Income/Wealth Inequality

By Paul Buchheit

It used to be that the average American resided halfway between two extremes:Today, 400 individuals have as much wealth as an entire HALF of America.

• Steven Schwarzman's home was being partially replicated in a Park Avenue hall for his gala $5 million 60th birthday party. The guest of honor's full-length portrait greeted the invitees as they proceeded past rows of orchids and palm trees to the dining area, where they feasted on lobster, filet mignon, baked Alaska, and the finest of wines. Martin Short provided the laughs, and the music came compliments of Marvin Hamlisch, Patti LaBelle, and Rod Stewart.

By Tula Connell

The AFL-CIO has launched the 2012 Executive PayWatch site—now called CEO Pay and the 99%—which includes the most comprehensive data accessible on 2011 executive pay. All of the data available is searchable by industry, by state and by the top 100 highest-paid CEOs. Check it and help us share it widely.

CEO Pay and the 99% shows that a CEO of a company in the S&P 500 Index, on average, received $12.9 million in total compensation in 2011. That’s nearly a 14 percent raise over the previous year. And that’s on top of a 23 percent increase in 2010.

In stark contrast, the average wage for workers hovered at $34,000 in 2011. Median household income fell $3,700 over the past decade. And those who are employed received an average 2.8 percent raise—barely keeping up with inflation.

The new site also features data on:

By Richard (RJ) Eskow

Let's face it. The subject of taxes intimidates a lot of people, and it can be an understandably touchy subject. So we won't inundate you with charts, graphs, and tables to tell you why the rich are getting away with murder on tax day. We've got something better for you on this Tax Day, just 24 hours after Republicans rejected the Buffett rule (a proposal which was sensible, if far too easy on the rich).

Instead of bogging you down with data, we offer you: The Elvis Index.

As we've noted before, Elvis had a manager named Col. Tom Parker - who, in the true huckster/promoter spirit, was neither a "Colonel" nor "Tom Parker." (He was a Dutch immigrant.) Col. Parker famously said back in the 1950s that ""I consider it my patriotic duty to keep Elvis up in the 90 percent tax bracket."

By Steven Mikulan
The Frying Pan

Heist, a new film by Frances Causey and Donald Goldmacher, joins the growing list of angry documentaries chronicling the destruction of America’s economy and its middle class by powerful corporate forces. Like Inside Job and just about any title in the Brave New Films catalog, Heist gets our blood boiling with its money-pile graphics and occasional glib comments exhaled by Wall Street fat cats. Call this genre the Cinema of Outrage.

Subtitled Who Stole the American Dream?, the film breaks away from the pack, however, by drilling deep to explain how we came to find ourselves on the verge of where Argentina was a dozen years ago. The film also eschews conspiracist viewpoints and refuses to offer up, say, Alan Greenspan or the Koch brothers as villainous piñatas for us to vicariously bash.

By Dave Lagstein
Alliance of Californians for Community Empowerment

While the majority of Californians continue to suffer from the economic crisis, big corporations and super-rich individuals are driving an agenda in our state to ensure the 1% prospers at the expense of the 99%.

The result has been an increased economic burden for working families that includes escalating costs of higher education and healthcare, fewer jobs, more foreclosures, depressed wages, and a deteriorating quality of life.

By Frances Causey
Co-Producer/Director of “Heist: Who Stole the American Dream”

For the last 40 years, the economic-political decision making in this country has been top down, leaving working people out of the equation. Supporting local economies is a powerful antidote to the unbridled power of corporations and the political financial elite who dominate our society.

We need to starve the corporate beast of its profits! As we point out in HEIST, it's time for us to fight back at the local level by targeting how we spend our money.  Buying at the lowest prices and the outsourcing that makes them possible has come at the cost of millions of American jobs. The Heist team is allied with strong advocates for local business ownership, including Local First.  

By David Dayen

Last year, the watchdog group Citizens for Tax Justice put out a paper showing that 30 Fortune 500 companies had a negative tax rate for the cumulative years 2008-2010. The corporations singled out by the report submitted a number of excuses to explain away what they claimed was an anomaly, owing to things like short-term tax breaks from the stimulus package. “They said it was aberrational. ‘Next year we’ll pay out a lot,’ they said,” according to CTJ’s Bob McIntyre. “So we thought it would be a good idea to look at what happened last year, in 2011,” to test these claims.

Check out upcoming showings of the film, including at Oakland’s Grand Lake Theater on April 19th and at UC Davis during the week of April 13th- 19th.

Mark Karlin: What role did the book "Global Class War" (2006) play in your formulation of the film?

Donald Goldmacher: Though our initial focus was on undocumented workers, the book gave us a much broader understanding of how big corporations were using low-paid workers, by either outsourcing manufacturing jobs to low-wage countries, or in-sourcing low-paid workers into the United States, to undermine good-paying jobs held by union members. It was also instrumental in helping us to understand that the phenomenon of globalization that began in the 1970s, accelerated during the 1980s by Ronald Reagan and George Bush senior, was also unequivocally embraced by Bill Clinton and his economic team, which included Professor Alan Blinder, Robert Rubin of Goldman Sachs and Larry Summers, all of whom believed in free trade and free markets. They revealed their true colors when they pushed through the North American Free Trade Agreement (NAFTA) agreements, concocted during the Reagan administration, screwing workers in all three countries.

By Danny Feingold, The Frying Pan

It’s matzah bargain-hunting season, and guess who has entered the fray? That’s right, Walmart.

The world’s largest retailer may not be known for bar mitzvah catering, but apparently the matzah market was too lucrative to pass up. Visit walmart.com, and in less time than it took God to part the Red Sea, you can load up on all variety of matzah products, from matzah ball soup mix to matzah meal. Those looking to brush up on their Pesach basics can even find Celebrate Passover: With Matzah, Maror and Memories, a handy guide to the holiday published by that noted authority on Jewish customs, National Geographic (imagine the charoset photo spreads).

But before you get out your credit card, you might want to consider whether a matzah splurge at Walmart is really in the spirit of Passover. Here’s some unleavened food for thought:

1) Walmart and Poverty

By David Dayen

It’s fair to be optimistic about the modest recovery of the US economy, though the White House is wisely staying pretty muted this time. The early read on jobs numbers for February looks decent, similar to the previous month, about in the range for an economy growing at an average pace. We’re nowhere near the near-depression of late 2008 and early 2009, and we’re in around the same shape of early 2011, before the debt limit fight and catastrophe in Europe sapped much of the economy’s strength.