ceo pay 2 bonus bak

main blank odd 4/19, it's still white so mebbe not; it works 4 22, 12 22

omg going on offense?! std/key API talking pt?

jj comm dr an 12 22

Fresh off posting the highest quarterly profit in its history, the U.S.-based fossil fuel giant ExxonMobil sued the European Union on Wednesday in an attempt to stop the bloc from imposing its recently approved windfall tax targeting major oil and gas companies.

The Financial Times, which first reported the new lawsuit, noted that the challenge takes aim at the European Council's "legal authority to impose the new tax—a power historically reserved for sovereign countries—and its use of emergency powers to secure member states' approval for the measure."

:{"The new tax is due to take effect from December 31 and will apply a levy of at least 33% on any taxable profits in 2022-23 that are 20% or more above average profits between 2018 and 2021," the newspaper explained.

In a statement, Exxon spokesperson Casey Norton insisted the company recognizes that sky-high energy costs are "weighing heavily on families and businesses" but claimed the tax would "undermine investor confidence, discourage investment and increase reliance on imported energy."

Reuters reported Wednesday that Exxon's chief financial officer has estimated the E.U.'s windfall tax could cost the corporation around $2 billion through the end of next year—a fraction of the company's 2022 profits.

Approved in late September amid a mounting cost-of-living crisis across Europe, the windfall tax was presented as an effort to generate additional revenue to "provide financial support to households and companies" struggling with high energy costs.Oil and gas companies like Exxon have been accused of exploiting global energy market chaos spurred by Russia's war on Ukraine to hike prices and pad their bottom lines.

In late October, Exxon announced it brought in $19.7 billion in profits from July to September, its largest-ever quarterly haul. The company also announced it would raise its dividend and expand its share buyback program, rewarding wealthy investors as consumers continue to face elevated prices at the pump.

According to a recent filing, Exxon has also been rewarding its top executives,boosting the annual salary of CEO Darren Woods from $1.70 million to $1.88 million for the coming year.

https://www.alternet.org/2022/04/ceos-raked-in-254-times/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/10/rep-katie-porter-brilliantly-grills-a-pharma-ceo-and-exposes-his-horrifying-earnings/

https://www.alternet.org/2020/08/ralph-nader-ranks-the-infinite-greed-power-and-controls-of-giant-corporations

Ralph Nader ranks the infinite greed, power and controls of giant corporations

The combination of greed and power often spin out of control and challenge the enforceable rule of law and the countervailing force of the organized civic community.

When greed and power are exercised by giant multinational corporations that escape the discipline of the nation-state, the potential for evil becomes infinite in nature. Enough is never enough.

Global giant companies, aided and abetted by their corporate attorneys and accountants, can literally decide how little taxes they are going to pay by shifting profits and expenses among different tax haven countries such as Ireland, Luxembourg, and Panama.

These same companies then proceed to lobby any nation, including most prominently the United States. Congress and the White House are pushed to cut formal tax rates, pack the tax laws with loopholes, and lower further the effective tax rate. The formal top tax rate for billions of company profits is now 21%, while the actual tax rate is lower – much lower for banks, insurance companies, drug companies, and behemoth tech companies like Apple that master tax avoidance.

"Generous” is not a word one can associate either with Apple or it’s avaricious, CEO Tim Cook. One of the first moves Tim Cook made, after replacing legendary Apple Founder, the cancer-stricken innovator Steve Jobs, was to arrange a $378 million, 2011 compensation package for himself and launch the biggest stock buyback in corporate history. Apple, which is worth $1.5 trillion has spent $327 billion since 2013 to buy back 2.5 billion shares of stock. Yet Apple has done little to produce productive investments, remediation of used and very toxic Apple products when discarded, or increase pay for the 350,000 serf-labor workers in China toiling under its merciless contractor Foxconn.

Apple made $104 billion in the last 12 months, puffed up by tax-avoidance, tax cuts and a no tariff deal with Trump on its Chinese imports, yet Tim Cook has rejected pleas to spend a little over $2 billion (deductible) to award a full year’s pay bonus to the 350,000 Foxconn workers who build Apple’s iPhones and iPads.

Apple’s massive stock buybacks have, however, increased the metrics to set compensation levels for Tim Cook and his executive sidekicks. Unfortunately, stock buybacks do little to tamp down excessive prices for Apple products. The massive stock buybacks also send a message that Apple’s management has no other uses for its corporate cash – not for R&D, not for improving the nature and security of its workers’ pensions, not for investing in curtailing the damaging side effects of Apple products on the environment and not for reducing other offloaded damage to society.

Tim Cook and Apple are also stingy, given their vast wealth, with charitable contributions. So stingy that Apple’s bosses do not even come close with the company’s charitable deduction limit of five percent of adjusted gross income. In 2018 Apple gave $125 million to charities. Apple’s net income for 2018 was $59.53 billion – a tiny fraction of one percent!

