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June 10, 2013 |
THIS WEEK | |
So how are average Americans doing so far in 2013? The latest indicator: Hourly wages, the Bureau of Labor Statistics informed us last week, fell at a 3.8 percent annual clip in the year’s first quarter, the largest quarterly drop ever recorded.Average Americans today are making less, after inflation, than they made in the early 1970s. Something has gone fundamentally wrong. American workplaces are simply no longer working for those who punch timecards — or play violins.Musicians who play violins — and every other instrument of a modern world-class orchestra — spend years perfecting their craft. They bring great joy whenever they perform. But the musicians of one great American orchestra have done no official performing since October 1. Local plutocrats have silenced their music.These plutocrats have demonstrated yet again why the United States has become, as sociologist Salvatore Babones points out, the world’s only major nation with inequality both high and rising. More on the new report that incited that observation — and class war with a cultured face — in this week’s Too Much. | About Too Much, a project of the Institute for Policy StudiesProgram on Inequality and the Common GoodSubscribe to Too MuchJoin us on Facebook or follow us on Twitter ![]() ![]() |
GREED AT A GLANCE | |
The executives at the Japanese financial giant Daiwa Securities have had a fairly spectacular last 12 months. This past February, Global Finance magazine namedDaiwa the world’s “most creative global investment bank.” Then last week came the news that pay last year for Daiwa’s top 12 execs nearly doubled over the year before. The dozen execs averaged $674,000 each. But better not let the Daiwa execs see what their U.S. rivals are making. At Goldman Sachs, the top five execs last year averaged $18.5 million each. Daiwa CEO Takashi Hibino and the rest of Daiwa’s top dozen execs together took in $8.1 million, over 11 times less than the combined $92.5 million that Goldman’s top five collected . . .![]() |
Quote of the Week“A country that cannot force wealthy and corporate taxpayers to pay their share of the tax burden is a country that will fail.” Linda Beale, The Boom and Bust Cycle of Tax Shelters and Intimidation of the IRS, June 7, 2013 |
PETULANT PLUTOCRAT OF THE WEEK | |
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IMAGES OF INEQUALITY | |
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Web GemPatriotic Millionaires/ An egalitarian action center for Americans of means without a mean streak. |
PROGRESS AND PROMISE | |
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Take Action on InequalityHow can Wal-Mart workers survive on their lowly wages? They can’t. Government support programs have to take up the slack — while Wal-Mart execs take home mega millions. Add your voice to the struggle against the Wal-Mart gravy train! |
INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS | |
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Stat of the WeekThe number of New York Times articles that mention inequality, notes University of California at Berkeley sociologist Claude Fischer, has increased from an average about 90 a year in the 1990s to 840 a year in the 2000s to about 2,700 a year since the start of 2010. |
IN FOCUS | |
They Can’t Stop Beethoven, Can They?For the grasping managers of Corporate America — and the institutions their wealth dominates — no workers deserve dignity, not even the most amazingly accomplished.What do bank executives who make $19 million a year do in their spare time? They do the same thing they do in the hours they spend in their executive suites. They squeeze America’s middle class.That’s not, of course, what the flacks at U.S. Bancorp, the nation’s fifth-largest bank, will tell you. They’ll inform you that the CEO of their Minneapolis-based banking giant, Richard Davis, graciously gives of his spare time to serve on the board of the nationally renowned Minnesota Orchestra.![]() Behind this massive redistribution: a relentless corporate offensive to minimize labor bargaining power by any means necessary. Including “lockouts.” Richard Davis chairs the negotiating committee at the nonprofit responsible for the Minnesota Orchestra. Last October 1, Davis and his fellow corporate managers who run the nonprofit “locked out” the orchestra’s musicians after theyrefused to accept a contract offer that would have cut musician pay by up to 50 percent and jumped annual health care premiums by up to $8,000. Ever since then, the Minnesota Orchestra’s near 100 symphony musicians have gone without salary, health insurance, and pension contributions, the basic building blocks of middle class security. These musicians are not striking. Quite the contrary. They offered to keep working while bargaining negotiations continued. They also offered to submit “to