New England Diary

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More, more, more!

A CVS kiosk set up in Quincy Market, in downtown Boston.

— Photo by Whoisjohngalt

“The Worship of Mammon (1909)’’, by Evelyn De Morgan

Adapted from Robert Whitcomb’s “Digital Diary,’’ in GoLocal24.com

CVS’s chief executive officer, Karen Lynch, made 458 times the Woonsocket, R.I.-based company’s average employee’s wages in 2021, when her compensation exceeded $20 million while the average CVS worker made $45,010. Cut Ms. Lynch’s taxes some more!

An Economic Policy Institute report in 2021 showed that  from  1978 to 2020, the pay of CEO’s of big public companies grew by 1,322 percent, far outstripping stock-market growth as measured by Standard & Poor’s (817 percent). It also exceeded corporate-earnings growth of 341 percent between 1978 and 2019, the latest data available. Meanwhile, compensation of the typical worker grew by just 18 percent from 1978 to 2020.

Where’s the evidence that corporate execs are better these days than they were 40 years ago and thus deserve these gargantuan pay days?

Behind a lot of this extreme compensation is the simple fact that the boards of big companies consist mostly of other very rich corporate execs who serve on multiple boards and give each other huge pay packages with the expectation that they’ll be taken care of in return.

Another is the media creation of the CEO of a big company as a genius superstar worthy of extracting vast sums from the economy.

Of course as they get richer and richer, they get more and more control of the political system, which they use to expand their wealth and power (especially via the GOP/QAnon Party) even further.

Hit these links:

https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/

https://www.golocalprov.com/business/cvss-ceo-lynch-makes-458-times-the-average-cvs-employee

https://www.epi.org/publication/ceo-pay-in-2020/

And:

https://www.salon.com/2022/07/19/just-27-billionaires-spent-90-million-to-buy-congress-report_partner/

https://americansfortaxfairness.org/wp-content/uploads/BBER-FINAL-WITH-LINKS.pdf