Last week I wrote about the deaths that had occurred as a direct result of the Republican Counterrevolution: Iraq War suicides, the Minneapolis bridge disaster, and inner city violence. It has long been dogma among many liberal pundits that the plan of the Republican Counterrevolution was to cut government and return the country to the pre-New Deal philosophy that government no longer has an obligatio0n to level the playing field. The “market” does this better, they say.

But now the budget-cutting and accompanying tax cuts jeopardize human lives. We can argue about the justification of cutting health insurance for children or Veteran’s benefits, but no one can justify budget cuts that put human lives in jeopardy. Yet that is exactly the point we have reached.

It would be one thing if we had reached this low point during a time of economic hardship, but America as a whole is richer than any nation in the history of the world and yet we cannot fix a bridge that everyone who inspected it admitted needed to be fixed. We cannot give our troops the mental health benefits they need. In fact we cannot even allow them sufficient time at home to recover from the stresses of combat–stresses, by the way, that neither this President nor Vice-President have ever experienced because they both dodged combat. Finally people are dying at alarming rates in our inner cities that approach the death rates of our troops in Baghdad and we totally ignore the dead and cut programs that might stop the killing.

That is the sad part. The money is there. It is there in buckets and piles that rival those of Scrooge McDuck’s money bin. There are CEO’s of American corporations who make more money than the budgets of entire nations. According to the new issue of Fortune:

The median rate of increase in CEO pay for all companies in the study was 5%, which is down from nearly 13% the year before, and marks the second consecutive year that pay raises have slowed.

Any workers out there who received a 5% raise last year? Now let’s look at who hauled in the most. According to Fortune:

Nabeel Gareeb, chief executive of semiconductor part supplier MEMC Electronic Materials, was the highest paid CEO so far this year. He took in more than $79.5 million in total actual compensation, an increase of about 1,430%, largely due to a $77 million profit on stock options.

The largest “discretionary” bonus - nearly $30 million - went to Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein. Many of the highest bonuses went to CEOs of financial institutions, including Wachovia, Bank of New York Mellon, Prudential Financial and American Express.

Fortune’s data comes froma study by The Corporate Library. Unfortunately you have to be a CEO to afford the study, which costs $45. According to a chart of national budget expenditures by country, that would rank Gareeb as 200th in the world, just below Tonga. Now Tonga is admittedly a little island country, but Gareeb’s salary is about a third of the total budget for the Vatican, 14% of that of Afghanistan and 10% of that of Rwanda.

The notion that one person’s knowledge and leadership is so valuable that it justifies such obscene compensation is as medieval as the notion that some prince or duchess deserves to live in a luxury castle because he or she happened to be born to a certain mother and father. Have any of these CEO’s invented anything comparable to Edison’s light bulb or had an original thought even close to one of Einstein’s? Have they cured cancer or AIDS? No. All they have done is move companies around like tokens in a monopoly game.

Let me make a little side bet. Give me the salary of one of those CEO’s and let me hire a team of both young hot-shots and older folks who have gotten screwed by corporate politics. In fact fire the whole lot of underlings whose job is to alternately suck up to the CEO and plot her or his demise the way they poisoned medieval royalty. Then pay all the people on my new team a tidy half-million a year, with some stock options for performance only. I guarantee you we could do better than the current lot of medieval nobility.

But this is not just about performance it is about equity. Not since the Civil War when the rich could buy their way out of carrying a rifle have we had a period when our country is at war and not everyone shares in the sacrifice. While the average American pays for Iraq, Afghanistan and the so-called War on Terror with $4 gas, reduced earning power and their lives, the folks in those modern castles invest in $10,000 bottles of wine.

In the past moral voices would have cried out at this blatant sinfulness, but where are the religious voices that exerted such a powerful impact on America’s sense of justice? The fundamentalist churches seem to applaud inequality. The Catholic Church seems to be focused on divorce, abortion and anything but social justice. The mainline Protestant denominations have all but abrogated any role as a social conscience. The rabbis of the synagogues who helped to provide many of the shock troops for the civil rights movement have been largely silent.

Then there are the voices of the media. Most of them are now either owned or in bed with the new nobility to the extent that they don’t dare ask the hard questions. The networks that produced programs such as “Harvest of Shame” have not had the guts to do anything like it for two decades. Instead the shame they harvest lies in getting everyday Americans to make fools of themselves in hopes of landing a big jackpot–an apt metaphor for our times.

Finally we should not excuse academia. During the Civil Rights and Vietnam eras some of the strongest moral voices came from America’s colleges and universities. They supplied the ammunition for Brown v Board and the ideas for domestic and foreign policy innovations. Today with their noses pressed to the minutia of publish-or-perish imperatives that have them researching the equivalent of George Washington’s false teeth, the academy seems bereft of policy alternatives save the equivalent of Rocky V. Few academics give more than lip service to relevance or public service.

Perhaps the most interesting developmen t is what has happened to liberals with money. The right wing now dominates the think tank industry. Meanwhile foundations that once supported ideas that kept the playing field level have either pulled back their funding or have funded “safe” and unimaginative initiatives.

In the end you come back to us, the American people. The way the Counterrevolution has bamboozled us about taxes ranks as one of the supreme con jobs ever. The so-called GOP tax cuts at both the state and federal levels have given each of us the equivalent of a month’s worth of house or car payments while taking away our children’s education and tuition benefits, raising our health care costs, entangling many of us in the mortgage crisis, leaving us with falling bridges and rising grocery bills. In short, for every dollar the Counterrevolution has supposedly given back to the “taxpayers,” its budget cuts have taken away many more. (Academics, foundations, think tanks–why can I find no data on this?)

Yet STILL if a candidate dares to propose raising taxes only on millionaires, they go down to defeat. Various luxury tax ideas never even get a hearing.

The question on which the 2008 election will depend is whether we ordinary Americans will finally recognize the con game. Perhaps knowledge that the Counterrevolution is literally killing us might finally open our eyes. Barack Obama are you listening or will you run another Kerry-Gore “me-too” campaign?

Tags: Barack Obama, CEO pay, CEOs, churches, counterrevolution, Edison, Einstein, equity, Fortune, foundations, GOP Counterrevolution, Hillary Clinton, justice, level playing field, media, Minneapolis bridge collapse, scrooge mcduck, tax cuts
Tagged with: Barack Obama • CEO pay • CEOs • churches • counterrevolution • Edison • Einstein • equity • Fortune • foundations • GOP Counterrevolution • Hillary Clinton • justice • level playing field • media • Minneapolis bridge collapse • scrooge mcduck • tax cuts