It's Not Easy Being Ultra-Rich By Barbara Ehrenreich, Barbaraehrenreich.com
Posted on September 3, 2007 On Labor Day we customarily give a nod to America's underpaid and
overworked blue and pink collar workers -- janitors, flight
attendants, forklift operators and the like.
But this year let's go a step further and salute the most reviled and
despised of the people who make our economy happen, the mere mention
of whom causes the average forklift operator to spit on the floor.
You are thinking perhaps of telemarketers, human traffickers, and the
fiends who answer the phone when you to try to make a claim on your
health insurance. But I'm talking about our CEOs.
Just in time for the holiday, two liberal groups -- United for a Fair
Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies -- have issued a
gleefully malicious new attack on our CEO class. They point out that
the CEOs of large companies earn an average of $10.8 million a year,
which is 362 times as much as the average American worker, and retire
with $10.1 million in their special exclusive CEO pension funds.
They further point out that the compensation of US CEOs wildly
exceeds that of their European counterparts, who, we are invited to
believe, work equally hard.
And, in what they must think is their cleverest point of all, the UFE/
IPS folks state that: "The 20 highest-paid individuals at publicly
traded corporations last year took home, on average, $36.4 million.
That's ... 204 times more than the 20 highest-paid generals in the
U.S. military."
You know what we're supposed to think here: Wow, but generals have
all that responsibility! They're responsible for national security,
or at least for conducting the wars that increase the threats to our
national security and thus help justify ever greater increases in our
national security apparatus!
But someone has to speak up for our beleaguered CEO class, and let me
begin with that spurious comparison to the top military brass. Could
we put patriotic emotion aside for a moment and look at this in a
hard-headed, bottom-line, sort of way?
Suppose you are the general responsible for all the service people
currently in Iraq, about 130,000 in round numbers, and suppose you
manage to lose every single one of them in some ghastly
miscalculation. With the death benefit for the family of a dead
soldier running at $100,000, your mistake will cost a total of $13
billion. Sounds like a lot, I know, until you consider that a hedge
fund manager or financial company CEO can lose that much in a single
afternoon, without anyone even noticing. Q.E.D., there is simply no
comparison between a general and a CEO.
That's a side issue though. The real point, which the CEOs and their
usual defenders are strangely reticent about making, is that it's
damn expensive to be rich, and extravagantly expensive to be super-rich.
Before you start playing your air violins, consider the costs of
maintaining up to five different homes, some of them up to 45,000
square feet in size, most with swimming pools, tennis courts, guest
houses, and wine cellars requiring constant supervision.
The poor whine about having no home at all, or maybe a two-bedroom
apartment for a family of six. They should just think for one moment
of the tribulations involved in running four or more mansions, each
with its own full-time staff. There's the problem of getting between
them, for example. A friend of mine, of very modest means himself,
consults for a billionaire couple who commute between London and Los
Angeles by private jet, with their dogs following in a second private
jet.
But much of what we know about the extreme costs of wealth comes from
Wall Street Journal columnist Robert Frank's recent book Richistan.
The ultra-rich, who are drawn largely from the CEO class, require
staffs of about 40-50 people, including not only cooks, maids and
nannies, but "lifestyle managers" (to set up the entertainment
schedule) and -- in a throw-back to the original gilded age -- butlers.
It's the butler's job, among other things, to deal with any issues
that may arise from the proliferation of homes. For example, if the
boss is in Palm Beach, Frank reports, "and wants to send his jet to
New York to pick up a Chateau LaTour from his South Hampton cellar,
the butler makes it happen, no questions asked."
Nor are the ultra-rich in a position to cut back on their expenses --
by, say, running down to the supermarket for a $12 bottle of
chardonnay. If they were to do so, their friends would despise them.
As Frank explains, the Richistani word "affluent," meaning someone
with less than $10 million in assets, translates into English roughly
as "scum."
A mean-spirited critic of the ultra-rich CEO class might grumble that
the rich should simply find a new circle of friends. But who exactly
might these new friends be? If you were in the $100- million-in-
assets set, you could hardly consort with the class of people for
whom a pittance like $10,000 might be a transformative sum, possibly
allowing granny to get her insulin and the children to have warm
winter clothes.
