CEO pay up 17 percent while US workers’ wages stagnate
By Matthew Taylor and Barry Grey
18 August 2018
Average compensation for CEOs at the 350 largest companies in the US increased by 17.6 percent in 2017 over the previous year, soaring to $18.9 million. Workers’ wages, meanwhile, continued to stagnate, rising a paltry 0.3 percent.
These indices of the relentless growth of economic inequality are reported in a new study published Thursday by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI), a Washington-based think tank.
The increase in US chief executive compensation brought the ratio of CEO to workers’ pay to 312-to-1. This means that the typical CEO of a large firm makes in a single day almost as much as the typical worker earns in an entire year. By contrast, the ratio in 1965 was 20-to-1.
The surge in CEO pay is largely driven by the record rise in stock prices, with corporate bosses benefiting from massive stock buybacks, increased dividend payouts and other forms of financial parasitism. The policy of the Federal Reserve and Democratic as well as Republican administrations over the past four decades has been calculated to drive up stock prices, enabling the stock market to serve as the primary mechanism for redistributing wealth from the working class to the corporate-financial elite—the top 5 percent income earners, and, particularly, the top 1 percent, 0.1 percent and 0.01 percent.
This redistribution of wealth was greatly accelerated under the Obama administration, which responded to the financial crash of 2008 by instituting a series of policies whose net result was the greatest transfer of wealth from the bottom layers of society to the top in history. These policies included the multitrillion-dollar bank bailout, near-zero percent interest rates, and the money-printing operation known as “quantitative easing.” These measures pumped trillions of dollars into the financial markets and provided the banks and hedge funds with virtually free credit, enabling them to mount new speculative operations similar to those that triggered the financial meltdown and Great Recession in 2008.
The vast inflation of stocks and other financial assets was made possible by the continuing suppression of the class struggle and workers’ wages by the trade unions, which all but banned strikes in the aftermath of the Wall Street crash. Wage cutting and the growth of low-paying part-time and temporary jobs in the place of decent-paying jobs wiped out in the Great Recession dramatically lowered the social position of the working class. This was combined with cuts in health care, pensions, education, housing, food stamps and other vital social programs.
The orgy of self-enrichment of the financial oligarchy has continued and accelerated under Trump with the enactment last December of a multitrillion-dollar package of tax cuts for corporations and the rich. Trump’s tax cuts have triggered a new round of mergers and acquisitions, stock buybacks and dividend payments that will increase the wealth of CEOs and investors by an estimated $2.5 trillion by the end of 2018.
According to the EPI, the average compensation of American CEOs has grown by 71.7 percent since 2009, while compensation for the average worker has grown only 2.1 percent in the same period.
The CEO compensation documented by the EPI report is 586 times the annual pay of a UPS warehouse worker under the sellout contract the Teamsters union is seeking to ram through over rank-and-file opposition. That agreement caps the pay of warehouse workers at $15.50 an hour.
The total 2017 compensation of CEOs at the country’s 350 largest firms was $6,615,000,000. This is enough to grant every one of UPS’s 230,000 workers in the US a bonus of $28,760.
Between 1978 and 2017, according to the EPI, CEO compensation rose in the US by 1,070 percent. The typical worker’s compensation over these 39 years rose by a mere 11.2 percent. This points to the most important factor in the colossal growth of social inequality over this period—the suppression of the class struggle by the trade unions.
The span of 1978 to 2917 roughly corresponds to the period when the trade unions began collaborating in wage cuts and other concessions to the corporations and, after betraying a series of bitter strikes against wage cutting and union busting in the 1980s, all but ended strike activity in the US.
The suppression of class struggle by the unions has been particularly pervasive in the aftermath of the 2008 financial crisis. In 2017, major work stoppages in the US fell to seven, the second-lowest level since records began in 1947. This has enabled the ruling class to carry out a fundamental restructuring of class relations, with labor’s share of nonfarm national income in the US falling from 66.4 percent in 2000 to 58.9 percent in 2018—a transfer of wealth that will equal $1.4 trillion in 2018 alone.
