CEOs in the country's S&P 500 companies make 319 times more than the average American worker

[Mimosa]

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/walmart-ceo-pay-hour-workers-year/story?id=11067470

Excerpt:

Ed Smith, an alderman in Chicago, presented posters at a city council meeting showing that Walmart CEO Michael Duke's $35 million salary, when converted to an hourly wage, worked out to $16,826.92. By comparison, at a Walmart store planned for the Windy City's Pullman neighborhood, new employees to be paid $8.75 an hour would gross $13,650 a year.

A study last fall by the Institute for Policy Studies, a liberal Washington D.C. research group, found that CEOs in the country's S&P 500 companies make, on average, 319 times more than the average American worker.

IPS associate fellow Sam Pizzigati said that in the 1970s, that ratio was 30 to 1.

"We've seen, over the past three decades, a tenfold-plus increase in the gap between top executives and average American workers," Pizzigati said. "That Chicago alderman is putting his finger on a very real problem in American economic life."

[Sherman A1]

1. +1000

This is the crux of the issue. Productivity has been raised by huge percentages, but wages have stagnated or lowered. The benefits have gone to the top through the magic of trickle down economics courtesy of St. Ronnie & friends.

[Phoebe Loosinhouse]

2. K&R The upper tier plunder their own companies for their own benefit.

Looting. Pillaging the assets that could be paid out for better employee wages and benefits or even higher dividends to the shareholders - but no, they want it all. Disgusting.

[SocialistLez]

3. +1

[Angry Dragon]

4. +1000 ......... Nothing to add