People of that class could not be trusted not to pocket the
silverware or rip out the gold fixtures in your powder room. They
might even make a lunge for your throat.
-----------
(Barbara Ehrenreich admits to being on the board of the Institute for
Policy Studies.) Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of thirteen books,
including the New York Times bestseller Nickel and Dimed. A frequent
contributor to the New York Times, Harpers, and the Progressive, she
is a contributing writer to Time magazine. She lives in Florida.
http://www.alternet.org/story/61359/
It's Not Easy Being Ultra-Rich
by nvrgnbk 11 Replies latest jw friends
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nvrgnbk
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brinjen
Lifestyles of the rich and the famous
They're always complaining
Always complainingIf money is such a problem
Well they've got mansions
Think we should rob them -
Open mind
I now have a new-found compassion for Nvr!!
We all know you're loaded!!
Open Mind
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nvrgnbk
I love this!
Great writing, to be sure!
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snowbird
Ecclesiastes 5:12 The sleep of a laborer is sweet,
whether he eats little or much,
but the abundance of a rich man
permits him no sleep.Dare I say more?
Snowbird
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changeling
"Don't hate me because I'm beautiful".
changeling
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mkr32208
Our economy runs on the power of stupid. This article illustrates it beautifully!
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nvrgnbk
Our economy runs on the power of stupid. This article illustrates it beautifully!
Glad you enjoyed it, mkr32208!
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WTWizard
There is nothing wrong with being a CEO. There is nothing wrong with being a super-rich CEO. However, there is something wrong with being a dishonest CEO or one that exploits workers unfairly. A CEO that gets rich because they work hard to build the business up and make sure it's well run deserves every penny of that money. As long as they are working to build up the business and create value for society, there is no problem with them getting billions of dollars. For instance, I think Bill Gates is trying his best to produce a quality product that allows everyone including ex-Jehovah's Witlesses to communicate. For this, he deserves every penny he has made.
My complaint starts when a CEO is merely consuming the business. This starts when they place unreasonable burdens on the workers and cut their pay for no reason other than to get more for themselves. They stop building the business. Quality begins to suffer, and often they outsource the labor. The consumers get crap product that is sure to break before its time, and the workers get crap paychecks. And then they lobby the government for more protection by regulating the competition out of existence. In this way, they force consumers to do business with them. Limited choices, unnecessarily expensive products, and stagnation of technology is the result.
What they need to do is totally deregulate the whole marketplace. If Microsoft begins to put out crap products, then Linux would start to do better and other independent people working out of garages could cash in. If Ford puts out gas-guzzlers, then a new company could start putting out SUVs that use totally renewable and cheap energy or that get more than 100 MPG and still put out substantial horsepower. Gas gouging? Why not use hydrogen or find a way to usurp global warming to put out more energy. And if your employer treats you like dirt and pays you next to nothing, you could quit and in a day start your own business and create value, even in the same line of work you used to do, and ultimately put the crap employer out of business. That would totally solve our problems. Prices would go down, while quality and quantity of value would skyrocket. People would not be stagnant. If someone with only a high school diploma and the ability to engineer a product felt like doing it, they would start their own business instead of getting hired.
Under those circumstances, people would have real opportunities. Then they would not have to worry about getting fired or a p*** poor pay raise, since they could start a business, quit, and put their former boss out of business. And we would have better products to boot.
Of course, being ultra-rich is shameful if your name happens to be Ted Jaracz. Unlike Bill Gates, Jaracz has created negative value and does not deserve a penny of his wealth. I can only hope that Jaracz starts losing all those lawsuits and dies destitute, heavy of heart, unfulfilled, and stagnant. One can only imagine what judgment awaits him after death. But I can be sure he is not going to heaven or to live forever on the earth. And, I promise with fully integrated honesty that, if I am the one that develops a way to resurrect people on earth through science, this humanoid will not be resurrected through me.
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JeffT
Actually I like rich people. So far they're the only ones that have signed a paycheck with my name on it.