Recently, the New York Times published articles showing how tiny the executive pay cuts were by the very few executives who announced and declared sympathy for their laid-off and impoverished workers.The media has also been reporting illicit maneuvers developed by corporate attorneys to help chain stores get relief payments that should have gone to legitimate small businesses. (Why isn’t the National Federation of Independent Business (NFIB) speaking out against this abuse and avarice?)

Replacing some of their greed with generosity could be directed to the estimated $6 billion to $11 billion needed this coming school year to give low-income students full equipment and connectivity to the internet for remote learning during the Covid-19 pandemic restrictions. States and localities need $4 billion to assure the voting process will be fair and that all votes be counted and on time. The Republicans in the Senate are blocking the money needed to guarantee free and fair elections. Four billion dollars for the profit-glutted Silicon Valley giants Facebook, Google, Apple plus Amazon, and Microsoft, is peanuts. These high-tech digital giants could easily contribute the money needed to avert a widely predicted election time disaster and weeks of understaffed counting after November 3^rd. Imagine such a show of patriotism from these companies.

Then there are the matters of woefully inadequate supplies, facilities, and training programs to counter the spreading Covid-19 pandemic that is crumbling the economy. These record-setting profitable companies, with soaring stock prices due to their monopolistic powers or consumer-gouging, should return some of Trump’s giveaway tax cuts of 2017 and the burgeoning corporate welfare payments from crony-capitalistic Washington, D.C. to help their afflicted or vulnerable fellow Americans. Many of these people are their own workers, friends, and relatives.

Economists should develop a “Hedonistic Index,” to rank the “greed-with-power” status of the 500 largest U.S. corporations.

People have the right to know how CEOs and major corporations do on the “Hedonistic Index” of greed and power. After all, at the end of the day, we are all paying the price of the full measure of the infinite avarice spiraling from these corporate supremacists and their private governments of control.

Dennis Muilenburg, the former CEO of Boeing, also committed to the phony Business Roundtable pledge. Shortly after making the commitment to “deliver value to customers,” Muilenburg was fired for failing to act to address the safety problems that caused the 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people. After the crashes, he didn’t issue a meaningful apology or even express remorse to the victims’ families and downplayed the severity of the fallout to investors, regulators, airlines, and the public. He was rewarded with a $62 million farewell gift from Boeing on his way out.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/05/robert-reich-breaks-down-the-sham-of-corporate-social-responsibility

last August, the Business Roundtable – an association of CEOs of America’s biggest corporations – announced with great fanfare a “fundamental commitment to all of our stakeholders” and not just their shareholders.

They said “investing in employees, delivering value to customers, and supporting outside communities“ is now at the forefront of their business goals — not maximizing profits.

Baloney. Corporate social responsibility is a sham.

One Business Roundtable director is Mary Barra, CEO of General Motors. Just weeks after making the Roundtable commitment, and despite GM’s hefty profits and large tax breaks, Barra rejected workers’ demands that GM raise their wages and stop outsourcing their jobs. Earlier in the year GM shut its giant assembly plant in Lordstown, Ohio.

Nearly 50,000 GM workers then staged the longest auto strike in 50 years. They won a few wage gains but didn’t save any jobs. Barra was paid $22 million last year. How’s that for corporate social responsibility?

Another prominent CEO who made the phony Business Roundtable commitment was AT&T’s Randall Stephenson, who promised to use the billions in savings from the Trump tax cut to invest in the company’s broadband network and create at least 7,000 new jobs.

Instead, even before the coronavirus pandemic, AT&T cut more than 23,000 jobs and demanded that employees train lower-wage foreign workers to replace them.

Let’s not forget Jeff Bezos, CEO of Amazon and its Whole Foods subsidiary. Just weeks after Bezos made the Business Roundtable commitment, Whole Foods announced it would be cutting medical benefits for its entire part-time workforce.

The annual saving to Amazon from this cost-cutting move is roughly what Bezos – whose net worth is $117 billion – makes in a few hours. Bezos’ wealth grows so quickly, this number has gone up since you started watching this video.

GE’s CEO Larry Culp is also a member of the Business Roundtable. Two months after he made the commitment to all his stakeholders, General Electric froze the pensions of 20,000 workers in order to cut costs. So much for investing in employees.

Dennis Muilenburg, the former CEO of Boeing, also committed to the phony Business Roundtable pledge. Shortly after making the commitment to “deliver value to customers,” Muilenburg was fired for failing to act to address the safety problems that caused the 737 Max crashes that killed 346 people. After the crashes, he didn’t issue a meaningful apology or even express remorse to the victims’ families and downplayed the severity of the fallout to investors, regulators, airlines, and the public. He was rewarded with a $62 million farewell gift from Boeing on his way out.

