither out of it,” Father Doyle told me. And yet, no matter how bleak, there were always unexpected
flashes of joy and hope, gifts of
grace. “One day God sent a message from of all places Arlington
Street, and it brightened up the doorway of my mind,” he wrote. “On
Arlington, in the awful heat, on that Godforsaken street without light or
life, ugly, urban decay at levels straining the imagination, seven children
were splashing in cascading water like shining wet dolphins in the sun.
Somehow, they had hauled a discarded hot tub from Adventure Spas on Chelton
Avenue, opened a fire hydrant and the powerful pressure sent the water upward
on an old sheet of plywood into the tub and sent the children into ecstasies
of delight in spite of all the awful misery around them…Nothing could daunt
the wild surge of their young lives and hopes. What is it about hope? Does its real inspiration only
rise out of the tragic emptiness to take its pure and unsupported stand
against all odds?” These moments of grace sustained him even as he acknowledged
that everything he had spent his life fighting for had gotten worse. They
affirmed that no matter how bleak the world around us, death and despair do
not have the final word. Time will slowly erode the memory of this priest, as
it erodes all memory, until he becomes a ghostly remnant of another era, a
name adorned on a plaque. But what will endure is what mattered to him most,
the life force to which he dedicated his existence. The Chris Hedges Report is a
reader-supported publication. To receive new posts and support my work,
consider becoming a free or paid subscriber. |
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“El crecimiento se va a detener, por una razón o por otra,” Contexto
y Acción, July 21, 2022.
“Fifty
Years After ‘The Limits to Growth’: Dennis Meadows interviewed by Juan Bordera.”
Originally published: CTXT (Contexto y
Acción) on July 21, 2022 by
Juan Bordera & Ferran Puig Vilar (more by CTXT (Contexto y Acción)) (Posted Aug
10, 2022)
Climate Change, Health,
Inequality,
Political EconomyGlobalCommentary,
InterviewDennis
Meadows, Featured
Runaway
inflation. War. Increasingly severe energy problems. Earlier and more powerful
heat waves. Arrests of scientists. Setbacks in women’s rights taking us back 50
years… Exactly 50 years. Does all this have any connection?
Actually,
yes, it does.
This year is special. It
is the 50th anniversary of the publication of one of the most important works
of the 20th century. The Limits to Growth.
That work which, as early as 1972, gave a clear warning that the planet had
limits and little time to face them. For this reason, one of the main authors,
Dennis Meadows, has been giving interviews to some of the most important media
in the world, such as Le Monde, or
the Suddeutsche Zeitung. . . .
JB: According to the HANDY model, a fundamental parameter for causing
collapses is inequality, which increases in parallel to the
lack of trust among peers, another reason for a collapse. The design of our
economic system causes both to increase every year. And it makes it impossible
to adjust to the limits, because the elite–which is usually detached from
reality and therefore does not detect the alarms–is the one that serves as a
model. How to untangle such a mess?
DM: The truth is not to
be found in a few equations, obviously. It is to be found in history. And our
history over thousands of years shows that the
powerful seek more power, and have an easier time finding it because of
their situation–it’s a positive feedback loop. In system dynamics this is
called “success for the already successful”. We rarely deviate from this
phenomenon.
No one can
untangle this tangle. I don’t think there is any action or law that can do
that. In a few cultures, however, evolved redistribution mechanisms have been
seen. In the northwest of the United States there are some tribes that have a
custom called “Potlatch”, a ceremony in which the chiefs of the tribe, the
richest, would give away part of their possessions–I’m simplifying for sure. In
Buddhism there is also a tradition of material detachment in many of its
practitioners. But these are rare exceptions. In our world the tendency is to
accumulate power and, as you say, that helps to be detached from reality. Then
you may end up with a collapse–even of your power–and everything starts all
over again. It’s a process that happens in response to limits.
And inequality is growing in all countries.
JB: To
what extent are the elites anticipating the mathematical need for greater
equality and preparing for it? Or, are they just planning their own survival?
