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Get ready to swallow your “Statistic of the Day!”
But first, to help you absorb the big one, here’s a preliminary statistic for you: 158,000. That’s the number of kindergarten teachers in America, and their combined income in 2013 was $8 billion. Now, here’s your Big Stat of the Day (even though it seems smaller): Four. That’s the number of America’s highest-paid hedge fund operators whose combined income in 2013 was $10 billion. Yes, just four Wall Street greedmeisters hauled off $2 billion more in pay than was received by all of our Kindergarten teachers.
Now, which group do you think pays the lowest rate of income tax? Right… the uber-rich Wall Streeters! Incredibly, Congress (in its inscrutable wisdom) gives preferential tax treatment to the narcissistic money manipulators who do practically nothing for the common good. Even the flamboyant celebrity narcissist, Donnie Trump, sees through the gross inequality of this tax scam: “The hedge fund guys didn’t build this country,” The Donald recently barked. “These are guys that shift paper around and they get lucky. The hedge fund guys are getting away with murder.” Indeed, dodging through a loophole called “carried interest,” they pay about half the tax rate that Kindergarten teachers are assessed. In effect, Wall Street’s puppets in Congress let this tiny group of moneyed elites steal about $18 billion a year that they owe to the public treasury to finance the structure and workings of America itself.
The inequality that is presently ripping our society apart is not the result of some incomprehensible force of nature, but the direct result of collusion between financial and political elites to rig the system for the enrichment of the few – ie, themselves – and the impoverishment of the many. There’s a word for those elites: Thieves.
“Trump Lands Blow Against A Loophole,” The New York Times, September 18, 2015.
“These four hedge fund guys out-earned every kindergarten teacher in America,” www.vox.com, May 6, 2014.

Who will oversee Volkswagen’s overseers?

If a picture is worth 1,000 words, here’s one worth a thousand times that.
It’s a shot of three Volkswagen board members, gathered for a press conference to announce the resignation of VW’s CEO. He had just been forced out by the auto giant’s scandal of having rigged its diesel cars with secret software so the vehicles could spew 4,000 percent(!) more toxic pollutants into the air than allowed by law.
The picture showed the lead VW spokesman looking like he was gagging, as though he’d just swallowed a live toad. One grim-faced fellow board member was glaring at the gagger in ill-disguised disgust, and the other is nervously looking straight into the photographer’s camera, as if pleading: “Please tell me this isn’t happening, and please, please keep me out of the picture.”
It’s a perfect portrait of a shameful corporate crime, with these highly-paid overseers essentially confessing that corporations don’t commit crimes – their executives do. Yet the three board members still played the corporate game, referring to Volkswagen’s deliberate deception of millions of car buyers as “irregularities” and suggesting that some mysterious villains had installed the malicious software without the top bosses knowing it.
Horsefeathers! Eleven million VWs and Audis were tampered with in the past six years. Either these “overseers” knew what was going on, or they’ve been derelict in their sworn duty to prevent corporate abuse. Volkswagen has long been known for strict, top-down decision making, with even minor matters requiring the okay of its governing officials. And VW’s premeditated, systemic betrayal of consumer trust, plus its flagrantly-illegal poisoning of our air for six years, is hardly a minor matter. No wonder the photogenic blame-dodgers looked like deer caught in a VW’s headlights.
“Rigged Emissions Tests Topple Volkswagen Chief,” The New York Times, September 24, 2015.

Grassroots Democracy-Building in Iowa

Democracy is never given to us, but has to be won through constant struggle against elites who keep scheming to siphon ever-more of society’s money and power from the many into their own hands. A Woody Guthrie song about outlaws tells this story in one stanza: “As through this world I’ve wandered/ I’ve seen lots of funny men/ Some will rob you with a six-gun/ And some with a fountain pen.”
American democracy is the gritty history of workaday folks who get fed up with the fountain pens, get organized, and get moving to stop the thievery. Gutsy, grassroots confrontation is necessary for reclaiming, maintaining, and advancing our democratic values.
To see an uplifting example of organized people-power in action, look to the heartland, where a coalition called Iowa Citizens for Community Improvement has been building democracy since 1975, uniting and empowering people of all ethnic backgrounds to push back against the avarice and arrogance of big-money corporations. With more than 3,000 dues-paying, activist members, CCI is organized in every Iowa county. They’ve rallied thousands of other Iowans to join their local and statewide actions, including winning battles against factory-farm manure polluters, corporate wage thieves that prey on low-wage workers, payday lenders that trap poor people in cycles of debt with 300 percent interest rates, gas and electric companies that gouge customers, and banking interests that were either foreclosing on or refusing to lend to good farmers.
Years ago, I came across a small moving company consisting only of two guys and one truck. But they had a big, can-do attitude, summed up in their advertising slogan: “If we can get it loose, we can move it.” That’s the operating model offered by CCI – get democracy loose at the grassroots level, and the people themselves will move it forward. For more information about CCI go to www.iowacci.org.
“An Enemy of the People (Act 5),” Henrik Ibsen, 1882.
“Pretty Boy Floyd,” Woody Guthrie, www.woodyguthrie.org, 1958.