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What happened to the good ol’ American notion
of the common good — the idea that we’re all in this together,
trying to build a strong, unified society by fairly sharing the economic
gains that all of us help produce? Oh, sure, we’ve always had the rich and the
poor, but at least we’ve tried in the past to narrow that gap,
recognizing that a cohesive democratic society — a morally secure
society — is dependent on maintaining both a vibrant middle class and
a broad perception of fairness. Today the powers that be — both
corporate and governmental — have abandoned all pretense of shared
sacrifice, shared gains, and a shared future. The very, very rich are being
made ever and ever richer, and they are sailing blithely away from the rest
of us, no longer moored to America’s egalitarian ideals.
The latest indicator of this extreme change in our
nation’s guiding ethic comes from United for a Fair Economy (go to
faireconomy.org), which analyzes CEO pay, perks, and pensions. The
group’s latest survey finds that the chieftains of Fortune 500
corporations averaged $10.8 million each in pay in 2006 — more than
364 times the annual paychecks of the average U.S. worker! Well, asserts the CEO clique, we run huge
corporations and are simply being paid accordingly. However,
faireconomy.org compared the 20 highest-paid U.S. chief executives with the
20 highest-paid in Europe. The European chiefs took only one-third as much
pay — even though they ran companies that generated $19 billion more
in sales than the U.S. companies did. The ever-spreading pay gap has become a sundering
chasm in our society. To learn more about it and to see some proposals for
bridging this dangerous fissure, go to www.faireconomy.org.
Jim Hightower is a national radio commentator,
columnist, and author.
This article appears in Sep 20-26, 2007.