Oh, and the chairman of the Business Roundtable is Jamie Dimon, CEO of Wall Street’s largest bank, JPMorgan Chase. Dimon lobbied Congress personally and intensively for the biggest corporate tax cut in history, and got the Business Roundtable to join him. JPMorgan raked in $3.7 billion from the tax cut. Dimon alone made $31 million in 2018.

That tax cut increased the federal debt by almost $2 trillion. This was before Congress spent almost $3 trillion fighting the pandemic – and delivering a hefty portion as bailouts to the biggest corporations, many of whom signed the Business Roundtable pledge.

As usual, almost nothing has trickled down to America’s working class and poor.

The truth is, American corporations are sacrificing workers and communities as never before in order to further boost runaway profits and unprecedented CEO pay. And not even a tragic pandemic is changing that.

Americans know this. A record 76 percent of U.S. adults believe major corporations have too much power.

The only way to make corporations socially responsible is through laws requiring them to be – for example, giving workers a bigger voice in corporate decision making, requiring that corporations pay severance to communities they abandon, raising corporate taxes, busting up monopolies, and preventing dangerous products (including faulty airplanes) from ever reaching the light of day.

If the CEOs of the Business Roundtable and other corporations were truly socially responsible, they’d support such laws, not make phony promises they clearly have no intention of keeping. Don’t hold your breath.

The only way to get such laws enacted is by reducing corporate power and getting big money out of our politics.

The first step is to see corporate social responsibility for the sham it is. The next step is to emerge from this pandemic and economic crisis more resolved than ever to rein in corporate power, and make the economy work for all.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/04/robert-reich-heres-how-ceos-are-ruining-america/

no lnx

Robert Reich: Here’s how CEOs are ruining America

Written by Robert Reich / Robert Reich's Blog April 13, 2020

Today, America’s wealthiest business moguls – like Jamie Dimon, head of JPMorgan Chase – claim that they are “patriots before CEOs” because they employ large numbers of workers or engage in corporate philanthropy.

Rubbish.

CEOs are in business to make a profit and maximize their share prices, not to serve America. And yet these CEOs dominate American politics and essentially run the system.

Therein lies the problem: They cannot be advocates for their corporations and simultaneously national leaders responsible for the wellbeing of the country. This is the biggest contradiction at the core of our broken system.

A frequent argument made by CEOs is that so-called “American competitiveness” should not be hobbled by regulations and taxes.Jamie Dimon often warns that tight banking regulations will cause Wall Street to lose financial business to banks in nations with weaker regulations. Under Dimon’s convenient logic, JPMorgan is America.

Dimon used the same faulty logic about American competitiveness to support the Trump tax cut. “We don’t have a competitive tax system here,” he warned.

But when Dimon talks about “competitiveness” he’s really talking about the competitiveness of JPMorgan, its shareholders, and billionaire executives like himself.

The concept of “American competitiveness” is meaningless when it comes to a giant financial enterprise like JPMorgan that moves money all over the world. JPMorgan doesn’t care where it makes money. Its profits don’t directly depend on the wellbeing of Americans.

“American competitiveness” is just as meaningless when it comes to big American-based corporations that make and buy things all over the world.

Consider a mainstay of corporate America, General Electric. Two decades ago, most GE workers were American. Today the majority are non-American. In 2017, GE announced it was increasing its investments in advanced manufacturing and robotics in China, which it termed “an important and critical market for GE.” In 2018, over half of GE’s revenue came from abroad. Its once core allegiance to American workers and consumers is gone.

Google has opened an Artificial Intelligence lab in Beijing. Until its employees forced the company to stop, Google was even building China a prototype search engine designed to be compatible with China’s censors.

Apple employs 90,000 people in the United States but contracts with roughly a million workers abroad. An Apple executive told The New York Times, “We don’t have an obligation to solve America’s problems. Our only obligation is making the best product possible” – and showing profits big enough to continually increase Apple’s share price.

American corporations will do and make things wherever around the world they can boost their profits the most, and invest in research and development wherever it will deliver the largest returns.

The truth is that America’s real competitiveness doesn’t depend on profit-seeking shareholders or increasingly global corporations. The real competitiveness of the United States depends on only one thing: the productivity of Americans.

That in turn depends on our education, our health, and the infrastructure that connects us. Yet today, American workers are hobbled by deteriorating schools, unaffordable college tuition, decaying infrastructure, and soaring health-care costs.

And truth be told, big American corporations and the CEOs that head them – wielding outsized political influence – couldn’t care less. They want tax cuts and rollbacks of regulations so they can make even fatter profits. All of which is putting Americans on a glide path toward lousier jobs and lower wages. How’s that for patriotism?

The first step toward fixing this broken system is to stop buying CEOs’ lies. How can we believe that Jamie Dimon’s initiatives on corporate philanthropy are anything other than public relations? Why should we think that he or his fellow CEOs seek any goal other than making more money for themselves and their firms? We can’t and we shouldn’t. They don’t have America’s best interests at heart — they’re making millions to be CEOs, not patriots.