A second factor in the suppression of wages is the immense consolidation and concentration of corporate power, particularly in the US. In an article published Friday on next week’s annual Jackson Hole, Wyoming conference of central bankers, the Financial Times reported that a major topic will be the role of accelerated corporate monopolization in wage stagnation as well as low productivity and slowing capital investment.
The article cites a measure of corporate concentration—the Herfindahl-Hirschman index—which is up 48 percent since 1996. It notes that there has been greater concentration in some 75 percent of US industries over the past two decades.
Although not part of the official agenda, one can be certain that foremost on the minds of the bankers who gather at Jackson Hole will be the resurgence of strike activity this year in the US and internationally. In the first six months of 2018 there were 12 major work stoppages in the US, involving 444,000 workers, more than the total number of strikers over the last six years combined.
The surge in strike activity, and the fact that teachers in West Virginia, Oklahoma and Arizona initiated their statewide strikes independently of the unions, have struck fear in the American and international ruling class.
In all of these struggles workers have confronted not only the intransigence of the capitalist class, but also the treachery of the trade union bureaucracy, which seeks to suppress, contain and derail any action by workers that imperils the privileged position the union executives enjoy as the policemen of the working class.
This is nowhere more apparent than in the current contract negotiations between UPS and the Teamsters union. In June, 93 percent of UPS workers voted in favor of a nationwide strike when their contract expired on July 31. Rather than prepare for a strike and appeal to other sections of workers to join them, the Teamsters extended the contract indefinitely so as to wear down opposition to the new contract.
The new five-year contract “negotiated” by the union maintains poverty-level wages for warehouse workers, 70 percent of whom are part-time. It also creates a new “hybrid” class of drivers who will both deliver packages and work in the warehouses, earning $6 less per hour than regular drivers.
The conditions are rapidly developing for a massive eruption of working-class resistance in the US. In addition to the contract covering 230,000 UPS workers, labor agreements will expire in the coming days for hundreds of thousands of workers at the US Postal Service and in the steel, telecom and entertainment industries. At the same time, teachers will be returning to their classrooms under conditions where none of the issues that sparked strikes in West Virginia, Oklahoma, Arizona and other states have been resolved.
The growth of militancy is combined with increased disgust with capitalism and interest in socialism. What is required is a struggle to break the grip of the pro-corporate, nationalist trade unions and mobilize the working class against the entire political establishment and the corporate oligarchs it represents.
INCOME PLUMMETS UNDER OBAMA AND HIS WALL STREET CRONIES
collapse of household income in the US… STILL BILLIONS IN WELFARE HANDED TO ILLEGALS… they already get our jobs and are voting for more!
THE CRONY CLASS:
Income inequality grows FOUR TIMES FASTER under Obama than Bush.
“By the time of Bill Clinton’s election in 1992, the Democratic Party had completely repudiated its association with the reforms of the New Deal and Great Society periods. Clinton gutted welfare programs to provide an ample supply of cheap labor for the rich (WHICH NOW MEANS OPEN BORDERS AND NO E-VERIFY!), including a growing layer of black capitalists, and passed the 1994 Federal Crime Bill, with its notorious “three strikes” provision that has helped create the largest prison population in the world.”
OBAMA’S CRONY BANKSTERISM destroyed a 11 TRILLION DOLLARS in home equity… and they’re still plundering us!
Barack Obama created more debt for the middle class than any president in US
history, and also had the only huge QE programs: $4.2 Trillion.
OXFAM reported that during Obama’s terms, 95% of the wealth created went to the top 1% of the world’s wealthy.
CITY JOURNAL
August 16, 2018
Economy, finance, and budgets
In June, American credit-card debt reached an all-time high of $1.04 trillion. Forty-one percent of Americans carry such debt, according to the ValuePenguin financial-research group, meaning that they can’t meet their basic expenses without borrowing, regularly, at an average interest rate of 17 percent. The upper-middle-class and poor alike carry such debt, though the poorer you are, the more you’re likely to owe, as a percentage of income. But average income isn’t the only way to tally credit-card debt. Age matters, too, and the rising age of credit-card debtors should concern anyone worried about entitlement spending, America’s potential public-debt crisis-in-waiting.