impartial, final and binding arbitration under the guidance of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.” U.S. Bancorp CEO Davis and friends rejected these offers. They chose instead to keep the musicians from working — and wait for them to cave. Back in America’s middle class golden age, in the middle of the 20th century, such management behavior would have been unthinkable. Back then, any corporate chiefs who locked out their employees in the middle of a labor dispute risked becoming pariahs in their communities, the sort of shady operators who would never be invited to sit on the board of a prestigious nonprofit like the Minnesota Orchestral Association. But elite attitudes toward lockouts started changing in 1975 when an ostensibly liberal pillar of the business community, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, replaced striking workers with “replacement workers” and lived to tell the tale. Six years later, a newly elected conservative President, Ronald Reagan, fired and replaced striking air traffic controllers. A new anything-goes corporate management approach to labor relations soon took hold. Lockouts, in this atmosphere, would become simply another option in the modern American management toolkit — and the federal regulator created to safeguard the right to good-faith collective bargaining, the National Labor Relations Board, would prove too feeble to offer up much resistance. U.S. Bancorp CEO Davis has had an up-close chance to see how effective a management tool lockouts could be. Nearly two years ago, another major enterprise in Minnesota, American Crystal Sugar, locked out 1,300 workers. The unionized workers at Crystal, the nation’s largest beet sugar producer, had solid middle-class jobs that averaged $40,000 a year, plus overtime. But in 2011 contract negotiations Crystal management demanded huge health care cuts and work rule changes that would undercut the job security of long-term workers. The workers voted not to accept the offer Crystal labeled “final.” In August 2011, Crystal then locked them out. The workers never struck. Crystal replaced them anyway. Last month, the worn-out workers, their unemployment benefits exhausted, voted to accept the same management attack on their middle-class contract they had rejected four times earlier. Crystal management had won a total victory. U.S. Bancorp’s Davis expected total victory when his lockout began, too. But the musicians have hung tough, buoyed by widespread community support. Still, the hostile environment management has created has taken a toll. About a quarter of the orchestra’s 98 musicians have taken jobs elsewhere or retired. Like this article? Sign up “This lockout is destroying the Minnesota Orchestra, musician by musician by musician,” viola player Sam Bergman told the audience at one benefit concert late in April. Richard Davis personally took home $18.8 million in 2010 for his U.S. Bancorp labors, several million dollars more than the annual wage and benefit cost of the entire Minnesota Orchestra. Since becoming Bancorp CEO over six years ago, Davis has averaged about $10 million annually. Imperial CEOs like Richard Davis owe their grand fortunes, in large part, to the grand squeeze American workers have suffered over the last generation. These execs have been squeezing so long they simply cannot operate any other way. Even music, turns out, cannot soothe the savage beast. Aficionados of fine music — and advocates for a more equal America — can now support the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra online. |
New Wisdom on WealthMark Bittman, Welfare for the Wealthy, New York Times, June 4, 2013. The mega millionaires of agriculture continue to prosper off the tax dollars of ordinary Americans.Bill Black, How Elite Economic Hucksters Drive America’s Biggest Fraud Epidemics, Naked Capitalism, June 6, 2013. A University of Missouri-KC expert on financial crime lays bare the M.O. of our plutocrats.What Is Net Worth Really Worth? The Drucker Institute, June 7, 2013. What we need more than more wealth for the wealthy.Asawin Suebsaeng, The Purge: A Horror Flick about . . . Income Inequality?!,Mother Jones, June 7, 2013 A new fright flick has as much to say about inequality as swinging axes into amoral, wealthy college kids trying to kill your family.
Looking for an ace summer read? Check out this new history of America’s first — and so far only — triumph over plutocracy. |
NEW AND NOTABLE | |
A Close Look at Where Our Inequality Lurks![]() |
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ABOUT TOO MUCH | |
Too Much, an online weekly publication of the Institute for Policy Studies | 1112 16th Street NW, Suite 600, Washington, DC 20036 | (202) 234-9382 | Editor: Sam Pizzigati. | E-mail: editor@toomuchonline.org | Unsubscribe. |
Chronicles of Inequality [TOO MUCH, June 10, 2013)]
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