Today is the day for Fox News commentator Glenn Beck to share his dream on the anniversary of Martin Luther King’s famous speech on the steps of the Lincoln Memorial.
King delivered his “I Have A Dream” exactly 47 years ago and will now be the scene of Beck and his followers offering their own “dream.” The article below describes supporters wearing telltale teeshirts with Palin’s name that the legend “Babies, Guns, Jesus.”
Here is another tee-shirt from the rally:
Some accounts are almost biblical of Beck’s role in reshaping America. Former House Majority Leader Dick Armey explained “[w]e see Glenn Beck as a guy who is bringing revelations of understanding to the American people.”
Revelations by St. Beck will commence this afternoon.
Source: Bloomberg
From the Institute for Policy Studies
CEO Pay and the Great Recession
September 1, 2010 • By Kevin Shih
At a time when we’re experiencing the worst economic crisis in the past 80 years, CEOs who slash jobs should have to tighten their own belts.
http://www.ips-dc.org/blog/ceo_pay_and_the_great_recession
Over 15 million workers were fired from their jobs from January 2007 through December 2009, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics.
Keep that in mind while looking at these numbers from IPS’s just-released 17th annual Executive Excess Report, CEO Pay and the Great Recession:
• Fred Hassan, the ex-CEO of Schering-Plough, received a $33 million golden parachute when his firm merged with Merck in late 2009. The merger led to 16,000 workers being fired.
• William Weldon of Johnson & Johnson took home $25.6 million, more than three times as much as the S&P 500 CEO average, at a time when his firm slashed 9,000 jobs and while the company was facing a massive drug recall scandal.
• Mark Hurd of Hewlett-Packard, currently famous for failing to cover up a relationship with a contractor/erotic film star, has been awarded $24.2 million for laying off 6,400 workers. On top of that, he received an additional $28 million in severance.
These two sets of data illustrate a pretty dire picture, especially at a time when we are experiencing record unemployment. Both the government and the private sector are unwilling to take sufficient measures to put Americans back to work. The federal government is moving away from job-creating stimulus to supposedly austere measures, like cutting much needed social safety net programs (see here for an obvious example). The private sector, on the other hand, is making record short-term profits by eliminating jobs—furthering the income gap between the rich and the poor, while also significantly decreasing the consumption and taxpaying power of regular workers.
CEO Pay and the Great Recession is a report we released today that illustrates this irresponsible behavior in the corporate sector. According to the report, the 50 top CEOs that have laid off the most workers in 2009 received $12 million on average, while the S&P 500 companies have earned around $8.5 million on average.
Some additional key findings:
• Five of the 50 top layoff leaders were recipients of major financial bailouts. Of these, American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault took home the highest 2009 pay, $16.8 million, including a $5 million cash bonus. American Express has laid off 4,000 employees since receiving $3.4 billion in taxpayer bailout funds.
• The $598 million combined compensation of the top 50 CEO layoff leaders could provide average unemployment benefits to 37,759 workers for an entire year — or nearly a month of benefits for each of the 531,363 workers their companies laid off.
At a time when we’re experiencing the worst economic crisis in the past 80 years, CEOs who slash jobs should have to tighten their own belts, not just so they’re in line with today’s S&P norm, but moving towards CEO pay levels in previous decades when the U.S. economy was more stable. This is a move that is necessary to establish robust sustainable economic growth. It would also help prevent future economic crises like the one we are experiencing today.
For example: do not most murderers wish to go free? If they did not, there would not be so many unsolved cases as the majority of the criminals would have turned themselves in. It is through fact finding and the imposition of the rule of law that they are brought to justice. That is why having the rule of law as it is now – simply disregarded and severely skewed where taken seriously – is so damaging to society. Damaging in a way that leads to critical social instability if the course continues as plotted.
Blouise,
LOL!
Actually–no more white gloves OR church for me!
🙂
Byron,
A government cannot function in the justice capacity without enforcing the will of the people. Unfortunately, our government now bows to We the Corporate instead of We the People. Herein lies the rub that will eventually create enough social friction to start a fire.
Regardless who’s at fault, government with C.R.A. banks or shoddy people. They all suffering now and as a result “We the People” are.
I hear countless stories in my community of people just deciding to quit paying their mortgages. A friend told me yesterday his neighbors had not made a payment on a house that sold for 750k three years ago for a little over a year. The bank finally settled and said if there was anyway they could make one payment, they would forgive the last twelve and reduce the interest by half.
Stop paying your mortgage, that will teach’em.
From the New York Times (8/20/2010)
The Charitable-Giving Divide
By JUDITH WARNER
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/22/magazine/22FOB-wwln-t.html
Excerpt:
With the battle over whether to extend the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy shaping up as the major political event of the fall, opponents of repeal were handed a bounteous gift this summer when Bill Gates, Warren Buffett and 38 others announced that they formed a pact to give at least half their wealth to charity. After all, what better illustration could there be of the great social good that wealthy people can do when the government lets them keep their hard-earned dollars to spend as they please?
The problem is that the exceptional philanthropy of the superwealthy few doesn’t apply to the many more people defined as rich in the current debate over the Bush tax cuts — individuals earning over $200,000 and couples with revenues over $250,000. For decades, surveys have shown that upper-income Americans don’t give away as much of their money as they might and are particularly undistinguished as givers when compared with the poor, who are strikingly generous. A number of other studies have shown that lower-income Americans give proportionally more of their incomes to charity than do upper-income Americans. In 2001, Independent Sector, a nonprofit organization focused on charitable giving, found that households earning less than $25,000 a year gave away an average of 4.2 percent of their incomes; those with earnings of more than $75,000 gave away 2.7 percent.