Big American corporations aren’t organized to promote the wellbeing of Americans, and Americans cannot thrive within a system run largely by corporations. Fundamental reform will be led only by concerned and active citizens.

https://www.alternet.org/2020/01/inequality-in-the-trump-economy-just-keeps-getting-worse/

CEOs make more in first week of January than an average salary. Here’s the solution

Tobore Okah-Avae, The Conversation

Nobody else, apart from CEOs, has enjoyed a similar rise in their fortunes since the 1980s.

no lnx

Inequality in the Trump economy just keeps getting worse

Written by Sher Watts Spooner / Daily Kos January 5, 2020

Every month when the Bureau of Labor Statistics releases its monthly jobs report, Donald Trump and Republicans crow about the economy and the low unemployment rate. And every month, too many Americans wonder when they’re going to start feeling the effects of that “great economy.”

A recent study on poverty and a new way of measuring the quality of jobs show the shallowness of GOP claims about the U.S. economy. Poverty went up in at least one county in every state, concentrated in rural areas and the South. And a new system of measurement called the Job Quality Index shows that, although there are jobs available, for the most part, they aren’t jobs that pay well and aren’t career jobs for the long term. Often, they don’t even employ workers for a full 40 hours a week.

Combine that with the disastrous effects of the Trump tariffs and the trade war with China, especially how that trade war hurt U.S. manufacturing; the surge in bankruptcies of small farmers; the fact that American consumers now have a record $14 trillion in debt; and the 2017 GOP tax reform scam that turned into a windfall for big companies instead of helping everyday Americans, and most of us don’t feel that we’re better off than before Trump became president—a benchmark used by challengers in nearly every election.

Don’t forget that, after the GOP House and Senate passed and Trump signed the tax overhaul in late 2017, Trump’s message to his rich cronies at Mar-a-Lago gathered for the Christmas holidays was, “You all just got a lot richer.”

That was not a message that trickled down to average Americans. The supposed tax savings didn’t do much trickling down for them, either. Since the country started coming out of the Great Recession in 2009, the overall U.S. poverty rate has decreased. But between 2016 and 2018, the poverty rate grew in 30% of counties across America, according to data from the U.S. Census Bureau.

As a story from HuffPost put it:

The counties with the biggest jumps in poverty ranged across the political and demographic spectrum: from 97% white and solidly Republican-voting Carter County in Kentucky to black-majority, Democratic Bullock County in Alabama.

Most of the biggest increases were in areas both rural and Southern. Those areas generally had residents who lacked job training and skills and industries that suffered downturns.

Those industries included the coal industry in many of those poverty-stricken areas. Coal output has decreased by 27% in the last five years, and 50 coal power plants have closed across the country since Trump became president. That’s good news for the environment, but bad news for those counting on coal mining for a paycheck. It’s also a betrayal of one of Trump’s main promises in coal country.

But the unemployment rate is only 3.5%. That’s got to be great, right? Actually, considering the kinds of jobs available—and the fact that wage growth is fairly stagnant—not so much. And this isn’t a recent phenomenon.

The U.S. Private Sector Job Quality Index, or JQI, is a new economic indicator developed by academic economists that measures desirable higher-wage/higher-hour jobs versus lower-wage/lower-hour jobs. Job quality is defined as the weekly dollar-income a job generates for an employee. A paper defining the system and explaining why the detailed indicator is a more accurate reading of the economy is available at this link.

The paper’s conclusion reiterates the fact that U.S. manufacturing jobs have “declined dramatically in the last three decades,” and replacement jobs are poorer-paying, service-sector jobs with no guarantee of job stability or even a full work week. There also has been a “massive loss of market share, revenue, and jobs to foreign manufacturers.”

An important question surrounding the decline of manufacturing is whether those leaving manufacturing are transitioning into better or worse jobs. …

With other countries targeting what they see as high-value industries, the US is not just in danger of, but actually has been, forced into greater reliance on low-value, low-growth industries, offering lower-wage, lower-hours jobs. The success of superstar companies like Google or Apple or Pfizer should not blind us to the fact that today Leisure & Hospitality is our largest sector with 14.7 million non-management employees. It’s a sector that pays such workers $16.58 an hour and the average worker works just 25.8 hours a week — resulting in average weekly income of $428. …

When all that a country has left is the domestic manufacture of processed foodstuffs, you end up with a lot of unhealthy and unwealthy workers who are in dire shortage of security, much less dignity. A republic that offers no better than this cannot long endure.

“When U.S. unemployment is at a 50-year low, why do so many people have trouble finding work with decent pay and adequate predictable hours?” asks a story from Forbes on the JQI. Answer: Few non-specialized good jobs are available.