DM: Well, one cannot
properly speak of “elites”. Some elites are concerned and doing all they can to
reduce inequality, others are not even thinking about it–probably the
majority–and others are working to make it bigger and bigger. There is
certainly no trend towards reducing inequality. . . . .
GLOBAL STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE
The word
barely uttered by neoclassical economists (even when they're talking
"inequality")
1-21-22 |
7:45
AM (22 minutes ago) |
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“A disturbing milestone”: America’s top 12 plutocrats
now own $1 Trillion in wealth.
Mronline.org (8-22-20).
New figures from the Institute for Policy Studies show
that, despite a pandemic that has stunted the economy for months, America’s
billionaire class is becoming richer than ever, adding nearly $700 billion to
their fortune since the nationwide lockdown in March. | more…
“A
disturbing milestone”: America’s top 12 plutocrats now own $1 Trillion in
wealth
Posted Aug 21, 2020 by Alan MacLeod
Capitalism , Economic
Theory , Financialization , Global Economic Crisis United
States Newswire
Originally
published: MintPress (August 19, 2020) |
F or the first time in history, the 12
richest individuals in the United States collectively hold over $1 trillion in
wealth. New figures from
the Program on Inequality and the Common Good at the Institute for Policy
Studies (IPS) show that, despite a pandemic that has stunted the economy for
months, America’s billionaire class is becoming richer than ever, adding
nearly $700 billion to
their fortune since the nationwide lockdown in March, now holding $1.015
trillion. Speaking with MintPress today,
the IPS’ Chuck Collins described his findings as a “disturbing milestone in the
history of extreme inequality in the U.S.” adding:
This despotic dozen has tremendous power and wealth related to
their control of the technological platforms and digital commons that we all
depend on.
Included
on the list are figures like Amazon founder Jeff Bezos, the world’s richest
living individual, who has nearly doubled his fortune to an estimated $189
billion, and Tesla Motors CEO Elon Musk, who saw his personal net worth triple
to $73 billion in the last six months.
The news
of these billionaires’ growing fortunes comes amid record stock market gains.
Yesterday, the S&P 500, an index measuring the performance of America’s 500
largest corporations, reached an all time high, closing at 3,389.78, breaking
the previous record set in February.
Few Americans, however,
are feeling any benefits. The coronavirus pandemic has wrought a terrible
economic and social cost on the country, with an estimated 26 million going
hungry in the last week, 40 million facing
eviction from their homes, and around 55 million filing
for unemployment benefits since March. Food banks across the country have
seen great increases in demand and, in some cases, are
struggling to meet it.
Wages fall as profits soar
President Trump has many
times touted the
surging stock market as a reflection of his administration’s competence,
mirroring the 1950s slogan “what’s good for General Motors is good for the
country.” However, few appear to accept Trump’s word on it. Dean Baker, Senior
Economist at the Center for Economic Policy Research in Washington, D.C.,
told MintPress that, “Stocks measure the expected value
of future corporate profits. With the labor market weak and likely to remain so
for a while, wages are likely to lag productivity, which will be good for
profits. Also, continued low interest rates mean there are not good
alternatives to stock”–something that raises the question of for whom is the
economy currently working. “It is a societal failure when so much wealth and
power are in so few hands,” said Collins.
The full
list of 12 plutocrats and their quickly rising net worth are as follows:
·
Jeff
Bezos ($189.4 billion)
·
Bill
Gates ($114 billion)
·
Mark
Zuckerberg ($95 billion)
·
Warren
Buffett ($80 billion)
·
Elon
Musk ($73 billion)
·
Steve
Ballmer ($71 billion)
·
Larrry
Ellison ($71 billion)
·
Larry
Page ($67 billion)
·
Sergey
Brin ($66 billion)
·
Alice
Walton ($62 billion)
·
Jim
Walton ($62 billion)
·
Rob
Walton ($62 billion)
Of the twelve, five have
taken a pledge to give away at least half of their wealth
during their lifetimes. But only one of those on the list, business tycoon and
CEO of Berkshire Hathaway, Warren Buffet, has actually seen his net worth
decrease in the past six months. Bezos, whom some are predicting will
be the world’s first trillionaire, has not, and is asking the public for donations to help his
800,000 employees through the pandemic. One-third of
Amazon employees in Arizona are on food stamps, with other states not faring
that much better.
