Victor Jara
IT’S TIME TO CRACK DOWN ON EXCESSIVE CEO PAY
The pay gap between workers and CEOs at America’s largest low-wage employers is now 670 to 1. That’s obscene.
By Sarah Anderson | July 27, 2022
Working families are getting hammered by inflation while corporate leaders and politicians are calling for belt-tightening. But there’s one group of Americans that’s actually profited from increasing prices.
Big company CEOs have enjoyed soaring pay, even as their employees have been struggling to keep their families safe and their bills paid.
Look at Target, for example. Last year, the median Target worker salary did not even keep pace with inflation, rising by less than 4 percent to just $25,501.
Did the giant retailer lack the money to make sure wages kept up with rising prices?
No, just the opposite. In 2021, Target spent $7.2 billion of their extra cash on stock buybacks. That would’ve been enough to give every one of their 450,000 employees a $16,000 raise.
When a company repurchases their own shares, it does nothing for workers. Instead, it makes rich CEOs even richer by artificially inflating the value of their stock-based pay. Last year, Target CEO Brian Cornell made $19.8 million, which is 775 times more than the median pay for his employees.
How do CEOs get away with making hundreds of times more than their workers? Corporate pay practices are still based on the ridiculous notion that the “genius” in the corner office is almost single-handedly responsible for company value.
This was always pure nonsense, but during the pandemic it became even clearer that lower-level workers are essential to their companies and our whole economy.
Target is just one example of corporate America’s obscene disparities. At the Institute for Policy Studies, we looked at 300 low-wage employers and found that the average gap between CEO and worker pay rose to 670 to 1 in 2021. That was up from an already obscene 604 to 1 the year before.
And among the companies where worker pay fell below inflation, about two-thirds spent huge sums on stock buybacks to further enrich their CEOs. With such extreme unfairness, it’s no wonder we’re seeing record numbers of workers quitting their jobs and a surge in unionization.
One recent poll shows 87 percent of Americans view the growing gap between CEO and worker pay as a problem for the whole nation.
What can we do about it?
Workers can fight for equitable pay through collective bargaining. In other countries with higher unionization rates, CEOs tend to earn much less than their U.S. counterparts. In Canada, for example, the share of workers who are union members is about triple the rate in the United States, while average CEO pay there is less than half the U.S. level.
But policymakers need to step up as well.
On Capitol Hill, one pending bill would use tax incentives to encourage companies to narrow their divides — the wider the gap between a company’s CEO and worker pay, the higher their corporate tax rate. But companies with narrow gaps wouldn’t owe an extra dime.
President Biden could also take action on his own without waiting on Congress.
For instance, he could make it hard for companies with huge pay gaps to land lucrative federal contracts. That would have a big impact, because federal contractors employ an estimated 25 percent of the private sector workforce.
Biden could also ban contractor CEOs from personally profiting from stock buybacks. And he could order contractors to be neutral in union organizing drives. That would help combat the union-busting we’ve seen at some major federal contractors, like Amazon.
These kinds of executive actions would build on Biden’s executive order requiring federal contractors to pay a minimum of $15 an hour.
By wielding the power of the public purse against excessive CEO pay, the president could strike another blow against extreme inequality. All workers, up and down the corporate ladder, deserve a fair share of the wealth they create.
Sarah Anderson directs the Global Economy Project at the Institute for Policy Studies and co-edits Inequality.org. This op-ed is adapted from a video produced by More Perfect Union and distributed by OtherWords.org.
Class War: Game Review
Since the Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights helped sponsor and support Class War: The Jacobin Board Game, I decided to pick up a copy and test it out with my friends with a socialist/anarchist game night.
The Good
This game isn’t hard to figure out and once you have it setup and you’ve figured out the rules, it’s really enjoyable. The game also looks sleek and feels fun. It has an almost Bojack Horseman vibe to it with the animal workers and capitalists animating the cards.
If you regularly do game nights with friends, this is going to be an easy game to incorporate into your collection and, despite it being only a handful of economic and workplace scenario larger card pieces, the smaller capitalist and worker cards themselves and what you draw from your corresponding deck make this game a new experience each time you start another round.
The Okay
It does feel educational. While it’s overall fun, I couldn’t help but shake the feeling that I played a similar game in my high school economics class. Being a PhD student and an educator for the Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights means that the educational feel didn’t bother me much, but it would be fun to add in a few more outlandish features of this game, maybe in the way of an expansion pack, to mix in a bit more humor with the educational feel.
