Jim Hightower

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 faireconomy.org, which analyzes CEO pay, perks, and pensions. Their latest survey finds that the chieftans 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! On top of this, CEOs salted away an average of $1.3 million in pension gains in 2006, and they averaged another $438,000 in such freebies as personal travel on corporate jets, country club fees, and even corporate payment of their taxes.

Well, assert 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 to 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.

This is Jim Hightower saying… 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.