All "traditional" types of crime are on the wane. Things we think of when the word crime is mentioned, murder, rape, assault, theft and property crimes have not been this low since the sixties. I don't think that we can attribute this to the fact that all the criminals have been jailed. Quite the contrary, people who have perpetrated crimes against me have never even been arrested. Oddly enough, the crimes that I have been victimized by have subjected me to ridicule from police, disbelief, or at least they have given the police a good laugh. Questioning victims as if they were perpetrators makes one wonder if cops just get off on dealing with "bad guys", or if they just get so used to dealing with criminals, that it makes them treat everyone with disdain. If we look to a larger picture, it only makes sense that as people learn to survive on less, and the economic outlook for so many continues a downward slide, there would be higher levels of desperation and propensity to steal and rob. Not so, I guess, we see crime rates falling in all areas, and for all crimes according to the FBI.
The petty sorts of crimes that hurt just one victim at a time have been replaced by crimes that hurt us all. Corporate outlaws who absorb billions in tax money and continue to make bad business decisions top my list of evil deed doers, but we seem to be at a loss for what to do with these bad boys. Law enforcement has been trained to look for footprints in the snow, leading away from crime scenes, finger prints and physical evidence that ties perpetrators to crime scenes. Now, there is even the ability to "search" the net for traces of illicit activity. Even though we have sophisticated ways of finding ordinary criminals, there is a definite lag between what is actually taking place and our response to it. If a company can be classified as "too big to fail", they can lay off thousands, pay their figurehead leader millions, and take our tax money with impunity. This double standard allows the rich to undermine our democracy in a most unsettling way. In response to these heinous crimes, it seems that some police agencies have redoubled their efforts to prosecute people who have engaged in victimless crime, growing marijuana, or God forbid, smoking it. It is confusing to see the attention we pay to trivia, while letting gross abuse of power and theft on a grand scale pass unnoticed. Profiling Muslims has become "defensible", but corporate outlaws are overlooked because we all "want to be like them", rich.
Back in the seventies, there was a pay disparity between the top CEOs and the average workers of 44-1. This meant that it would take working stiffs an average of forty-four years to earn as much as the top person in their company would make in one year. This was basically a person's entire working career, to equal one person's pay for a single year! The reasoning behind this was that top earners were smarter, better educated, under more stress, and responsible for bigger decisions that would make or break their corporation. Even though forty-four times smarter sounds impossible, forty-four times as educated sounds illogical, forty-four times more stress seems improbable and forty-four times more responsible ignores the fact that "average"workers are the ones that actually make products or provide services for which the company is needed in the first place.
Today, this pay disparity has climbed to 360-1. This means that what the average wage earner makes in a year is made in less than a single day by top "wage" earners. To equal the pay of a CEO today, a "family" of workers would require eight generations of toil to "earn" the equivalent of a single year of effort by these super-humanly smart, ultra-educated, incredibly stressed out, and uniquely responsible individuals who are "top dogs" in the largest companies the world has ever seen. Even as their corporations crumble, it is said that they deserve their unreasonable compensation. At some point, will we see through this charade? How long will we allow this insanity to continue? Is screwing a billion people okay if we only steal a penny from each person? How about a dime? A dollar? What if we force them into bankruptcy? Will we ever classify wage slavery as slavery and outlaw it? Why do we continue to look the other way? How can we support a system of all men being created equal but yet reimburse some as if they are 360 people? In this age of technological advances, we must develop our awareness, our culture, and our laws to keep pace with the lightning speed of injustice.
Letting those who have led us down a path toward inequality, have a say in resolving the problems they have created, is like letting a fox into the hen house. This is commonly the way our government deals with important issues. In Wisconsin, when "public utilities" got caught stealing 64 million dollars from residential rate payers, the utilities themselves got to decide how to spend the court ordered forfeiture. Letting insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals and health care providers tell us what they want in a "health care bill" guarantees that their interests get priority while the general public continues to get fleeced. Similarly, when the banks and some insurance companies had gotten into trouble, playing the odds with borrowed money, we gave their terrible managers a get out of jail free card. Many were able to leave their crippled companies with severance packages that exceed the lifetime earnings of 90% of all Americans. I think that bad managers should be punished. Perhaps, if they had to bear responsibility for their stupidity, lack of judgment, larcenous ways, illegal gambling with money that belongs to others, or misrepresentation that only benefits themselves, their illegal and immoral actions would cease. Lying, cheating and stealing are bad, no matter who has done them. People who are worth billions should not be exempt from laws that govern the rest of us. As happy as I am that the crime rate has plummeted, I think that we need to look for injustice wherever it occurs.