I will also note that when I did play a similar game something like 20 years ago in high school, that game was very much pro-capitalist with a capitalist point of view and this game is very much not that.
The Bad
Honestly, the worst part about this game is being a capitalist. As a group of solid leftists, none of us were really all that committed to playing the part. We ended up agreeing that we’d rotate and take turns, just to make the gameplay fair for all of us.
But if you have friends that aren’t yet radicalized, that don’t see the harm in capitalism, and who think that workers are demanding too much, giving them the role of the capitalist and playing this game is a great way to teach them about the exploitatively properties of capitalisms all while pretending you’re having a fun little game night.
THE FAR RIGHT HATES ‘WOKE’ SOCIETY BECAUSE THEY WANT ONE THAT’S ASLEEP
Florida governor and rising GOP star Ron DeSantis has made a favorite hobby of censoring speech and thought.
By Jim Hightower | July 27, 2022
Although we haven’t even gotten through this year’s midterm congressional elections, it’s still not too early to start examining some of the characters who hope you’ll make them president in 2024.
I know, you don’t want to… but we must.
That’s because corporate elites have already chosen their favorites, and they intend to use massive sums of money, lies, more money, PR slickum, and even more money to slide their toady into the Oval Office — hoping you don’t discover until it’s too late that their chosen one really is a toad.
Take Ron DeSantis. The GOP’s far-right, power-hungry, narcissistic Florida governor promises to be the next Donald Trump — only more effective and not as nice.
His favorite gubernatorial hobby is the Orwellian practice of monitoring and censoring people’s speech and thoughts, culling out ideas he deems objectionable. “Don’t Say Gay” is his most infamous dictate to the state’s teachers, but he has also outlawed any teachings that might “denigrate the Founding Fathers.”
Nor will DeSantis tolerate the study of institutional racism in America. Indeed, he has even mandated that social studies textbooks (get this!) must not even include concepts of social justice.
DeSantis adamantly opposes what right-wingers call a “woke” society — he wants one that’s asleep.
Sound asleep. He recently rallied his right-wing cadre to ban some math textbooks. Yes, math! They screech that some real-life topics like wage disparities are being used to make math problems relevant to today’s students — so it was Fahrenheit 451 for those books.
Thus far, DeSantis’s censorship binge has nixed 42 math books for “incorporat[ing] prohibited topics.” Imagine what he could ban as president!
Did I mention that DeSantis is also forming his own gubernatorial paramilitary force — a state army that answers to him, which he can deploy in “emergencies”? What’s an emergency? He says he’ll decide.
We’ll need to decide, too.
OtherWords columnist Jim Hightower is a radio commentator, writer, and public speaker. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
The History of Capitalism and Human Rights
The History of Capitalism is the History of Exploitation.
In the early modern period, capitalism and oppressive power structures like racism, sexism, ableism, and classism (just to list a few) formed in such a way that they are not only entangled but nearly impossible to distinguish from one another; further, the underlying foundation of modernity as an overarching period, which started in roughly 1450 A.D.E. and continues today, is one rooted in capitalist power that exploits the bodies, hearts, spirits, and minds of the masses for the profit of the few. Cedric Robinson observed that “the historical development of world capitalism was influenced in the most fundamental way by the particularistic forces of racism and nationalism” and coined this term “racial capitalism” within his works.
Silvia Federici, in her works, agrees and expands upon this notion of differing forms of oppression and capitalist development:
Capitalism was not the product of an evolutionary development bringing forth economic forces that were maturing in the womb of the old [feudal] order. Capitalism was the response of feudal lords, the patrician merchants, the bishops and popes, to a centuries-long social conflict that, in the end, shook their power, and truly gave ‘all the world a big jolt.’ Capitalism was the counter-revolution that destroyed the possibilities that had emerged from the anti-feudal struggle.
There were a few major concessions made when capitalism came to power; in Federici’s works, she notes that women’s autonomy, women’s labor, and women’s ability to procreate future workers were one such concession. While men lost the ability to use common, open land to hunt and farm, they were able to claim their wife’s or daughters’ wages, control their social lives, and control their ability to procreate, etc.
In other words, one of the first things capitalism did when it came to power was to deny the rights of women within their society in addition to painting anyone outside of their society as the “other,” using race as a reason for crusades, wars, slavery, and future colonial expansion.
Can Capitalism Exist Alongside Human Rights?
