wages

Think Progress has posted this stomach-turning chart:

The red line indicated corporate profits and the blue is the average wage of Americans. As you can see the profits have been sky rocketing to record levels, while wages continue to plummet.

CNN Money puts it into words here:

In the third quarter, corporate earnings were $1.75 trillion, up 18.6% from a year ago, according to last week's gross domestic product report. That took after-tax profits to their greatest percentage of GDP in history.

But the record profits come at the same time that workers' wages have fallen to their lowest-ever share of GDP.

So we have to record breaking pieces of information here; profits are at record highs and wages are at record lows.

This comes at a very critical time in our nation. With the fiscal cliff less than a month away, many on the right are content with middle class taxes going up, just to save the corporations some tax money. The thinking is the same, failed logic that GOP has been pushing for years; "if corporations have more money, they will hire more." It goes against the very basis of supply and demand economics and is a proven failure just by this data. The corporations do have the money, but they aren't hiring and they aren't paying.

SB5, Ohio's bill stripping public employee union's of collective bargaining rights, will have it's fate decided this November by Ohio voters:

Ohio voters will have the chance this November to decide whether the state's contentious new collective bargaining law should be repealed.

The state's elections chief said Thursday that opponents had gathered enough valid signatures to put the question before voters. The measure is now suspended from taking effect until voters have their say.

The law signed by Ohio Gov. John Kasich in late March bans public employee strikes and restricts collective bargaining rights for more than 350,000 teachers, police officers and other public workers. While unions can continue to negotiate wages, they cannot bargain on health care, sick time or pension benefits.

The group We Are Ohio delivered more than 1.3 million signatures to Secretary of State Jon Husted, though the opponents needed roughly 231,000 valid signatures to get the question on the ballot.

This is excellent news for Ohio workers and the state overall. It's a chance to shove it back in the face of our pompous Governor and restore basic rights to our public employees.

It certainly isn’t if you have CEO behind your name and you work for a big corporation:

Compensation received by chief executives of the biggest US companies surged 11 percent over the past 12 months -- to $9.3 million on average, The Wall Street Journal reported.

Citing a study conducted for the newspaper by management consultancy Hay Group, The Journal said the increase was largely due to decisions by company boards to reward CEOs for strong profit and share-price growth with bigger bonuses and stock grants.

The survey covered the 350 biggest companies that filed their statement between May 1, 2010, and April 30, 2011.

So while middle America is struggling, the fat cats are still raking it in. Really – why shouldn’t they? Employment works much like the economy, based on supply and demand. Right now we have an over abundance of workers (supply), so they can hire people for less than normal wages. A lot of companies are even getting rid of the higher paid employees just to bring in lower paid ones. Is it right for this to occur? Nope, but it is what happens.

Of course there is also a real bad side to this. Income disparity will be even greater. Our middle class is being pushed into non-existence and our standing as the industrialized nation with the highest rate of income disparity will remain in tact. Also this increase will point to a growing payroll in America, which is only the case for about 1% of the working population. For the other 99% payroll has either remained flat or sunk, which the cost of living has continued to rise.

Yesterday the Democrats released the outline for immigration reform, but there is something missing. The issue, which goes to the heart of the matter, is the hiring of illegal immigrants. Under current laws the fines for businesses that hire illegals is laughable. It’s such a small amount that the fines actually becoming nothing more than the “cost of doing business”.

Let me go back to an example I have cited here before. A Krispy Kreme factory here in southwest Ohio was busted for hiring illegals back in 2006. At the time they found 25 undocumented workers employed by the diabetes factory. In 2009 they finally settled for $40,000. If we now do some simple math we can quickly see how this was a really good deal for Krispy Kreme.

• 2080 – Average number of hours worked per year per employee
• 52,000 – The number of hours for 25 full time employees in a year.

Even if Krispy Kreme decided to pay this people $1.00 less per hour since they are illegal, they still came out $12,000 ahead in just one year. Who wouldn’t turn down an extra $12,000 a year? Not to mention that this also takes away from jobs for citizens in an area with extra-high unemployment, and even drives down the wages for those “legal” workers.

When immigration reform came up a couple of years ago the Democrats did try to increase the penalties to companies hiring illegals. That was quickly defeated by the Republicans, who decried the move as “unfair” to business. Instead they chose to keep everything at the status quo and businesses continue to do the practice to this very day.

Ok I am impressed:

Melody Barnes, Domestic Policy Council served as chief counsel to Senator Ted Kennedy on the Judiciary Committee from 1985 to 1993. Want to get an idea of how progressive she is? Read this: In January of 2007, prior to President Bush's state of the union address, Barnes wrote this essay for the Washington Post, What a Progressive President Might Say:

Here at home there is urgent work to do to fight the historically high -- and growing -- gap between our richest and poorest citizens. While the mean income of households on the low end of the income spectrum -- the bottom 20 percent -- is just $10,655 a year, the income of the top twenty percent of households averages almost $160,000. That's 15 times as much. At the same time, according to the latest census figures, the middle class, beset with stagnant wages and mountainous debts, is shrinking. The sad fact is that one of our most cherished values as a society, namely equality of opportunity, is fading as a reality for far too many people...

More like this please?

This is absolutely absurd:

The U.S. Supreme Court turned down a lawyer's request Tuesday for immediate access to the medical files of a Guantanamo prisoner who says he has AIDS.

Chicago attorney H. Candace Gorman said she needs access to her client's records as she wages a legal fight to make sure he gets adequate medical treatment at the U.S. military prison in Guantanamo, Cuba.

The court rejected the request without comment. Gorman had said earlier this month that her client, Libyan prisoner Abdul Hamid Abdul Salam Al-Ghizzawi, told her in a letter that a Guantanamo doctor had diagnosed him with AIDS.

It sounds like Bush's SCOTUS is working for him. It's time for Congress to step up with some new laws and push another challenge.

A true look into the current chance of Americans rising to the top has taken place and what we use to say about our land is no longer true:

America may still think of itself as the land of opportunity, but the chances of living a rags-to-riches life are a lot lower than elsewhere in the world, according to a new study published on Wednesday.

The likelihood that a child born into a poor family will make it into the top five percent is just one percent, according to "Understanding Mobility in America", a study by economist Tom Hertz from American University.

By contrast, a child born rich had a 22 percent chance of being rich as an adult, he said.

"In other words, the chances of getting rich are about 20 times higher if you are born rich than if you are born in a low-income family," he told an audience at the Center for American Progress, a liberal think-tank sponsoring the work.

He also found the United States had one of the lowest levels of inter-generational mobility in the wealthy world, on a par with Britain but way behind most of Europe.

Alan Greenspan made a speech last year a few months before retiring. He said that the increasing divides amongst our social and economical classes are an increasing threat to our democracy. That is so very true. Considering the fact that to run for a seat on the United States House of Representatives has a price tag in the range of $20 million to $100 million, it is not surprise this threat exists.