Life at the Top: Endless Obscene Bonuses for Execs, Everyone Else Getting Shafted

[Donnachaidh]

http://www.alternet.org/economy/149745/life_at_the_top%3A_endless_obscene_bonuses_for_execs%2C_everyone_else_getting_shafted

We historically, here in the United States, have had a word for power imbalances this striking and stark: plutocracy, or rule by the rich.

Back in the Great Depression, even at the height of America’s misery, some people made quite a bit of money. Chase National Bank chair Albert Wiggin, for instance, netted a windfall worth over $4 million after the 1929 stock market crash — the equivalent of over $52 million today — trading his own bank short.

But most of America’s rich actually saw their fortunes sink, and significantly so, during the Great Depression.

The average incomes of the nation’s richest tenth of 1 percent, calculates economist Emmanuel Saez, fell from $1,242,237 in 1928, the last full year before the Great Depression, to $737,861 in 1931, as measured in today’s dollars.

More at the link --

[ladjf]

1. The "great heist" continues. No one is trying to stop it. nt

[OhioChick]

2. Sickening n/t

[FiveGoodMen]

3. ALL our economic problems at the moment are the result of the rich taking it all

and leaving us nothing.

And the god damned traitors among the poor and middle-class continue to support them.