Capitalism today has not varied far from its roots: we still live under a system of exploitation that thrives on perceived differences that explicitly exploits bodies that diverge from the white, cis, able, wealthy, land-owning, and male heteronormative subject capitalism is designed to benefit. Nowhere is this exploitation more apparent than in colonial practices – practices that nations like England began to develop and engage in (most infamously) with the nation’s second public joint-stock company, The East India Trading Company, founded in 1600. There is little to no difference between the exploitative practices of the early joint stock companies that expanded to colonize and oppress the people of India, Scotland, Ireland, and, later, most of the world (England became a nation in which, infamously, the sun never set) while heavily polluting the seas and destroying the environment of the local’s land than there is between Elon Musk and Space X polluting low-income neighborhoods of color, heavily polluting the atmosphere and the wetlands next to their facilities every time they launch, and sacrificing human lives while contributing to the destruction of this planet in order to colonize space.
Capitalism is rooted in exploitation and expansion; with the world now encapsulated in the system, the system itself must look for new places to expand and new planets to exploit at the cost of our current planet and the current people living here. There is no room for human rights in a system that is more concerned with its own survival than with ours. There is no room for human rights in a system that sees any variance from the rich, white, cis, able, straight, and male as not only a threat, but uses this variance as a justification for further exploitation, alienation, and outright abuse. In the early modern period this abuse came at the hands of men in power and colonizers; today, politicians, police, and the military fill that role. While time has passed, the capitalist system has failed to evolve in the way of human rights and instead finds new measures, often through reforms presented as solutions to the system’s inherent brutality, to reinvent the same means of violent oppression of the past.
Capitalism, and capitalist reforms, will never undue the systems of oppression in place because the very foundation of capitalism are these same systems: racism, sexism, homophobia, ableism, classism, alienation, exploitation, etc. As Audre Lorde said, it is:
Only within that interdependency of difference strengths, acknowledged and equal, can the power to seek new ways of being in the world generate, as well as the courage and sustenance to act where there are no charters. Within the interdependence of mutual (nondominant) differences lies that security which enables us to descend into the chaos of knowledge and return with true visions of our future, along with the concomitant power to effect those changes which can bring that future into being.
Human rights like freedom and equality cannot and do not exist under capitalism. Further, other rights like housing, food, water, healthcare, open land, and even life cannot and do not exist under capitalism. It is up to us to see the system for what it is: manmade by those in power to maintain their power and status. Capitalism was constructed and, like all constructed things, it can be dismantled and a new era that we design based on human rights and not exploitation, alienation, oppression, and difference can be ushered in.
Sources:
Federici, Silvia. Caliban and The Witch: Women, The Body and Primitive Accumulation. Autonomedia, 2004.
Lorde, Audre. The Master’s Tools Will Never Dismantle The Master’s House. Penguin Classics, 2018.
Robinson, Cedric J. Black Marxism: The Making of the Black Radical Tradition. U of North Caroline Press, 2000.
For this and other blog posts in a downloadable, shareable format, check out our new Education Materials page.
HOW TO PREVENT AN AMERICAN THEOCRACY
Six judges shouldn’t get to overturn the will of voters and destroy our rights. Expand the Supreme Court.
By Mitchell Zimmerman | July 13, 2022
Barely a month ago we lived in a world where all Americans had the right to decide for themselves whether to continue a pregnancy. For much of the country, that’s now history.
Just weeks ago, states could implement at least some common-sense limits on carrying guns. Public school employees couldn’t impose their religious practices on students. And the EPA could hold back our climate disaster by regulating planet-heating carbon emissions from coal plants.
Thanks to an appalling power grab by the Supreme Court’s conservatives, all that’s been demolished too. And they’ve hinted that the right to take contraception, marry someone regardless of your sexual orientation, and even to choose your own elected representatives could be next.
How did we get to this place? Because Republicans spent decades cheating their way to a right-wing Supreme Court majority that enacts an extremist agenda, rather than interpreting the law.
When the very close presidential election in 2000 turned on Florida, five GOP justices halted the vote count, stealing the election for the man most voters rejected, George W. Bush. In return, Bush appointed right-wing judges John Roberts and Samuel Alito.
In 2016, the Republican Senate defied the Constitution by refusing to let President Obama fill a Supreme Court vacancy. Instead, they let another voter-rejected president, Donald Trump, install right-winger Neil Gorsuch. Finally, even as voting was underway in the 2020 election, Republicans rush-approved Amy Coney Barrett’s appointment.
So we now have a hard-right Supreme Court drunk on its own power.
We need a fair balance — and we don’t have decades to set things right. We need to expand the Supreme Court to 13 justices right now, so we have judges who believe in privacy, who allow our government to protect our children from gun massacres, and who allow common sense steps to protect our future from climate change.