Tens of millions of working-aged Americans are still not formally employed and have no apparent interest in sending out a resume. If the job market is so hot, why are so many people sitting on the sidelines? One frequently cited explanation is the growing proportion of older generation workers. Now we have another more important element. Workers don’t re-enter the workforce because many of the jobs themselves are rotten. …

Many looked to the category of jobs known as Professional and Technical Services as a path for the economy to “move to higher ground.” Professional and Technical Services were supposed to offer high pay, growth in employee numbers, and an opportunity to increase productivity. In fact, the JQI does report that employment is up 41% in this sector and the average weekly pay for non-managerial workers of $1,575 exceeds the pay of many other industries. But that’s not enough to rescue what the economy lost in manufacturing.

To recap:

Many of the jobs available are poorer, with stagnant wages and little job stability or full employment guarantees.

The tax bills of many big companies ended up being even smaller than what was anticipated in the GOP tax scam law. This has caused a ballooning federal deficit that could reach $1 trillion in 2020.

Trump’s trade war with China led to a loss of U.S. manufacturing jobs and higher prices. No matter what he claims about a new agreement, it’s not a done deal, and it’s only “Phase One” of a partial deal with few specifics released.

After Trump’s tariffs against China, China retaliated with tariffs that were devastating to U.S. farmers. Despite $28 billion in farm subsidies in the last two years (many of which went to large agriculture suppliers, some foreign-owned), farm bankruptcies surged, especially in the Midwest.

The record $14 trillion in debt that Americans owe is spread across mortgages, auto loans, credit cards, student loans, and other forms of debt. By themselves, student loans make up $1.5 trillion of the debt total. And medical costs are still growing faster than income—medical costs have gone up 33% since 2009.

It doesn’t matter if the stock market had its best annual gain in six years. When only those at the top are benefiting from those stock market gains—not every worker has a 401(k) or fat IRA account—then there’s no trickle down from a bloated stock market. Although 20 states and 26 cities and counties are raising the minimum wage in 2020, the federal minimum wage of $7.25 an hour hasn’t gone up since 2009.

This is a message that all Democratic candidates should be repeating over and over, whether they’re running for president, the House, the Senate, or a state office: The Trump economy isn’t helping most Americans.

new

https://www.alternet.org/2019/11/how-progressive-lawmakers-seek-to-take-on-the-egregious-scale-of-ceo-pay/

no lnx

How progressive lawmakers seek to take on the egregious scale of CEO pay

Written by David Atkins / Washington Monthly November 15, 2019

Tackling wealth inequality is admittedly hard. The rich have access to very good accountants, lawyers, and lobbyists. There are a lot of places for them to stash their wealth. Loopholes are easy to create. Not to mention, they can always move (although they don’t carry out the threat nearly as often as conservatives would have you believe) if they really don’t like or can’t escape the tax bill.

Solving the problem requires a variety of approaches from many different angles: wealth taxes, financial transaction taxes, estate taxes, corporate taxes, loophole elimination, campaign finance changes, tax haven penalties, etc. Any one of them may fail, or be easy for certain classes of individuals to escape. Collectively, however, they can both put a dent in the deficit allowing for greater expenditures on social services and climate change abatement. More importantly, they can reduce the corrosive wealth inequality that is eating away at our democracy. Reducing the amount of the money hoarded by the obscenely wealthy would be a good thing on its own merits, even if it were merely burned in a bonfire rather than added to the Treasury.

That’s why a new proposal from a bevy of progressive lawmakers comes as a welcome and innovative addition to the policy arsenal: increasing the corporate tax rate in accordance with the gap between CEO pay and median worker pay. Here’s the general idea:

Sen. Bernie Sanders (I-Vt.), Rep. Barbara Lee (D-Calif.) and Rep. Rashida Tlaib (D-Mich.) introduced the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, which rewrites the federal tax code to tackle the inequality crisis created by corporate America’s unrestrained greed.

The typical restaurant employee at McDonald’s would have to work for more than 2,000 years to earn what the company’s CEO Chris Kempczinski received last year. A retail worker at Gap Inc. would have to work for more than 3,000 years to receive the annual compensation of Gap’s former CEO Art Peck. Peck’s pay was increased by 33 percent in 2018, even after he presided over years of declines in sales and stock prices.

The Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would pressure corporations to curb these outrageous pay gaps that are the norm today, by imposing graduated taxes for companies that pay their CEO more than 50 times the pay of the median worker. The tax penalties would begin at 0.5 percentage points and rise to 5 percentage points for firms compensating their chief executives at more than 500 times the rate of their workers. A recent report by the Institute for Policy Studies found that 80 percent of S&P 500 firms paid their CEOs more than 100 times the pay of their median worker.

Many of the firms lavishing multi-million-dollar compensation packages on their top executives rely on taxpayer support—through public housing, nutrition assistance, and Medicaid, for example—to assist full-time workers who struggle with poverty wages.