Two decades ago, the mythical credit-card borrower was a heedless college student throwing money away on spring break; now, it’s just as often grandma buying groceries.
A new report, “Graying of U.S. Bankruptcy,” is grim. “Older Americans are increasingly likely to file consumer bankruptcy, and their representation among those in bankruptcy has never been higher,” note Deborah Thorne, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, and Katherine Porter, all professors of law or sociology.
According to data culled from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project and from household surveys, Americans age 65 and older are filing for bankruptcy at rates two and three times higher than in 1991, even as young people file less frequently. “The bankruptcy trend . . . is so robust that the broader trend of an aging U.S. population can explain only a small portion of what is happening,” the authors note.
A new report, “Graying of U.S. Bankruptcy,” is grim. “Older Americans are increasingly likely to file consumer bankruptcy, and their representation among those in bankruptcy has never been higher,” note Deborah Thorne, Pamela Foohey, Robert M. Lawless, and Katherine Porter, all professors of law or sociology.
According to data culled from the Consumer Bankruptcy Project and from household surveys, Americans age 65 and older are filing for bankruptcy at rates two and three times higher than in 1991, even as young people file less frequently. “The bankruptcy trend . . . is so robust that the broader trend of an aging U.S. population can explain only a small portion of what is happening,” the authors note.
Today, one in seven bankrupt households involves someone 65 or over, nearly a five-fold increase in 25 years. Among the oldest Americans—75 and older—“there has been a near ten-fold increase since 1991,” from 0.3 percent to 3.3 percent of filers. Out of 800,000 annual household bankruptcy filings, 97,600, or 12.2 percent, come from older householders. The reason for more bankruptcies is hardly shocking: too many people are not ready for retirement. It’s true that, on average, people may overestimate their need for retirement income. As Andrew Biggs, an expert on the topic at the American Enterprise Institute, observes, “78 percent of current retirees tell Gallup they have sufficient money to live comfortably,” and retirement income is expected to rise in future years, from a median of $37,887 in 2015 to a median of $42,165 by 2035. Very few retirees—6.7 percent—live in poverty.
Still, averages aren’t everything, and of the 51 percent of people 60 and older who think their retirement savings are inadequate, according to a recent Federal Reserve survey, many of them are right. Many older people either voluntarily retire or lose their jobs without having saved enough to maintain their living standards. These problems are exacerbated by sudden shocks—big medical bills not covered by Medicare, for example. A younger person who loses a job has a good chance of getting another; an older person often cannot. “Being 67 and having back problems, not many people will hire you,” said one Consumer Bankruptcy Project participant.
Older bankruptcy filers are, generally speaking, not people who spent their working lives in poverty or profligacy. Filers don’t take bankruptcy lightly: 66 percent struggled for at least two years to manage their debt before giving up. Consistent with Biggs’s data, they are not even living in poverty in retirement. Two-thirds of them own their own homes, far greater than the 41 percent of younger bankruptcy filers. Older bankruptcy filers report about $30,600 in annual income, compared with $38,100 for their younger counterparts, consistent, again, with Biggs’s data on retirees’ relative income stability. The official poverty threshold for a family of four is $24,900. Most older families are smaller, with more modest needs, than families with children; they don’t need money to commute to work, pay for daycare, buy fresh clothing every year, or frequently replace their home-computer technology or cars.
No, the bankrupt elderly are people accustomed to maintaining at least a modest middle-income lifestyle—and whether hit with a shock or gradually falling behind, they are unable or unwilling to cut their expenses to meet the new realities. Nor do the bankrupt elderly bear the hallmarks of people who lived lives of chronic financial irresponsibility during their younger years. Paradoxically, bankruptcy itself is a sign of responsible long-term planning: it costs money, with the average personal bankruptcy requiring $1,300, and requires gathering paperwork, working with an attorney, and planning for the future, all indicators of competence. A less responsible person would simply ignore his creditors, particularly since credit-card and other unsecured debts aren’t transferred to heirs upon the death of a borrower.
