~a column by Colleen O’Brien
I can’t tell you how disgusted I am to read a news story telling me the salary difference between the top CEOs in the country compared to their average employee’s wage.
It’s as if some darned liberal reporter (so many are, you know; muckrakers of the first order) just wants to create divisiveness among the people, stir up class differences, create an US versus THEM mentality. The President’s been doing it, too, for months. Who does he think he is? Isn’t there enough hatemongering and war going on in this world without promoting warfare of the classes?
To report that Disney’s Roger Iger was given $43.7 million last year, making the pay ratio between him and his workers 2,238 to one is total irresponsibility. How is this going to make that median employee feel, the one who made $19,530 last year? With the knowledge of his top boss’s income under his hat, isn’t he going to have to ask for a raise, protest, picket, congregate his fellow workers and demand fairness? As in days past, it could lead to bloodshed in the streets. Really, reporter, what is your problem?
Howard Schultz, who founded Starbucks, fifth on the high-earning side of the divide, gave himself $21.5 million in 2014, which works out to 1,073 times what he paid his baristas.
If somebody can raise himself up by his own bootstraps and pay himself $21 million a year? Well, huzzah and hurrah. This is America, isn’t it? Where the business of the democracy is business? This is the land of the free enough to pay yourself whatever you can get away with; and home of the brave enough to raise it again next year.
It’s why everybody wants to come here, from the south of us, from Somalia and Nigeria, from, Ireland and Russia. It’s why we have this immigration problem so many are moaning about. Just how many people can we pay $21 million a year to? Stay home.
Anyway, back to the point: Stirring up the-you-know-what is probably more than irresponsible, it’s insurgency against patriotism. It’s behavior verging on the traitorous. We need to think again about that first amendment to the Constitution — free speech? Hornet nests everywhere. Who needs it? Ignorance is bliss.
Or is it, ignorance of the masses is bliss to the top one percent?
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Conclusion to this disgusting news: Boycotting Disney and Starbuck’s will not be a hardship for me. But I bet everything I buy has an off-the-salary-charts CEO behind it, making more money in a day than I can make in a lifetime. I believe this is the kind of news that should be on the front page of every newspaper and headline news of every broadcast.
Congress passed a law in 2010 requiring this CEO pay ratio to be public record. So far, the companies aren’t doing it, and even worse, Congress isn’t making them. A muckraking reporter had to ferret it out, while the rest of us, obedient in our relative poverty, file our feeble tax forms to the IRS for fear of reprisal.
It’s enough to make us escape into the Circus Maximus of the postmodern era: watching football on TV all weekend (as the new-age version of watching gladiators in the Coliseum a couple millenia ago) that keeps us preoccupied and vague about the government that very possibly could be screwing us in favor of the wealthy. TV watching is more satisfying than voting and much more pleasure than voting for folks who stir us up about teacher salaries or abortion or foreigners while working against our best interests economically, educationally, healthwise and many other -wises in order to cover up the fact of those guys making 2,000 times what we make.