CEO pay around the world, and especially in the United States, has become outrageous. While the average worker has only seen their compensation grow by 12 percent since 1968, the pay of the average CEO has increased by a whopping 940 percent since 1978. It’s not just an outrageous injustice that so many workers are being laid off, off-shored, and made insecure while the top executives make a killing. It also offends our very sense of how the economy is supposed to work: after all, it’s not as if CEOs are now a thousand times more productive than they were 40 years ago.

EXTRAction/smash and grab

In fact, the opposite is true: CEOs used to stick with a company for nearly a lifetime, their own reputation and financial well-being tied to the company’s. Now, they’re migrant mercenaries goosing quarterly profit in the short term while leaving the next guy holding the bag to deal with the consequences of the corners they cut. It breaks our understanding of the social and moral compact that underpins the political economy and the credibility of modern capitalism itself as an economic system. It would be great to pass the money being funneled to CEOs back to workers either in the form of wages or social program redistribution. But failing that, it would serve a valuable social good just to burn that money in a fire rather than continue to deliver it to the undeserving rich to buy another yacht.

Critics will call this a gimmick that doesn’t singlehandedly solve the problem, but ultimately, that isn’t the point.

First, it delivers a key political message: we understand that the economy is broken, that the social fabric is fraying, that the wrong people are being overcompensated for the wrong reasons, and that we intend to do something about that specifically.

Second, it attacks one of the aspects of wealth inequality in a direct, pre-distributive way. Rather than trying to claw back money from the obscenely wealthy after it has already been paid out, it incentivizes corporations not to give it to them in the first place. It puts coolant in the overheating engine that has been sending CEO pay skyrocketing to absurd levels in a chummy bidding war in the hands of a class of executives all too happy to distribute egregious sums to their friends and fellows.

Obviously, unless Democrats can both win the Senate and bypass the filibuster, this policy is dead on arrival against a wall of GOP obstruction. But it’s good to have in the back pocket in the meantime, and it would serve as excellent policy to campaign on as we approach the 2020 election, reminding the American people who is actually on the side of the average worker to build a fairer economy.

David Atkins is a writer, activist and research professional living in Santa Barbara. He is a contributor to the Washington Monthly’s Political Animal and president of The Pollux Group, a qualitative research firm.

new

https://www.alternet.org/2019/09/why-would-we-trust-plutocrats-to-save-us-from-plutocracy/

no lnx

Why would we trust plutocrats to save us from plutocracy?

Written by Jim Hightower / Common Dreams September 12, 2019

Ralph Waldo Emerson once wrote of being leery of a loud-talking huckster who visited his home: “The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons,” Emerson exclaimed.

Likewise, today’s workaday families should do a mass inventory of their silverware as an integrity check on a mess of loud-talking corporate honchos. Suddenly, 181 of these union-busting, tax-cheating, environment-contaminating, consumer-gouging corporate hucksters are asking us to believe that they stand with us in the fight against … well, against them. Wall Street banksters, Big Oil polluters, anti-union extremists and a myriad of other profiteers grouped into a prestigious collective calledBusiness Roundtable,issued a “grito” in August, trumpeting their future intentions to serve not just themselves but every “stakeholder” (which is what they call employees, customers, supplies, et al.).

Nice of them, of course, but vague proclamations are cheap, and it’s worth noting that these new champions of the common good propose no specifics—no actual sacrifices by them or benefits for us. Excuse me, but their grandiose promise of corporate beneficence is what West Texas cowboys would call “bovine excrement.”

Yes, we’ve now been joined in the trenches of class struggle by the CEOs of JPMorgan Chase, Walmart, Amazon and nearly 200 other giant corporations. Well, not quite in the trenches, for you can get your Guccis dirty in there. Still, on the battleground of public relations, Business Roundtable (the chief lobbing front for America’s biggest corporations) has declared its solidarity with all of us who seek economic fairness and equal opportunity.

Their opening volley was fired in August in a grand declaration titled “Statement on the Purpose of a Corporation.” For 50 years, that purpose has been ruthlessly clear: maximize their investors’ profits, no matter who or what they have to run over. But now, the barons of big business are putting on a softer face, proclaiming that their “fundamental commitment” is not merely to serve shareholder greed but also to benefit workers, reduce inequality, protect the environment and serve the whole community. It’s corporate kumbaya, y’all — solidarity forever!

Alex Gorsky, CEO of Johnson & Johnson, was designated to write the Roundtable’s new declaration of concern for the common people. He later expressed a historic sense of pride in the task: “There were times when I felt like Thomas Jefferson,” Gorsky gushed.

Really? This is the same guy who presided over Johnson & Johnson’s profiteering roll in spreading deadly opioids throughout America. Even as he was posing as Jefferson, an Oklahoma jury was assessing a $572 million fine on his corporation for foisting the opioid horror on the common people he now professes to love.