The petty sorts of crimes that hurt just one victim at a time have been replaced by crimes that hurt us all. Corporate outlaws who absorb billions in tax money and continue to make bad business decisions top my list of evil deed doers, but we seem to be at a loss for what to do with these bad boys. Law enforcement has been trained to look for footprints in the snow, leading away from crime scenes, finger prints and physical evidence that ties perpetrators to crime scenes. Now, there is even the ability to "search" the net for traces of illicit activity. Even though we have sophisticated ways of finding ordinary criminals, there is a definite lag between what is actually taking place and our response to it. If a company can be classified as "too big to fail", they can lay off thousands, pay their figurehead leader millions, and take our tax money with impunity. This double standard allows the rich to undermine our democracy in a most unsettling way. In response to these heinous crimes, it seems that some police agencies have redoubled their efforts to prosecute people who have engaged in victimless crime, growing marijuana, or God forbid, smoking it. It is confusing to see the attention we pay to trivia, while letting gross abuse of power and theft on a grand scale pass unnoticed. Profiling Muslims has become "defensible", but corporate outlaws are overlooked because we all "want to be like them", rich.
Back in the seventies, there was a pay disparity between the top CEOs and the average workers of 44-1. This meant that it would take working stiffs an average of forty-four years to earn as much as the top person in their company would make in one year. This was basically a person's entire working career, to equal one person's pay for a single year! The reasoning behind this was that top earners were smarter, better educated, under more stress, and responsible for bigger decisions that would make or break their corporation. Even though forty-four times smarter sounds impossible, forty-four times as educated sounds illogical, forty-four times more stress seems improbable and forty-four times more responsible ignores the fact that "average"workers are the ones that actually make products or provide services for which the company is needed in the first place.
Today, this pay disparity has climbed to 360-1. This means that what the average wage earner makes in a year is made in less than a single day by top "wage" earners. To equal the pay of a CEO today, a "family" of workers would require eight generations of toil to "earn" the equivalent of a single year of effort by these super-humanly smart, ultra-educated, incredibly stressed out, and uniquely responsible individuals who are "top dogs" in the largest companies the world has ever seen. Even as their corporations crumble, it is said that they deserve their unreasonable compensation. At some point, will we see through this charade? How long will we allow this insanity to continue? Is screwing a billion people okay if we only steal a penny from each person? How about a dime? A dollar? What if we force them into bankruptcy? Will we ever classify wage slavery as slavery and outlaw it? Why do we continue to look the other way? How can we support a system of all men being created equal but yet reimburse some as if they are 360 people? In this age of technological advances, we must develop our awareness, our culture, and our laws to keep pace with the lightning speed of injustice.
Letting those who have led us down a path toward inequality, have a say in resolving the problems they have created, is like letting a fox into the hen house. This is commonly the way our government deals with important issues. In Wisconsin, when "public utilities" got caught stealing 64 million dollars from residential rate payers, the utilities themselves got to decide how to spend the court ordered forfeiture. Letting insurance companies, drug companies, hospitals and health care providers tell us what they want in a "health care bill" guarantees that their interests get priority while the general public continues to get fleeced. Similarly, when the banks and some insurance companies had gotten into trouble, playing the odds with borrowed money, we gave their terrible managers a get out of jail free card. Many were able to leave their crippled companies with severance packages that exceed the lifetime earnings of 90% of all Americans. I think that bad managers should be punished. Perhaps, if they had to bear responsibility for their stupidity, lack of judgment, larcenous ways, illegal gambling with money that belongs to others, or misrepresentation that only benefits themselves, their illegal and immoral actions would cease. Lying, cheating and stealing are bad, no matter who has done them. People who are worth billions should not be exempt from laws that govern the rest of us. As happy as I am that the crime rate has plummeted, I think that we need to look for injustice wherever it occurs.
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