Republican politicians will say that changing the number of justices represents “politicizing” the Court. But it is the Republican-appointed justices who have entered politics, unleashing gun lovers to run wild, vetoing climate change regulations, canceling abortion rights, and threatening other personal freedoms.
The danger from the Republican judges is only growing.
Their latest project is destroying the power of regulatory agencies. We will be left with a government that cannot protect babies from dangerous cribs and hazardous toys, cannot prohibit unsafe drugs and contaminated food, cannot protect workers from dangerous workplaces, and cannot limit climate-ravaging carbon emissions.
If we allow this to continue, our political system will look a good deal more like Iran’s theocracy. Like the United States, Iran has elections. But reactionary, fundamentalist religious leaders there set election rules, decide who can run, and often override the decisions of the elected government.
The Supreme Court’s six conservative justices seem dead-set on playing this role here in our system. So the best way to curtail the power of our own black-robed fundamentalists is to increase the size of the Supreme Court.
Under the Constitution, it is for Congress to decide how many justices there will be. Over the years Congress has changed the number six times. It’s time to change them again.
For much of American history, there’s been one justice for each judicial circuit. Today we have 13 circuits, so we should have 13 justices. We cannot simply accept the unfairness of the Republican judicial takeover. We can and must act to restore balance to protect our rights, our lives, and our planet.
Mitchell Zimmerman is an attorney, longtime social activist, and author of the anti-racism thriller Mississippi Reckoning. This op-ed was distributed by OtherWords.org.
Leftists Should Love Lucy
There’s a biopic out now about Lucille Ball called Being the Ricardos that has mixed reviews (something like a 6.6 on IMDb from users and a similar 68% on Rotten Tomatoes). But there are some things the movie gets right about Lucille – like her ties to the Communist Party and Lucy being targeted during the McCarthy Red Scare in 1952 when she testified for the first of two times in front of the FBI and their Un-American Activities Committee.
While Lucy was cleared by stating she registered as a Communist for her grandfather and never voted Communist and the committee believed her, there’s a lot from Lucy herself both in her show, I Love Lucy, and in things she later produced as an executive at Desilu Productions that really calls that testimony into question. Maybe Lucy wasn’t an active Communist, party-wise, but she embodied leftist ideals and challenged the status quo of the American housewife and even the idea of what an American marriage could be on television.
Why do I think leftists should love Lucy, despite her denouncement of Communism when under investigation and under threat of possible blacklisting in Hollywood? Because Lucy’s actions speak louder than her words, spoken under threat of loosing her platform and livelihood. Here’s a few things about Lucille Ball that shows even if she wasn’t a comrade, she was an ally:
- Lucy from I Love Lucy challenged the notion of the 1950s housewife. She wasn’t happy to cook and clean. She didn’t budget well. She was ambitious and wanted to be out of the house and in show business. She disobeyed her husband. While all of this was presented to American audiences under the guise of comedy, Lucy and her show quickly became a favorite among American audiences because of the freedom she embodied in a system that would otherwise have women restricted to the home, obedient, and complacent.
- Lucy and her costar/husband Desi (who played Ricky on the show) were the first interracial married couple to be featured on T.V. Lucy, in fact, had to fight to get her husband cast in the show as her fictional husband because studio executives didn’t see a “red blooded American girl” falling in love with a Cuban. The show had to constantly fight executives to break boundaries, but break boundaries they did. In addition to being the first interracial couple on T.V., the show was also the first to feature a pregnant woman (despite no one being able to say the word pregnant) and, towards the show’s end, the first show to have a married couple share the same bed. Lucy, as an executive at Desilu Productions, would continue this trend of breaking boundaries.
- Lucy saved Star Trek. Lucy and Desi divorced in 1960 and, in 1962, Lucy bought out his shares in their production company, Desilu Productions, making her head of the largest independent studio in Hollywood. In 1964, Roddenberry couldn’t find a home for his sci-fi show, which seemed alien to studios like CBS which rejected it. NBC took a shot an ordered a first episode for Desilu to produce but by then, executives other than Lucy at Desilu were balking at how expensive the first episode would be and wanted to pull back on producing the show. Lucy overrode them all and is credited for saving the show, and in 1965 the pilot was produced and two more episodes were ordered – which became the 1966 television pilot of Star Trek, also known as a show about international space communism where mankind grew out of the need for capitalism and instead embraced curiosity and their differences to explore the universe. Was the show a perfect lefty show? No and there’s some questionable colonial themes (amongst other issues), but did it introduce the idea of international unity, racial equality, mutual aid and support, a system without money, and, most importantly, tribbles to the American masses. And, in continuing with first for Lucy, Star Trek also featured the first interracial kiss between a Black actress and a white actor.