This situation is perplexing if you think of it in terms of dollars and cents: the poor, you would assume, don’t have resources to spare, and the personal sacrifice of giving is disproportionately large. The rich do have money to spend. Those who itemize receive a hefty tax break to make charitable donations, a deduction that grows more valuable the higher they are on the income scale. And the well-off are presumed to have at least a certain sense of noblesse oblige. Americans pride themselves on their philanthropic tradition, and on the role of private charity, which is much more developed here than it is in Europe, where the expectation is that the government will care for the poor.
But in the larger context of “the psychological culture of wealth versus poverty,” says Paul K. Piff, a Ph.D. candidate in social psychology at the University of California, Berkeley, the paradox makes sense. Piff has made a specialty of studying those cultures in his lab at the Institute of Personality and Social Research, most recently in a series of experiments that tested “lower class” and “upper class” subjects (with earnings ranging from around $15,000 to more than $150,000 a year) to see what kind of psychological factors motivated the well-known differences in their giving behaviors. His study, written with Michael W. Kraus and published online last month by The Journal of Personality and Social Psychology, found that lower-income people were more generous, charitable, trusting and helpful to others than were those with more wealth. They were more attuned to the needs of others and more committed generally to the values of egalitarianism.
“Upper class” people, on the other hand, clung to values that “prioritized their own need.” And, he told me this week, “wealth seems to buffer people from attending to the needs of others.” Empathy and compassion appeared to be the key ingredients in the greater generosity of those with lower incomes. And these two traits proved to be in increasingly short supply as people moved up the income spectrum.
Elaine M.,
No more white gloves in church for us!!!
necessary to provide required
pardon, fried catfish verb interference
that’s my story and I’m sticking to it
Byron,
“[T]axation and regulation curtail wealth creation and keep us from having a prosperous happy country” but they do so because they are also necessary provide required infrastructure for our country to remain competitive (like highways and – yes – eventually socialized medicine like the rest of the world enjoys), to create justice (in all forms), and, last but most certainly not least, to deter crime as a component of encouraging justice.
Byron,
Please read the link I sent you (when things have settled down) … there is so much more to the concept than just wealth.
If you are in the weather as Bdaman seems to be … please take care.
Buddha:
the function of government is to try and make the field level and protect from the initiation of force on the individual. It should be an impartial referee and the rule book should be the Constitution properly interpreted without either side trying to impose their will.
Buddha,
My background is different from yours. I spent my early years in an era when women were supposed to keep quiet and let the men do the talking. I could only be silenced for so many years. If I have something that I feel needs to be said–I’m going to say it.
I’ve had plenty of discussions with Byron. We rarely agree with each other–but I respect him because he doesn’t get nasty and insulting. That said, I’m going to respond to comments he makes that I feel need a response. Too many conservatives/right-wingers have tried to put the entire blame for the near collapse of our financial system on the poor and minorities who got home loans they didn’t qualify for. There was a lot more to the story than that!
P.S. My husband is a good businessman too. He doesn’t, however, view all businessman through rose-colored glasses. In fact, he’s informed me over the years about all the “pirates” he’s met over the years in the course of conducting business. I should note, too, that he’s also met many business people who are honest and trustworthy.
Byron,
You, my dear, are a formidable opponent … and I only quote Colbert to someone who is worthy.
Thanks Blouise I’ll keep it in mind while trying to paddle through mass amounts of water coming at me 10 feet high.
Blouise:
If you look to a previous post, I think you will find my philosophy of business/wealth in line with Prof. Rawls. But it must be voluntary without coercion of any kind.
To all my progressive friends:
I do not think business people are without fault, some are ruthless pricks who need to spend a few years in jail. Just as not all politicians are noble selfless creatures.
I come at this from a purely individual liberty stand point, hopefully in step with Locke, Jefferson and others who are committed to freedom. If I err it is with the best of intentions. For example I think Ken Lay was a very bad man. I think Henry Paulson should be in jail for what he did. I think business should rise and fall on their own merits, no subsidies, I think lobbying should be expunged from the national and local stage. But then I also think that taxation and regulation curtail wealth creation and keep us from having a prosperous happy country.
Is there a golden mean? Undoubtedly but where is it? It certainly isn’t at a tax rate of 50-60% (all taxes) and it isn’t at 0%. Should the bankers on Elaines video be in Jail? Most definitely but for how long? 90 days isn’t long enough but 10 years is too long. Should they have their credentials pulled? Maybe. Should the local pols be able to run for office again? I don’t know.
Bdaman,
Please stay safe … I don’t want to have to say “Where’s Bdaman?”
Byron hopefully you have stocked up on a few provisions as a precautionary measure. Hope all goes well next 24-36.
Any deviation to the West and you could experience Tropical Storm Conditions. VA. Beach and the OBX are sitting on pins and needles.
Large ocean swells effecting our beaches now with offshore winds forecasted late tommorrow into Friday. Check out 911Surfreport.com
over the next two days for pics of some classic surf.
The butterflies have been flying since early this morning.
Gyges,
Your own sense of social justice perhaps?
Woof on you (in the key of E-flat for the emotions)
Elaine,
Never mind. 😀