The American Zombie

In service of the almighty dollar, the corporate class has hollowed out America and created a permanent underclass. Real wages have not grown in 40 years and the average American's discretionary income is subject to the vagaries of the price of gas. Meanwhile, the money these hard working Americans earn and then put back into the community is circulated amongst the corporations that dominate the landscape of middle market America-- McDonalds, Walmart, and the like. That money leaves the community and is not reinvested. It ends up in the offshore tax haven of a Walmart scion.

This is the Trump base. That mythical base that the New York Times pursues with its fawning unending series, now almost a comedy routine, on the typical Trump voter.

The base that believes in Q-Anon. The base that Trump says loves him. This is the base that Koch Brothers service in order to get their destructive agenda passed.

The base that is slowly disappearing amidst a toxic miasma of opiod addiction and dwindling opportunities. The base that rose up during the Tea Party. And is now being led by the nose to believe in Q-Anon-- an hilarious scheme designed to sell t-shirts and generate Youtube views according to the fake news at NBC.

Now the that base has served their purpose and the corporations have squeezed everything they can out of them-- there is only one profit center left to exploit them-- private prisons. This is the base the wealthy campaign donors behind conservatism has created. They're addicted to opiates, cheap goods from China and the Church of Trump.

On Thursday, The Guardian noted that here in the U.S. CEOs now earn 312 times the average worker's wage. That's pretty unprecedented in modern history. And the number jumped right after the Republican tax scam when the CEOs got an average pay increase of 17.6%, "while their employees’ wages stalled." CEOs are making an average of $18.9 million. Workers' pay rose an average of 0.3%, less than inflation. "In 1965 the ratio of CEO to worker pay was 20-to-one; that figure had risen to 58-to-one by in 1989... Between 1978 and 2017 CEO compensation has increased by 979%."

The astronomical gap between the remuneration of workers and bosses has been brought into sharper focus by a new financial disclosure rule that forces companies to publish the ratio of CEO to worker pay. Last year McDonald’s CEO Steve Easterbrook earned $21.7m while the McDonald’s workers earned a median wage of just $7,017-- a CEO to worker pay ratio of 3,101-to-one. The average Walmart worker earned $19,177 in 2017 while CEO Doug McMillon took home $22.8m-- a ratio of 1,188-to-one.

...“Over time I think there has been a loosening of norms.” said Mishel. “Everyone wants to believe their CEO is one of the best, so they look around and see what everyone else is being paid and then they pay them a lot more. They think everyone is better than average.”

The outsize pay packets have had a direct impact on people down the corporate ladder, Mishel claims. “The redistribution of wages to the top 5%, but particularly the top 1%, affected the wage growth of the bottom 90%. As a mathematical matter, had there not been the redistribution upward-- to the top 5%, but which is mostly about to the top 1%-- the wages of the bottom 90% could have grown twice as fast as it actually did.”