Rather, what’s driving elderly bankruptcy is the use of debt as a replacement for income. Older bankruptcy filers owe $101,600, including $32,700 of unsecured debt (credit cards, medical bills, and the like). Credit-card debt among the elderly, in particular, is a new phenomenon. A separate study this year, by the Employee Benefit Research Institute, found that 42 percent of families age 65 to74 have outstanding credit-card debt, up sharply from 29 percent in 1998. Among people 75 and older, the figure is 26 percent, up from 11 percent in 1998. The average credit-card debtor between the ages of 65 and 69 owes $6,876, according to ValuePenguin—substantially more than an adult below the age of 35, who owes $5,808.
From the perspective of financial prudence, this gets it exactly backwards. A member of Generation Z (the cohort following the millennials) has decades to pay off her debt. It may be understandable that, in the course of getting started as an adult, she has to borrow money for a period of time before her income catches up to these starting-out-in-life costs. For a much older person, those big purchases are largely in the past, and the chances of ever catching up with such borrowing are slim, actuarially speaking.
Of course, the vast majority of elderly people are not in bankruptcy; 97,600 each year is still a small number. Yet the very existence of such debt among people over 65 is a sign of stress. Indeed, the plight of older America collides directly with the challenge of ballooning entitlement spending. With spending on Social Security and Medicare set to rise from 8 percent of GDP this year to 10 percent by 2028, exacerbating multi-trillion-dollar budget deficits, almost every mainstream proposal to pare the federal budget involves cuts to these programs. But sensible-sounding solutions—such as raising the Medicare-eligibility agefrom 65 to 67 or accelerating existing increases in Social Security’s full retirement age from a soon-to-be 67 to 70—would hit many elderly people hard, and not just the financially stressed.
As Biggs notes, the fact that the average household spends just $7,300 cumulatively on long-term care during retirement—thus likely keeping bankruptcy rates down—is largely due to Medicare and Medicaid. These costs aren’t a matter of concern to retirees themselves, he says, but rather to “states and federal governments, which foot most of the bill.” Shifting more of that bill toward households would cause more strain. As for Social Security, of the nearly 3 million people who started to receive benefits in 2017, nearly 1.6 million were under age 66, though such workers face a significant penalty for taking this “early retirement.” People who opt to incur this penalty aren’t irrational; they simply need the money.
As America grapples with its public-sector debt burden, driven in part by spending on retirees, it should heed a sign from the private-sector debt market: too many middle-class retiree families already have little room for financial or fiscal change. The longer the country waits to act on solutions—including on cutting health-care delivery costs—the sharper a future shock could prove to be.
August 11, 2018
Are Millennials Educable?
Picture ten-year-old Johnny, his masculinity threatened on every level, his mental and physical energy denied expression, his home life hectic and unsupportive, his continued inability to read becoming more debilitating every year, and his boredom level off any available chart. Imagine being him. We know that his disadvantages will not be met in 5th grade any more than they were in 1st. We know – looking at the recent educational studies – that in seven years, he will graduate, in much the same condition, if he graduates at all. Given the odd assumption that graduation proves effective education, and the pressure schools are under to up graduation numbers, he probably will walk away with a diploma, but it will be meaningless.
We know that the graduation rate and the proficiency levels no longer correlate at all. Over 80% of our high school seniors "earn" diplomas, but 37% of them can read at grade level. Twenty-five percent of them can do math at grade level. And yet our schools are more concerned about programming young people for sexual deviancy and multicultural hatred of their own country than they are in turning out thinking, informed, skilled adults.
Why can't our schools fix this problem? There are many answers – teachers' unions, left-leaning educational institutions, leftist textbooks, etc. But our schools are filled with wonderful teachers working appalling hours and wanting desperately to see their students learn. What is in their way? How is it these kids can get all the way through 13 years of schooling and know nothing?
Look back at Johnny. In first grade, he didn't learn to read, but what happened to him? He went on to 2nd grade, where he had even less opportunity to figure it out. But did he stay in 2nd grade or a remedial class until he caught on? No. On to 3rd, where his dismal scores on standardized tests demonstrate clearly his inabilities, but still nothing will be done.
