Working Fer The Man

I try not to Hate People

I try not to hate people.  It really is a lot of wasted energy in most cases, but there is one small sector of society that I just can’t seem to find much love for.   I have a hard time seeing that great universal energy flow that unites all of creation when I think about these folks.  They are the infamous upper one-tenth of the top one percent of earners. 

 

Some people think that they are reptilian space aliens like on The Simpsons.  I don’t know, but I do wonder if they can be human.  Maybe they are some subspecies or as radio host Tom Hartman suggests a variant of sociopath.   Clearly though, they represent the worst kind of human behavior.

 

Think about it.  A big CEO in one year makes enough money to retire and live a wonderful life, but instead he or she keeps their job so they can export other people’s jobs, bust unions, take away health care and pensions, deny fair wage increases and make products that are filled with toxins that can kill people or at least that are made with “built in obsolescence.”

 

Average pay for big time CEO’s was $11.7 million last year.  Often the performance of their company has little effect on their pay.  If the company does well they take the credit, and if it doesn’t they blame someone else.  Check out Sarah Anderson’s post on Extreme Inequality.

 

Lawrence Mishel from the Economic Policy Institute points out that the wage income of the top one percent of earners in 2006 was nearly 20 times that of the average wage of the bottom 90 percent – 19.9-to-1.  This is just wages not stocks or other investment income.

 

If that’s not enough to piss you off, how about this.  The top tenth of the top one percent earned 70 times (in wages) the average working stiff in the bottom 90 percent. That means it takes them 3.7 days to earn what the vast majority of working people earn in one year. 

 

Even though I’m mostly an atheist, I try to be “spiritual.”  I read Zen Buddhist philosopher Thich Nhat Hahn, meditate and do yoga almost every morning.  I even read stuff about nonviolent communication.  It would be a helluva lot easier to walk the spiritual path if we could just change our economy so it was focused on providing for people’s needs instead of bosses’ profits.  I try not to hate people, but it sure ain’t easy.