Against "shared sacrifice"

[dcsmart]

Corporate America called them the "boom years" for good reason--CEO pay and benefits took off. In 1980, the average CEO made 42 times the average worker's salary--a fairly outrageous difference. But by 2007, CEOs were getting 364 times what an average worker makes.

If many workers are seeing their wages and working hours disappear, their mountains of debt aren't. The conventional wisdom in the media and among politicians is that the American people were living "beyond their means"--using credit to buy things they couldn't afford. But for many Americans, credit filled the gap between what they earned and what it costs to live.

If anyone was living "beyond their means" during the 2000s, it was Corporate America and the rich. As Financial Times columnist Michael Skapinker wrote:

Special treatment that passes unnoticed when times are good provokes rage when they are not, as the fury over bonuses paid at AIG shows. Warren Buffett said: "You only find out who is swimming naked when the tide goes out." You also find out who has been wearing diamond-studded flippers.
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Of course, the auto giants aren't the only companies demanding cuts in hours, wages and benefits--and using the rapidly rising unemployment rate, now at its highest point since 1983, to threaten workers with shutdowns and layoffs if they don't get their way.

A Watson Wyatt survey released in March found that 56 percent of the 245 corporations surveyed had a hiring freeze in effect, 42 percent had salary freezes, 12 percent had reduced 401(k) matching contributions, and 13 percent had instituted a shortened workweek.
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Countering conservative accusations that Obama's bailout of the banks amounts to "nationalization," economist Joseph Stiglitz, in a column for the New York Times, called the administration's policy "ersatz capitalism, the privatizing of gains and the socializing of losses. It is a 'partnership' in which one partner robs the other."
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FULL ARTICLE
http://socialistworker.org/2009/04/10/against-shared-sacrifice