Newsletter: Shout

The Fitting Extinction of the Gorilla

Have our values become distorted to the point that we feel more sympathy to an animal than to our neighbors?

By Lila Schow

So the question is not whether we will be extremists, but what kind of extremists we will be. We be extremists for hate or for love? Will we be extremist for the preservation of injustice or for the extension of justice?

Martin Luther King's
Letter from Birmingham Jail

So now we know what "noble cause" Cindy Sheehan's son died for in Iraq: Sharia ... The new Constitution, drafted under heavy pressure from the Administration, sets aside the secular personal law under which Iraqis have lived for nearly half a century in favor of theocracy lite.

Katha Pollitt Theocracy Lite

Perhaps now that we have Iraq under our belt, perhaps now that we have Katrina under our belt, perhaps now that we have had a few unspeakably costly lessons on just how wretched, stupid, useless, blind, willfully ignorant, dangerous, petulant, frightening, narrow-minded, foolish and ultimately deranged this administration is, perhaps now we can look at September 11 for what it really was: just another Bush administration failure that came with another massive body count.

September 11 Revisited by William Rivers Pitt

It's impossible for me to imagine how you report a story whose subject is death without allowing the public to see images of the subject of the story.

Journalist Groups Protest FEMA Ban on Photos of Dead Larry Siems of the PEN American Center

Top 10 Censored Stories of the Past Year

#1 Bush Administration Moves to Eliminate Open Government

#2 Media Coverage Fails on Iraq: Fallujah and the Civilian Death Toll

#3 Another Year of Distorted Election Coverage

#4 Surveillance Society Quietly Moves In

#5 US Uses Tsunami to Military Advantage in Southeast Asia

#6 The Real Oil for Food Scam

#7 Journalists Face Unprecedented Dangers to Life and Livelihood

#8 Iraqi Farmers Threatened by Bremer's Mandates

#9 Iran's New Oil Trade System Challenges US Currency

#10 Mountaintop Removal Threatens Ecosystem and Economy

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. On the one hand, we are called to play the Good Samaritan on life's roadside, but that will be only an initial act. One day we must come to see that the whole Jericho Road must be transformed so that men and women will not be constantly beaten and robbed as they make their journey on life's highway. True compassion is more than flinging a coin to a beggar. It comes to see that an edifice which produces beggars needs restructuring. A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth.

Martin Luther King Jr.
Beyond Vietnam: A Time to Break the Silence

To be poor in America was to be invisible, but not after this week, not after those images of the bedraggled masses at the Superdome, convention center and airport. No one can claim that the post-Reagan orthodoxy of low taxes and small government, which does wonders for the extremely rich, also inevitably does wonders for the extremely poor. What was that about a rising tide lifting all boats? What if you don't have a boat?

Eugene Robinson

CEOs at the largest defense contractors have received a 200 percent raise since the September 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, compared to a 7 percent increase for chief executives at other large companies.

* “Body armor profiteer” David H. Brooks, the CEO of bulletproof vest maker DHB Industries, personally earned $70 million in 2004, a 13,349 percent increase from his 2001 compensation of $525,000. The report notes, “Brooks also sold company stock worth about $186 million last year, spooking investors who drove DHB’s share price from more than $22 to as low as $6.50.”

The US Marines recalled over 5,000 DHB armored vests issued to troops in Iraq and Afghanistan after their effectiveness to stop bullets was called into question. “By that time, Brooks had pocketed over $250 million in war windfalls,” the study notes.

* David Lesar, CEO of Halliburton, formerly headed by Vice President Dick Cheney, received a 171 percent pay increase between 2003 and 2004, “the period when government auditors were tallying up $1.4 billion in ‘questioned’ or ‘unsupported’ charges by the company for work in Iraq.”

* United Technologies CEO George David raked in $88 million in 2004, the same year the Pentagon terminated its Comanche helicopter program. After investing $6.9 billion and 21 years of effort into the helicopter—“including 10 years with David at the helm”—the project was scrapped upon recommendation by the Army after projected costs for the helicopter continued to balloon.

* J.P. London, CEO of CACI, whose employees served as interrogators and were involved in the torture scandals at the notorious US-run Abu Ghraib prison complex in Iraq, saw his pay jump 170 percent to $3 million in 2004.

According to the study, the average CEO-to-worker pay in the US also increased greatly, from 301-to-1 in 2003 to 431-to-1 in 2004. By contrast, in 1990 the average CEO pay was “only” 107 times more than the pay for the average production worker.

The report notes that if the average pay of workers had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the US would be earning $23.03 an hour, not $5.15 an hour, and the average production worker would make $110,126 annually, rather than the $27,460 average earned in 2004.

Other key findings of the report include:

* “Book Cookers”: Between 1995 and 2004, CEOs of firms accused of using shady and/or fraudulent accounting practices appeared 18 times on the top 10 lists of the highest paid CEOs each year.

* “Tax Dodgers”: The $12.6 million average CEO pay of the 46 companies that paid no federal income tax in 2003 was 55 percent more than the $8.1 million received by the average CEO that year.

* “Gross Pay”: The cumulative pay over the last 15 years of the 10 highest paid CEOs in each year, taken together, totals more than $11.7 billion.

The entire ruling class stands exposed as a criminal class profiting from war and capitalizing on natural disasters that bring calamity and massive human suffering. As this report and others have documented, the wholesale looting continues unabated, and Washington’s war drive has increased the feverish rate at which the financial elites exploit workers, whose social and living conditions continue to deteriorate.

Report documents runaway American CEO pay and war profiteering

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