So forgive me for not believing for a moment that there’s one iota of sincerity in this sudden assertion of egalitarian sentiment by the soulless organizers of today’s corporate plunder. They’re still going to plunder your unions, paychecks, jobs, health, environment and overall well-being. The only difference is that they now want you to think they feel bad about it.

A few media observers have been mildly skeptical, saying it’s “an open question” whether any of the corporate proclaimers will change how they do business. But it’s not an open question at all. They won’t. They won’t support full collective bargaining power for workers, won’t join the public’s push to get Medicare for All, won’t stop using monopoly power to squeeze out small competitors and gouge consumers, won’t support measures to stop climate change, won’t back reforms to get their corrupt corporate money out of our politics … won’t embrace any of the big structural changes necessary to reverse the raw economic and political inequality that has enthroned their plutocratic rule and made them richer than royalty.

In fact, their empty proclamation is nothing but a cynical ploy to soften people’s anger at their rampant greed in hopes of fending off the actual changes that real reformers are advancing. Corporate elites won’t fix inequality for us; they’re the ones doing it to us.

no lnx

How to become a corporate CEO scam artist in five easy steps

Robert Reich image via Screengrab

Written by Robert Reich / Common Dreams August 22, 2019

Average CEO pay at big corporations topped 14.5 million dollars in 2018. That’s after an increase of 5.2 million dollars per CEO over the past decade, while the average worker’s pay has increased just 7,858 dollars over the decade.

Just to catch up to what their CEO made in 2018 alone, it would take the typical worker 158 years.

This explosion in CEO pay relative to the pay of average workers isn’t because CEOs have become so much more valuable than before. It’s not due to the so-called “free market.”

It’s due to CEOs gaming the stock market and playing politics

How did CEOs pull this off? They followed these five steps:

First: They made sure their companies began paying their executives in shares of stock.

Second: They directed their companies to lobby Congress for giant corporate tax cuts and regulatory rollbacks.

Third: They used most of the savings from these tax cuts and rollbacks not to raise worker pay or to invest in the future, but to buy back the corporation’s outstanding shares of stock.

Fourth: This automatically drove up the price of the remaining shares of stock.

Fifth and finally: Since CEOs are paid mainly in shares of stock, CEO pay soared while typical workers were left in the dust.

How to stop this scandal? Five ways:

Ban stock buybacks. They were banned before 1982 when the Securities and Exchange Commission viewed them as vehicles for stock manipulation and fraud. Then Ronald Reagan’s SEC removed the restrictions. We should ban buybacks again.

Stop corporations from deducting executive pay in excess of 1 million dollars from their taxable income – even if the pay is tied to so-called company performance. There’s no reason other taxpayers ought to be subsidizing humongous CEO pay.
Stop corporations from receiving any tax deduction for executive pay unless the percent raise received by top executives matches the percent raise received by average employees.

Increase taxes on corporations whose CEOs make more than 100 times their average employees.

Finally, and most basically: Stop CEOs from corrupting American politics with big money. Get big money out of our democracy. Fight for campaign finance reform.

Grossly widening inequalities of income and wealth cannot be separated from grossly widening inequalities of political power in America. This corruption must end.

619 an hightower

...Oh, wait … You say you didn’t get 7%? Oops, my mistake. It was the CEOs of corporate giants who reported to the Associated Press that they enjoyed a median jump of 7% last year. And as their paychecks were already king-size, that uptick amounted to an extra $800,000 in their take-home, for a median yearly income of $12 million each. Bear in mind that “median” means half of the corporate bosses grabbed more than 7%. For example, David Zaslav, honcho of the Discovery television network, had a 207% boost in pay, raising his total take in 2018 to $130 million.

These lavish payouts to top-floor bosses—combined with a miserliness toward rank-and-file employees who actually produce the corporate wealth—is creating an untenable income disparity in corporate America, stretching inequality in our Land of Egalitarianism to the snapping point. The pay gap between aloof CEOs and typical employees nearly doubled last year at a range of corporate giants, from PayPal to CVS Pharmacy, and it tripled at Discovery. AP’s recent survey of 340 major corporations found that compensation inequality is now so extreme that a middle-wage employee would have to work 158 years to make as much as his or her chief executive was given last year alone. This separation is widening at warp speed, propelled by the boundless greed and narcissism of so-called leaders like Zaslav. To amass as much pay as he pocketed in 2018, a typical Discovery employee would have to work 989 years.

When you hear corporate chieftains and such corporate cheerleaders as Donald Trump gloat that our economy is “booming,” ask yourself: A boom for whom?

