A new report has found that CEO pay is once again skyrocketing, while companies are slashing the median pay of workers. Mike Papantonio & Farron Cousins discuss more.
Transcript:
*This transcript was generated by a third-party transcription software company, so please excuse any typos.
Mike Papantonio: A new report’s found that CEO pay is once again skyrocketing while companies are slashing the median pay for the people who are getting the job done. The workers. I love this fact that Bernie Sanders seemed to be the only person that had enough sense to say, wait a second. There needs to be some cost for a CEO getting five or 600 times the amount of money that the worker’s getting. The worker is the person that’s making the CEO look good. The worker is delivering and the CEO is getting paid 500 times what the worker’s being paid. Pick it up.
Farron Cousins: Yeah. This new study found that over the last year, just the last year, CEO pay has gone up 11%, worker pay has declined by 9%. So there is now an even, a 20 point larger gap than there was before. So CEOs, not only are the companies making more money than ever, they have fully recovered from the pandemic numbers, but workers are making less on average,
Mike Papantonio: This number says 251 times, 250, now this is the median number.
Farron Cousins: Yeah.
Mike Papantonio: Understand that’s the median number. That’s not with the typical CEO getting paid 500 times, but the median number, just the median number alone is 250 times. And so how do you solve it? What’s the solution there? And the solution is to say, okay, if we’ve got a company, and this is Bernie’s solution, it’s at least the beginning, if a CEO is making 50 times what a worker is making, there’s gotta be some tax. Now, the problem I have with that is that doesn’t really help the worker. You follow me. The tax, that’s where this all goes astray. The government collecting tax money still doesn’t help that worker. There’s got to be something more direct where the government’s not making that money, but the worker is benefiting. And to say, well, we know this, some people have already tried it. You’ve got places where they’ve already tried this. It doesn’t do anything for the worker. All it does is makes more tax money for that entity. Right?
Farron Cousins: Right. The cities that have done this, or the states that have done this, say, hey, well look, we are bringing in more revenue. And the workers at these companies say, well, okay, wonderful for you. What about me? Like, you said you were gonna help me and I have nothing. My life has not changed. And a lot of times also, these corporations, if they do get hit with a tax like this.
Mike Papantonio: They pass it on.
Farron Cousins: Right. They’ll look for loopholes too. And they’ll say, okay, well you’re talking about salary. So your base salary is gonna be a million dollars. Your bonus at the end of the year is gonna be 50 million and you can’t touch that because that’s not part of your regular pay. So they will find a way around it if that happens. But what has to happen here is that we have to get price gouging under control to help the consumers and we have to put some kind of protection in place for these workers to make sure that when the company does better, they’re doing better as well.
Mike Papantonio: I thought this was so San Francisco. San Francisco, they tried doing some variation of this. Well, San Francisco made $137 million in tax money for the city, but the workers didn’t benefit one dime. So as we look at this, you gotta say, okay, well what is really gonna protect the workers? What kind of mandate are we gonna give the CEO to say, look, no, 500 times what the worker’s making doesn’t make any sense? And it’s gotta be something besides a tax. Bernie at least is onto something here. It’s let’s do something. But it’s gotta be something not that the government makes money, but the worker actually benefits.
Suspicious Activity: That it had helped dirty money flow through its branches around the world, including at least 800. Plaintiffs allege that the defendants provided money and medical goods to terrorist groups, Hezbollah and Jaysh al-Adl. This is a well organized business for these individuals that carry out these attacks. Terrorism is a business and they run it like a business. They knew about what was going on for a decade. They absolutely, absolutely no question about it knew that HSBC was washing money. They had every reason to understand it was for terrorism and it was for drug cartels. Took no action whatsoever.
These banks are involved, their accounts are connected, and they’re using them to mask the transactions. The more complicated they can make the transactions, the more distance they could put between the bad guys and a seemingly legitimate purpose of these funds. They pay $1.9 billion, which is a drop in the bucket compared to what they’ve made. And nobody goes to prison. These CEOs, these bankers that made this decision, they’re safe at home. They know what they’ve done. They know it’s resulted in the death of Americans, contractors and soldiers, not just hundreds but thousands. And we look the other way because they don’t look like criminals. The die cast, the people that are responsible for it, are on Wall Street. And they don’t look like criminals. It’s almost a suspension of disbelief. Sometimes I’ll have people call me and say, is this, is this real? Do they really get away with this? Yeah, they do.