Dear Log,
In the Guardian:
"In the US 10 years ago, the income of company directors was 42 times
higher than that of the blue-collar workers; it is now 419 times higher; 95%
of the surplus of $1,100bn generated between 1979 and 1999 has been
appropriated and consumed by 5% of Americans.
...
According to the UN Development Agency, less than 4% of the personal wealth of the
225 richest people would suffice to offer all the poor of the world access to
elementary medical and educational amenities as well as adequate nutrition."
And the article ends with this quote: "We should raise our children to find it intolerable that we who sit behind desks and punch keyboards are paid 10 times as much as the people who get their hands dirty cleaning our toilets and 100 times as much as those who fabricate our keyboards in the third world."
Grosso modo, he has a point. Altho it's not exactly fair to compare the effective worth of a US dollar in Malaysia and a US dollar in Silicon Valley; nor is it fair to lump together all work that involves "punching keyboards". Interesting thought: people 150 years ago would probably have lumped together all people who work indoors.
I find the statistics interesting but while I cannot disagree with the apalling disparity between haves and havenots in the US and elsewhere do remember that this sort of societal stratification happened well before the advent of money. It is hard to bear watching billion dollar bombs drop on a desert wasteland while people starve and go uneducated in our own country...the US is even considering closing some national parks due to budget concerns. A few egos get stroked and there will be more poor and non-High School educated people to work at the airport security checks. All this and the land of opportunity too...who knew?
"We should raise our children to find it intolerable that we who sit behind desks and punch keyboards are paid 10 times as much as the people who get their hands dirty cleaning our toilets and 100 times as much as those who fabricate our keyboards in the third world."
But what does "intolerable" mean? Note that this quote by itself would have gotten you arrested in the 1950s.
Dont get me wrong, I find the wealth granted to people such as the executives of Enron to be obscene. But how to express that? Laws? Boycotts? Unions? Maybe if corporations weren't so powerful, we could express it without laws, by various forms of consumer activism. That would certainly be my preference.