...

https://news.littlesis.org/2019/05/29/these-are-the-millionaire-ceos-whose-corporations-fund-politicians-banning-abortions

2018, AT&T CEO Randall Stephenson made over$29 million in his role. Coca Cola CEO James Quincey received$16.7 million between base compensation and bonuses. Aetna is now owned by CVS Health Corporation. CVS CEO Larry J. Merlo made $22 million in 2018.

https://www.commondreams.org/news/2019/04/11/watch-rep-katie-porter-uses-basic-budget-math-expose-jamie-dimon-starvation-wages

During a House Financial Services Committee hearing on Wednesday, Rep. Katie Porter used the financial struggles of one of her constituents to grill JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon over the vast worker-executive pay gap and low wages at his bank.

"What I'd like you to do is provide a way for families to make ends meet, so that little kids who are six years old living in a one-bedroom apartment with their mother aren't going hungry at night because they're $567 short."

—Rep. Katie Porter

Porter, a Democrat from California, outlined the monthly expenses of her constituent, a single-mother working full-time as a JPMorgan Chase teller for $16.50 an hour.

After paying for rent on her one-bedroom apartment, food, utilities, child care for her daughter, and other basic needs, Porter estimated that her constituent has a $567 budget shortfall each month.

When Porter asked Dimon—who earns $31 million a year—how his employee should manage this shortfall while working 40 hours a week at his bank, the Wall Street CEO had no answer.

"I don't know, I'd have to think about that," Dimon said three times after Porter asked whether her constituent should take out a JPMorgan Case credit card and run a deficit or overdraft at the bank.

After Dimon said he would like to be "helpful," Porter responded, "What I'd like you to do is provide a way for families to make ends meet, so that little kids who are six years old living in a one-bedroom apartment with their mother aren't going hungry at night because they're $567 short."

"Mr. Dimon, you know how to spend $31 million a year in salary, and you can't figure out how to make up a $567 a month shortfall," Porter said. "This is is a budget problem you cannot solve."

In response to Dimon's suggestion that her math may not be correct, Porter hit back on Twitter.

"Jamie Dimon said he didn't know if all my numbers were accurate," the California Democrat wrote. "Here's the math so he can check."

...

“We renew our resolve that America will never be a socialist country,” Donald Trump said recently.

Someone should alert him that America is now a hotbed of socialism. But it’s socialism for the rich. Everyone else is treated to harsh capitalism.

In the conservative mind, socialism means getting something for doing nothing. This pretty much describes General Motors’ receipt of $600 million in federal contracts, plus $500 million in tax breaks, since Trump took office.

Some of this corporate welfare has gone into the pockets of GM executives. Chairman and CEO Mary Barra raked in almost $22 million in total compensation in 2017 alone.

But GM employees are subject to harsh capitalism. GM is planning to lay off more than 14,000 workers and close three assembly plants and two component factories in North America by the end of 2019.

The nation’s largest banks saved $21 billion last year thanks to Trump’s tax cuts, some of which went intomassive bonuses for bank executives. On the other hand, thousands of lower-level bank employees got a big dose of harsh capitalism. They lost their jobs. [vid]

Banks that are too big to fail—courtesy of the 2008 bank bailout—enjoy a hidden subsidy of some $83 billion a year because they have the backing of the federal government. This hidden subsidy gives Wall Street, giant banks a huge advantage.

In 2017, Wall Street’s bonus pool was$31.4 billion. So, take away the hidden subsidy, and that bonus pool disappears, along with most profits. Trump and his appointees at the Federal Reserve are easing bank requirements put in place after the bailout. But they will make sure the biggest banks remain too big to fail.

When he was in business, Trump perfected the art of using bankruptcy to shield himself from the consequences of bad decisions– socialism for the rich at its worst –while leaving employees twisting in the wind. Now, all over America, executives who run their companies into the ground are getting gold-plated exit packages while their workers get pink slips.

Under socialism for the rich, you can screw up big time and still reap big rewards. Equifax’s Richard Smith retired in 2017 with an $18 million pension in the wake of a security breach that exposed the personal information of 145 millioncustomers to hackers.

Wells Fargo’s Carrie Tolstedt departed with a $125 million exit package after being in charge of the unit that opened more than 2 million unauthorized customer accounts.

Whatever happened to the idea of a meritocracy – an economic system that allows everyone to get ahead through hard work, and economic gains go only to those who deserve them?

Around 60 percent of America’s wealth is now inherited. Many of today’s super-rich have never done a day’s work in their lives. Trump’s response has been to expand this divide by cutting the estate tax to apply only to estates valued at over $22 million per couple. Mitch McConnell is now proposing that the estate tax be repealed altogether.

To the conservative mind, the specter of socialism conjures up a society in which no one is held accountable, and no one has to work for what they receive. Yet, that’s exactly the society Trump and the Republicans are promoting for the rich.

Meanwhile, most Americans are subject to an increasingly harsh and arbitrary capitalism.

They need stronger safety nets, and they deserve a bigger piece of the economic pie.

If you want to call this socialism, fine. I call it fair.