I am a little fuzzy on what the Wall Street protest demonstrations are all about, though I suspect it’s merely the quite understandable and justified rage of a populace feeling powerless, overwhelmed and screwed all at the same time. It certainly wouldn’t surprise me if what is really sticking in everyone’s grommet is the realization – finally – that the economic structures in place at the highest point in the pyramid are wretchedly skewed in favor of a corporate elite that has gorged itself a bit too long at the trough at the expense of the vast unwashed middle and lower classes.
For a country that staked its claim as a sovereign nation more than 200 years ago by shrugging off a monarchy and soundly rejecting virtually all of its trappings, it’s more than a little disconcerting in 2011 to watch as we quietly sort of collectively acquiesce to the creation of monarchy’s 21st century alter ego: American corporate royalty.
We don’t like the idea of kings and queens (except for blubbering over the British Halloween Party from time to time), but nobody seems to muster much of a protest as we implicitly ordain craven corporate miscreants to positions of majesty and staggering opulence that would make a sultan blush. All that’s technically missing from these coronations is the lifetime tenure provisions typically enjoyed by monarchies, but that’s hardly a major drawback given the disproportionate wealth that is routinely lavished on these new-millennium charlatans.
And I’ll stipulate that not everyone atop the upper echelon of America’s corporate hierarchy is a miscreant or huckster, but many are, and a cause can be made that even those not explicitly picking someone’s pocket are nonetheless hauling down millions of unearned dollars. When times were better, the great unwashed apparently seemed willing to wink at all of that; the protests on Wall Street and around the country these days hint that the pendulum has swung way too far in that direction.
It might have been expected – or at least hoped – that mainstream media might have taken up this cause with the revelations of countless corporate scandals over the past two decades, but that has hardly been the case. Despite the savings and loan debacle, Enron, the vast billions squirreled away in the housing bubble and the bank bailouts, the media has been woefully inadequate in standing up for the average American who got trampled in the wake of all of that.
While the mischief and misdeeds have become increasingly flagrant and broader in scope in recent years, the truth is that the seeds of the problem were probably visible 30 years ago if anyone really wanted to look carefully. As the initial tidal wave of public revelations of big-business malfeasance faded in the 1970s in the wake of a number of seemingly intractable economic problems like inflation, stagflation, soaring energy costs and tepid GDP growth, the increasingly bewildered public barely seemed to take notice as corporate pay started to get wildly out of control,
Quite properly, the gap between those in the boardroom and the executive offices vs. those at the bottom rung of the corporate ladder has always been enormous, but starting in the 1970s and accelerating with a vengeance over the last 20 years, the differences have easily morphed from being intellectually defensible to well beyond obscene. And nobody much seemed to notice or care.
It’s not that stripping top corporate executives of millions of dollars in pay and pension largesse would be a cure-all if the funds were suddenly redirected into the salary pool for the rank and file, but it would modify the underlying message about the ascendancy of greed and avarice in modern American life. Rage against that underlying message is likely at the core of what the Wall Street and related protests are all about.
And at the same time, the very discussion of these notions would sort of modestly re-introduce the quaint concept that all work is to be valued and that all employees ought to be provided a minimum living wage before individuals at the top of the pyramid are permitted to squirrel away sums that at best represent grotesquely in appropriate “earnings,” and at worst gleefully cross the line into criminality.
Oddly, some of the very same forces that keep millions of Americans voting against their own best interests at the ballot box every year are also at play in the national fantasy about corporate remuneration. People are seemingly oblivious to the inherently shameful disparities because so many of them harbor elaborate fantasies that someday they will be on the receiving end of such munificence. It’s the same reason that millions of middle-class taxpayers routinely nod off on tax cuts or amended tax policy that literally transfers money from their own pockets and plants in squarely in the trendy purse of the wealthy: they daydream that someday they might wiggle their way up the ladder. The sobering statistics of the decline of middle-class wealth over the last three decades gives the lie to such nonsense, if anybody cares to look at them.
- T.S. O’Connell
(This will be concluded in an entry in a few days.)