While working-class
Americans have had to make do with one $1,200 government check, the country’s
billionaires have been most carefully looked after. A report from the Joint
Committee on Taxation, a nonpartisan congressional body, found that 82 percent of the tax breaks from the Trump
administrations Coronavirus Aid, Relief, and Economic Security (CARES) Act went
to those making over $1 million annually, with the super-wealthy feeling the
most benefits. And as the government has gone on vacation until September, it
is unlikely that any relief will arrive in the near future.
Nevertheless, serious
changes are necessary, both over the short and long terms. “Without any
significant reforms–which include an excess profits tax, a wealth tax and a
progressive estate tax–wealth will continue to concentrate in the hands of a
small minority and worsen inequality in the future,” said Collins’ colleague at
the Program on Inequality and the Common Good, Omar Ocampo. With Trump promising another
large tax cut, the problem of wealth inequality is likely to get worse rather
than better.
·
·
·
·
·
·
About Alan MacLeod
Alan MacLeod is a MintPress Staff Writer as
well as an academic and writer for Fairness and Accuracy in Reporting. His
book, Bad News From Venezuela: Twenty Years of Fake News and
Misreporting was published in April.
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GLOBAL
STRUGGLE FOR JUSTICE
EDUARDO
GALEANO, CHILDREN OF THE DAYS: A CALENDAR
OF HUMAN HISTORY. (2011 Spanish) Nation
Books, 2015. Rev.: Andy Lee Roth, “The Man Who Won’t Let Us
Forget: Eduardo Galeano Knew That
Justice Relies on Knowing Our History.” Yes! (Fall 2015). Historical vignettes each connected to a
specific day in the year. Galeano
authored the famous indictment of US exploitation of Latin America, Open
Veins of Latin America (1971). The Guardian called him “the poet laureate
of the anti-globalisation movement.”
--Dick.
CEO compensation has grown 940% since 1978Typical worker compensation has risen only 12% during
that time
Report • By Lawrence
Mishel and Julia
Wolfe • August 14, 2019
Summary
What
this report finds: The increased focus on growing inequality has led to an
increased focus on CEO pay. Corporate boards running America’s largest public
firms are giving top executives outsize compensation packages. Average pay of
CEOs at the top 350 firms in 2018 was $17.2 million—or $14.0 million using a
more conservative measure. (Stock options make up a big part of CEO pay
packages, and the conservative measure values the options when granted, versus
when cashed in, or “realized.”) CEO compensation is very high relative to
typical worker compensation (by a ratio of 278-to-1 or 221-to-1). In contrast,
the CEO-to-typical-worker compensation ratio (options realized) was 20-to-1 in
1965 and 58-to-1 in 1989. CEOs are even making a lot more—about five times as
much—as other earners in the top 0.1%. From 1978 to 2018, CEO compensation grew
by 1,007.5% (940.3% under the options-realized measure), far outstripping
S&P stock market growth (706.7%) and the wage growth of very high earners
(339.2%). In contrast, wages for the typical worker grew by just 11.9%.
Why
it matters: Exorbitant
CEO pay is a major contributor to rising inequality that we could safely do
away with. CEOs are getting more because of their power to set pay, not because
they are increasing productivity or possess specific, high-demand skills. This
escalation of CEO compensation, and of executive compensation more generally,
has fueled the growth of top 1.0% and top 0.1% incomes, leaving less of the
fruits of economic growth for ordinary workers and widening the gap between
very high earners and the bottom 90%. The economy would suffer no harm if CEOs
were paid less (or taxed more).
How
we can solve the problem: MORE
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