- I Love Lucy was critical of capitalism in many of their episodes where Lucy participated in the workforce and sided with the workers. As I write this, three popular episodes of the show come to mind: “Lucy’s Italian Movie” where she stomps grapes, “Lucy and the Chocolate Factory” episode here she and Ethel work on a chocolate assembly line, and the “Vitameatavegamin” episode or where Lucy gets drunk taking a vitamin for a commercial shoot. While portrayed as part of a movie shoot, Lucy illustrates the intense labor it took to stomp grapes into wine and, in her signature comedic fashion, shows how exhausting physical labor is in “Lucy’s Italian Movie.” As a child watching reruns of this episode, I got the humor of the situation, but I also appreciated the amount of work it took to produce a lot of the goods we take for granted since industrialization has automated many aspects of production. But Lucy also challenges this idea of industrialization in the “Lucy and the Chocolate Factory” episode where she and Ethel fail, miserably, to work on a chocolate factory line. This episode illustrates that automation doesn’t always make things easier for the worker and, despite the ability to produce more at faster rates, capitalists still try to push the human part of production past impossible limits and actively overwork their laborers. Lucy was able to pull off critiques like this because they were presented under the guise of humor.
In the “Vitameatavegamin” episode, Lucy gets progressively more and more drunk as she does take after take of a vitamin commercial. On the surface, this one seems like less of a critique of capitalism to me and more of a critique of how studios treated and drugged women at the time like Judy Garland and Marilyn Monroe. I think we often see these two actresses as stand-alone in the way studios abused and drugged women for production purposes, but this was standard practice for many women in the industry at the hands of these large studios. With the original air date of 1952, the “Vitameatavegamin” episode fell a decade before Marilyn died from an overdose and a decade after Judy Garland starred in The Wizard of Oz and spoke about how she was drugged on the set to make her peppy for a take or to wind her down so she could get some rest. Lucy being drugged on set, in this case accidently, was poking fun and shedding light on a dark trend in Hollywood and how women were treated on sets. Lucy herself escaped this treatment thanks to being head of her own studio and working independently, but that doesn’t mean that she wasn’t privy to what other actresses had to endure to be part of the industry.
Exit Capitalism, Stage Left – Episode 15 Out Now!
The fifteenth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights.
In this episode, we go over an old relevant interview that highlights what’s going on with UAW workers in the past and what has lead to a strike now, as well as what the strike means to workers and the unfair labor practices of the UC’s bargaining team.
This episode also looks at the strike going on with railroad workers, the fact that congress is attempting to force them back into work, and that the senate doesn’t seem to have enough votes on their side to give railroad workers at least 7 days of sick leave, instead of the 15 they are asking for, and that the contract that will pass through our federal government will probably leave railroad workers with 1 sick day a year.
Don’t forget to send us your questions for the last segment of our podcast at exitcapitalismstageleft@gmail.com.
The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights Stands with Striking UC Grad Students and Postdocs
We at the Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights stand in solidarity with the striking UC workers.
Exit Capitalism, Stage Left – Episode 13 Out Now!
The thirteenth episode of Exit Capitalism, Stage Left is out now. This podcast is supported by The Maggie Phair Institute for Democracy and Human Rights.
This episode is the first in our education series which looks at the origins of capitalism in the early modern period. In part I of the series, I explored early modern English history, Queen Elizabeth I, King James I, and William Shakespeare’s works to look at early aspects of separation, dehumanization, and exploitation and how those aspects of capitalism manifest in The Tempest. This is Part II in the series in which we talk about early modern critiques of patriarchy, mercantile capitalism, the erasure of the labor of country people by pastoral works, and more while exploring Doctor Faustus by Christopher Marlow and Lady Mary Wroth’s sonnets.
This podcast includes works from:
- “The Reformation, Inter-Imperial World History, and Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus” by Jane Hwang Degenhardt
- Critiques of Michael Keefer
- Nicolas Kiessling’s article “Doctor Faustus and the Sin of Demoniality”
- Clarance Green’s “Doctor Faustus: Tragedy of Individualism”
- And more!
Don’t forget to send us your questions for the last segment of our podcast at exitcapitalismstageleft@gmail.com.
