In 2009, CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the biggest layoffs were paid an average $12 million--42 percent more than the average pay for the Standard & Poor's 500.
There is certainly a lot of horrible news on how America's fairly poor business administration practices of the past decades ARE STILL continuing to drive American business, schools, economy and life in general. When will American labor and teachers wake-up and stick it to bad business models in school and national development--including political economic development?
First, many leading teachers, like Chicago's Karen Lewis, have only recently noted how America's recent penchant to once-again blindly love corporate America will continue to lead to horrible lives and lifestyles in America (and elsewhere) this decade.
KAREN LEWIS stated on Democracy Now Friday, " Well, the problem is that the whole idea of the [American] business model doesn't work in education. In the business model, you can select how you want to do something. You have an opportunity to innovate in a way that discriminates. It's very easy to do. Whereas in a public school system, where we do not select our children--we take whoever comes to the door--what we need is actually more resources and more support for the people that are there and the work that's being done. However, again, Arne Duncan, Michelle Rhee, Joel Klein--I don't know about Joel Klein--none of these people are superintendents. You have to have, again, credentials for that. These are business folks. Look, the business model took this country to the brink of Armageddon in 2008. And yet, we want to follow a failed business model and imprint that on top of public education? No. And these things are not innovative. What they are is they're terrorism. They're "my way or the highway.' And they're still not producing, quote-unquote, "results.'
Nobody disagrees with accountability. That's not the issue. The issue is, what do you use? We still know that high-stakes testing basically tell us more about a student's socioeconomic status than it does anything else. And until we're honest about that and want to deal with the fact that we have neighborhoods in our cities and across the nation that have been under-resourced, have been devalued for decades, and for some reason or other, the schools are supposed to fix all that and change that."
Why weren't good universities, business schools, and teachers stating this in the classroom decades ago? Could they all have been brainwashed by the Chicago School of Economics?
Meanwhile, in another interview on Democracy Now on Friday, the lead author of a report, entitled "Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession" stated "the CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the biggest layoffs were paid an average $12 million--42 percent more than the average pay for the Standard & Poor's 500" in 2009.
Come on, America, there ought to be laws to stop this stupidity in a depression!
It is time that American media begins to report (like good labor unions instead of as Wall Street love children) and get this and other stories out and circulating properly in schools and homes..
KURZARBEIT AND SEATS ON BOARD ARE NEEDED IN AMERICA
Sarah Anderson is Global Economy Project Director at the Institute for Policy Studies. Anderson also noted in her interview with Juan Gonzalez last week that Americans and businessmen & employees need to "look for some ideas at European countries, where they have policies that discourage layoffs by requiring higher severance payments and other things to really promote preserving jobs. They also have a system called--well, in German it's called Kurzarbeit, but it's where the government can help pay for part of a worker's salary with reduced hours, just to be able to keep them on payroll through tough times. And I think there are some experiments with that in some of the US states, as well. Overall, the European countries have tried to avoid the kind of real devastating effects that we've seen in the US and, of course, have stronger social protection and unemployment insurance programs there, as well. So we can learn from other countries. In Europe, also, in about a dozen countries, they require big companies to have representatives of workers on their boards. We think that could really help with the executive pay problems, as well.
Please, America, listen to good stories and circulate them in your emails--instead of all the junk and propaganda that is out their by BIG BUSINESS AND LOBBY INTERESTS against your best interests.
The transcript of the interview, from the Democracy Now web site, is below:
JUAN GONZALEZ: Two years into the recession, there's one small group of Americans who are not feeling the bite of the economic downturn: CEOs. Chief executive pay in 2009 more than doubled the CEO pay average for the decade of the 1990s. It more than quadrupled the CEO pay average for the 1980s and ran approximately eight times the CEO average for all the decades of the mid-twentieth century.
And a new study from the Institute of Policy Studies shows that CEOs who fired the most workers during the recession took home the highest pay. According to that study, the CEOs of the fifty corporations responsible for the biggest layoffs were paid an average $12 million--42 percent more than the average pay for the Standard & Poor's 500. The study covered the period from November 2008 to April of this year. For 72 percent of companies, mass layoffs were announced during periods of profit and high CEO salaries.
For more on this story, I'm joined now from Washington, DC, by the lead author of the report, titled "Executive Excess 2010: CEO Pay and the Great Recession." Sarah Anderson is Global Economy Project Director at the Institute for Policy Studies.
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