Little guy vs. big guy. Whose side are you on?
Rep. Ronnie Shows, D-Miss.
Source: Wall Street Journal
Making it easy
It seems clear now why some large corporations and some political friends of theirs want to get big government off their backs and deregulate everything. That sure made it easier for them to do their crooked accounting.
Al Weir
UAW Local 135 retiree
Source: Grand Valley (Mich.) Labor News
Going down
Since President George W. Bush took office, the United
States has lost a combined total of $3.9 trillion in wealth.
Each American family, on average, lost a combined total of
$37,600 in savings, pensions and other assets.
Source: Bush Breakdown, prepared by the office of Rep.
David Obey, D-Wis.
Shooting from the lip
If there’s another terrorist attack and it’s from a certain ethnic community or certain ethnicities that the terrorists are from, you can forget about civil rights in this country.
Peter Kirsanow of the
U.S. Commission on Civil Rights
Source: Detroit Free Press
Where do we sign up?
Increases in executive pay outpaced growth in average workers’ pay in the 1980s and 1990s. BusinessWeek has estimated that the average CEO of a major U.S. corporation made 42 times the average hourly worker’s pay in 1980, 85 times in 1990 and 411 times in 2001. Over the last 10 years, CEO pay soared 340 percent.
Source: UAW Research Bulletin, Spring-Summer 2002
White-collar crime
The FBI estimates that white-collar crime costs more than $200 billion in a typical year, over 46 times the cost of street crime and burglary. Yet while millions of low-level thieves have been imprisoned in the last 10 years, the SEC has jailed only 87 executives for corporate wrongdoing.
Eli Pariser
MoveOn International campaigns director
Source: MoveOn Bulletin (eli.pariser@moveon.org)
Executive self-reliance
After working so hard to get impoverished mothers and children off public assistance, Congress should turn its attention to CEOs. To start, we would help executives learn self-reliance by sunsetting corporate giveaways; eliminating tax breaks for companies that move off shore; and doing rigorous, independent assessments of tax incentives and subsidies to see which, if any, work.
Sarah van Gelder, executive editor
Yes! Magazine
