If your salary is in the neighborhood of several hundred thousand dollars per year, or several million, you may not have even noticed that the rest of the planet is in a recession. The layoffs, mergers, and bankruptcies (not to even begin talking about the crash of pension plans and life savings accounts that Wall Street has lost), may not have settled on your radar. The greed of the corporate elite and "let them eat cake" crowds are nothing new, but it appears that they have sunk to new depths.
The apologies of the bankers, investment counselors, lawyers and other lap-dogs of the wealthy won't feed you after they have used up your retirement savings in fees and assorted charges. The use of mass distraction, by the corporate-owned media, only attempts to mask the real crime that is being committed. The wealthy flaunt their disregard for this country, and its' citizens. They abuse and ignore the very people that have supported the system that allowed the mighty to become powerful and rich. Their deeds are becoming more alarming by the minute; shame on us if we don't speak out against the types of excesses that created the financial crash of our country.
Where are all the crazies that barked about killing Social Security and forcing all of us into stock-based 401K's? Can you imagine if our citizenry had lost all sense of reality and listened to them? Social Security checks may not be a panacea for all that ails our seniors and those who need it, but it sure beats a letter of apology explaining how they all your money has been lost. Playing roulette with the security of your golden years is not smart, and we probaly all know why the bankers and Wall Street pushers want you to hand your security over to them.
Where are our children going to find jobs in the future? Today we are giving welfare to the wealthy through tax cuts and corporate subsidies, at the same time we are laying off teachers - closing schools and increasing class sizes. What sort of American Dream are we handing off to the next generation?
It won't be easy to turn this mess around, as President Obama is finding; even the best plans run into resistance when being put into practice. Educate yourselves to what is going on, and what you can do to correct the system. Today, we hand out money like we actually have some, and still too many of our citizens don't have access to health care, or a prospering education system. We can do better than that.
Write letters and phone your elected representatives, talk to your families, friends and neighbors about what really matters in life. Contact your media outlets (newspapers, radio, television) and let them hear how you feel, and tell them you expect them to speak out about the damage that is being done to our children's future. Work to get the Employee Free Choice Act passed, it is the single most powerful piece of legislation for getting a strong focused voice of opposition to the corporations and banks that forget where their bread is buttered.
Warning:
you may experience a sore neck from reading the information below
(caused from shaking your head and screaming "NO!")
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The Wall Street Journal has been doing a series of articles that monitor and highlight the pay of CEO's. There are several stories about companies that have taken the bailout money, and some articles about what shareholders are trying to do about the excesses that are rampant in the mahogany boardrooms. You can read and learn at: http://online.wsj.com/public/page/executive-pay.html
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The AFL-CIO has long studied the over-compensation of corporate executives; check it out at: http://www.aflcio.org/corporatewatch/paywatch/
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Teh NY Times has a wonderful web-page that is worth a read. It includes an interactive feature that reviews the 2008 compensation of 198 of the top CEO's. Wait until you see what CitiGroups' Vikram S. Pandit hauled in. Visit the NY Times page, at: http://topics.nytimes.com/top/reference/timestopics/subjects/e/executive_pay/index.html?inline=nyt-classifier
