Class Massacre

That has what has been going on for the last forty years: The rich have been pummeling the rest of us. As Dan O'Shea put it:

Yes, there’s been some class warfare going on all right, if you want to call it that. It looks a little bit more like the Mai Lai massacre – the rich machine gunning the poor in the ditches and then whining about how it’s the poor’s fault.

A CEO makes about 475 times as much as his or her workers. In 1970, it was 25 times.

1973 comes across as the Year of the Great Disconnect, the year when workers' pay was decoupled from workers' productivity. Before then, when workers produced more, they were paid more. But since then. the productivity of American workers has nearly tripled, but pay has barely kept pace with the rise in the cost of living. Since 1970, worker's pay has risen 26%

So where has the additional wealth created by workers gone? Into the pockets of CEOs, for one, as executive compensation has more than quadrupled. Into increased corporate profits, for another, which have more than doubled.

But the real story is the point that it is the top-level executives who have robbed the workers and, to some degree, even robbed their own corporations. Oh, they say that the workers also benefit because of their pension plans being tied to corporate profits, but we know that is really a bald-faced lie.

What is the response of the rich and the CEOs? They whine about banking regulations which are preventing them from harvesting even more money from American consumers. They yearn for the day when they could loot a bank, have it fail and it was the workers and middle-class depositors who took the fall by losing their life-savings.

They complain about regulations, which are hindering their efforts to sell untested drugs and dump toxins into the land, the air and the water. They want to go back to the day when they were free to dump their wastes into the lakes and rivers and if your town's drinking water came from those lakes and rivers, well, it sucked to be you. They want to go back to the day when being downwind of a coal-fired power plant meant that if you were close, mercury and other heavy metals rained down on you and if you were further, sulfur dioxide killed the land and lakes.

Shit has to change in this country. It will change. The question is whether the politicians are going to help change things, peacefully, or whether they become some of the first to dangle from the lamp posts.

And if you think I'm cheering on the idea of settling accounts with the banksters and the politicians and yes, their butt-monkeys in the media, maybe just a smidgen. But only a smidgen. For there have been damn few revolutions in human history that didn't end up with things being even worse than they were before the barricades were stormed.

We were lucky in the 18th Century. I doubt that we'd be so lucky the next time around.