One year, during my tenure as a high school English teacher, we were required to attend evening classes instructing us in how to teach our students to read – in addition to everything else we were supposed to be inculcating. The lessons in these classes were all geared to 3rd grade, which bothered us all – if this approach didn't work when these kids were eight-year-olds, why would it work when they're 17? I asked about the viability of this approach for high school, and the instructor admitted that they had no idea how to rescue a teenager who had never mastered reading.
Fifty years ago, schools quit holding Johnny back a grade when he didn't reach the set standards. Administrators deemed it too rough on his ego to admit his problem and fix it. We would damage his self-esteem, and we heard over and over again that the self-esteem deficit would render any increase in skill null and void. No one ever proved that, but say something often enough, and it becomes gospel. No one considered what damage Johnny's ego would sustain in high school when reading and writing and computing skills were both assumed and necessary.
Once the schools cannot hold kids back because they haven't mastered reading and math, then subsequent teachers are under pressure – political, professional, and pragmatic – to keep the momentum going.
Some dumbing down has to happen if a teacher has a classroom full of students below grade level. There is nothing to be gained by failing them all. And as teachers, we are taught to meet our students where they actually are. That is good pedagogy.
However, if an instructor's students don't meet the standard, the teacher gets in trouble, the students become demoralized, and the parents get angry. Angry parents make for nervous and defensive administrators who, in turn, pressure the teachers into – what? Passing the students whether they've cleared the hurdles or not.
This continues until high school when the problem just blows up. Unless the district chooses to do what my district did: we "raised the bar." You've got to love educational jargon. We did this by:
1. Cutting out the "D" as a grade option – which merely inflated the grades.
2. Demanding that students turn in all assignments. I know: this doesn't seem out of line, but most students miss an assignment now and then, and no one could see that a do-or-die turn-in policy only erased the ability to insist on due dates. We couldn't legally fail a kid for being late on an assignment. One of my students said to me one day, "Ah, due dates, schmue dates." Kids were turning in papers months late, and we had to accept them.
3. Forcing kids into honors-level classes whether they are capable or not. And then when too many began failing, the administration demanded that teachers dumb down the curricula. Then the following year, students were assigned to the next level up, and they weren't ready to do the work, because the previous curricula had been so simplified. That was "raising the bar."
Then these kids go off to college, and the colleges face the same problems. I'd like very much to increase the rigor of the college classes I teach – in spite of the fact that transfer students find my classes much more rigorous than their state junior college classes have been. But if I really expected kids to actually function at what we used to call "college" level, they'd fail. It's mind-boggling, and frustrating, and knowing where it came from is not much help.
It's not as if we don't know what can be done about it. In the last couple of decades, brain research has taught us quite a bit about how the brain learns. We know that the more background knowledge a child has, the better a reader he will be – yet we spend most of the school day drilling kids on "reading skills" rather than teaching them anything factual. We know that movement plays a big role in brain development, yet we cut back on recess. We know music and art improve brain function, but we cut art.
We must remember that the original purpose of John Dewey's educational scheme never was to produce thinking, critical, knowledgeable human beings. It was to create drones. We have succeeded in that.
Plus, the society in general discourages facing ugly truths and makes pretending fairly easy for a long period of time, but here in 2018, it's clear that the make-believe fairy tale is over. Millennials are finding that they are tens of thousands of dollars in debt, yet they know little that is actually true. They have learned attitudes but not facts. We've hit that wall.
What does public education do? Nothing. I've been involved, either willingly or otherwise, in half a dozen educational reforms designed to fix our problems. They all fail. The solution lies outside the auspices of government and teacher unions. The responsibility for educating our young has to start with the family. It can easily blossom into private enterprise, charter schools, and school vouchers. The homeschooling industry is thriving, and so are the students educated at home.
For the last nine years, I've been involved in building a school, a Bible-based junior college. Accreditation took us that long, and raising money isn't easy, but it can be done. We can crawl out from under the crushing weight of a system devoid of reality. We just have to begin.
Deana Chadwell blogs at www.ASingleWindow.com. She is also an adjunct professor and department head at Pacific Bible College in southern Oregon. She teaches writing and public speaking.
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