People Have a Right to Feel Bitter

• Wal-Mart's CEO, Lee Scott, earned $23.3 million in 2007.
  
• That come to $12,000 an hour (five day work week, eight hours a day).
  
• The average Wal-Mart sales associate earns $10/hour, más o menos.
• The average Wal-Mart employee would have to work for 800 years to earn what Lee Scott got in 2007.
• Bear Stearns CEO, James Cayne, earned $13.4 million as a reward for driving the company into bankruptcy. That was his bonus in the JP Morgan buyout. Cayne earned an additional $38 million in 2007 for his incompetence.
  
• The world's 500 richest people have more wealth that the poorest 416 million.
  

In 1965, corporate CEOs earned 24 times the salaries of their average employee. Forty years later, in 2005, this discrepancy has increased by 1100%, it took 262 employees to equal one CEO. Source. Two years later the gap had grown to 364 to 1. Perversely, The American CEOs who get paid the best are the ones who ship the most jobs overseas. This discrepancy grew slowly during the Reagan and Bush I years. but it was during the second Clinton Administration that the new Gilded Age began (the peak ratio was 525 to 1 in the year 2000). Bush II institutionalized it.

People have a right to feel bitter. The country into which they were born has been stolen from them. The promise of "Life, Liberty, and the Pursuit of Happiness" has been replaced with hopelessness. No matter how hard they work, no matter how faithful to family, nation, or God they are, they are worse off than their parents and they know their children will be worse off than themselves. Republicans will tell them that the thieves are immigrants, liberals, and gays. Republicans are liars, paid whores who sell unreasoning hatred as a balm for bitterness.

The real thieves are a handful of Robber Barons. Corporate executives who long ago sacrificed their humanity on an altar of gold. The milk of human kindness has turned to bile in their souls. Corporate profits no longer go to the workers whose sweat earned it or to the investors whose capital was put at risk. The profits go first into CEO's own greedy hands. If a business is successful these Robber Barons keep an obscene amount of the profits. If the business fails the Robber Barons keep everything. The employees are put out of work. The investors are left with worthless stock. The CEO takes home tens of millions.

See Also: The Wretchedness of Excess, Inequality.org, Times are Tough for Billionaires