Wall Street to Main Street: Lick My Versaces

by Tula Connell, Oct 21, 2009

Given the raging jobless rate in this country, it’s no surprise that only 10 percent of Americans say now is a “good time” to find a quality job, reflecting no improvement since February, and less than the 33 percent who held similar views as the recession began in January 2008, according to a Gallup poll out this week. The poll concludes:

Job-market conditions across the U.S. are a little better than they were six months ago, but remain far worse than they were during the first year of the recession. Another jobless recovery—no matter its overall shape—is the last thing Americans need after the worst recession since the Great Depression.

It’s bad enough America’s workers can’t find jobs. But even those with jobs are experiencing such a decline in wages that the United States has seen a dramatic increase in economic inequality. According to a new paper by the Center for Economic Policy Research:

While the United States has long been among the most unequal of the world’s rich economies, the economic and social upheaval that began in the 1970s was a striking departure from the movement toward greater equality that…was a central feature of the first 30 years of the postwar period. This is…the direct result of a set of policies designed first and foremost to increase inequality. 

The vast majority of us are on the downward end of the inequality scale. But as Robert Shapiro writes on the NDN blog, CEOs are richer than ever: “We didn’t need this latest and most conspicuous instance of greed at Goldman [Sachs] to know that the compensation provided to the uppermost echelons of American business is out of control.” 

Since 1990, the pay of American CEOs has jumped from 90 times the average workers’ pay to 250 times—compared to 15 to 30 times for British, French and Japanese CEOs.

Not to worry. Jobless workers can now get a gig standing in line for wealthy financial industry lobbyists. Seems the well-coiffed from Goldman Sachs and other beneficiaries of taxpayer bailout money don’t want to wait to get into congressional hearing rooms—where these lobbyists are fighting to kill regulatory reform and proposals like the Consumer Financial Protection Agency and other reforms that would actually help America’s workers.

They might get a hair out of place.

(Mad as hell and don’t want to take it anymore? Join AFL-CIO President Richard Trumka in the Oct. 27 Showdown in Chicago, where thousands of working families will gather outside the American Bankers Association meeting to demand these taxpayer-bailed out institutions stop blocking essential financial reform.

At 10:30 a.m., the march departs from the corner of East Wacker Drive and Stetson Avenue. After an approximately 15 minute march the rally will be outside the Sheraton Chicago Hotel & Towers at 301 E. North Water St.

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