(11 am. – promoted by ek hornbeck)
Cross posted from The Stars Hollow Gazette
GRAPH: An Average CEO At America’s Big Corporations Earns 200 Times The Salary Of A Navy SEAL
In the wake of their successful assault on Osama Bin Laden’s hideout, ABC News did a short feature on the Navy Seals. The report tells us that the people who hold this highly demanding and dangerous get paid about $54,000 a year. It then adds that:
“The base salary level [of Navy Seals] is comparable to the average annual salary for teachers in the U.S., which was $55,350 for the 2009-2010 school year, according to the Digest of Education Statistics.’ That is one possible comparison. There are other possible reference points. For example, the CEOs of Goldman Sachs and J.P. Morgan both pocket around $20 million a year.
GRAPH: Income Inequality In U.S. Worse Than Ivory Coast, Pakistan, Ethiopia
Exxon Makes $30.5 Billion, So GOP Votes Unanimously To Give Them Tax Breaks
Former Clinton labor secretary Robert Reich shares is thoughts on the rise in pay for CEO’s and the rise in unemployment number
12 comments
Skip to comment form
Author
Big question. Jobs are about doing what is needed. And 10 to 20% of the American working population are not really needed in our system other than being a spare-labor category that, along with illegal immigration, keeps wages and labor militancy down. This class will, furthermore, will never be needed in any other way. This isn’t going to change. The underclass here is permanent. There is no scenario that would revive the American working class. Reich’s recommendations are just out of the question, not because they are irrational, but precisely because they are rational.
Rational solutions to any major social or international issue are impossible, as I’ve said ad nauseam because they are rational. There are many of reasons for this but primary among them is the confluence of needs between the oligarchs that run this country and the American people who have willingly ceded their sovereignty to enable them to shamelessly pursue fantasies and addictions. Reality would just unhinge the majority of the American people–they require their illusions and the oligarchs are happy to supply them with those illusions and they are becoming increasingly good at delivering the goods. Mind you, the average American, like any average person in any society, has depended on a coherent mythological framework–it’s just that no society has ever had such a super-charged whore-house culture as this one.
Jobs will come from servicing these fantasies–as we know there always is a need for bartenders, waitresses, cosmetic surgeons, prostitutes and drug-dealers.
Think about the rise of the temp company. Dying companies no longer have the HR resources to do the hiring process so that is outsourced. The addition benefit is exploiting temporary workers by not paying benefits.
OK,well I could always just drive a truck you say. No, I can’t as “at fault” accident records last for six years here in Marxachusetts. That includes rear ending the Mercedes minivan who locked up the brakes on a rainsoaked road. Maybe I could be a shipper/receiver for a company. Well, actually not as they are demanding knowledge of international shipping/hazmat labels/ITAR compliance and a working knowledge of ISO 9000, SAP and Sarbanes-Oxley compliance reporting.
Internet scamming?
Where ever that is.
There are no jobs, and what jobs there are, or that’ve been created are these really low-paying service type jobs that don’t even pay a decent living wage so that a worker can support either him/herself, or their family, if they have one.
Of course, bringing more businesses into areas, as well as getting to work to really fix our crumbling infrastructure would help create jobs, although the latter would more than likely be temporary. The creation of jobs was supposedly part of the stimulus program that the Obama Administration announced, but was it really, though? No, especially when one looks at the fact that 42% of the stimulus actually consisted of tax cuts, if one gets the drift.