A Tea-bagging Resource for Current Events: Executive Pay Database

Leave it up to Fox News to call the silly Tea Party movement a "grass-roots" affair, when it's backed by, um, Fox News, the Coors family, and other deep-pocketed conservative groups.

Here's a useful resource to pull back the curtain and reveal the wizard for the media manipulator he truly is: the 2009 Executive Paywatch Database on the AFL-CIO's website.

I searched it for Wal-Mart, and learned this: CEO H. Lee Scott's total package amounted to $29,682,064, which is equal to:

17 Nobel prize winners
74 average university presidents
74 U.S. presidents
109 AFL-CIO presidents
158 Chairmen of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
729 average workers
2,178 minimum-wage earners

Assuming a (generous) 50 weeks at 8 hours a day, Scott averages roughly $15,000 per hour, or $250 per minute.

Wal-Mart is an extreme case, according to the database. Microsoft's CEO made less than $1.5 million, and Steve Jobs at Apple made less than $1.25 million. This makes the Walton pay scheme all the more interesting, since the Walton family is a major force in the education "reform" movement, and the biggest funder of non-union charter schools. Imagine being a teacher at a Wal-Mart school.

The American case is an excessive exception in international capitalism:

Different calculations of executive pay by different researchers yield different results. As Larry Bumgardner of Pepperdine University's business and management school points out, a Business Roundtable study in 2006 puts the Average Worker:CEO pay ratio at 179 to 1, while 2005 studies by "the Institute for Policy Studies and United for a Fair Economy, determined the ratio to be 411 to 1." (According to Bumgardner, the Economist reports "the ratio of average CEO compensation at large U.S. companies to the average production worker's pay was about 40 to 1 in 1980, [and] the ratio had risen to 85 to 1 by 1990, and then soared to about 400 to 1 by 2003.")

But the paydirt comes when Bumgardner compares American practices to those of other nations:

[E]ven if the average CEO is paid only about 200 times as much as the average employee, rather than roughly 400 times, there is little doubt that the ratio in the United States remains far higher than in other industrialized nations. According to The Wall Street Journal, in 2006, the CEO to average worker pay ratio was 11 to 1 in Japan, 15 to 1 in France, 20 to 1 in Canada, 21 to 1 in South Africa, and 22 to 1 in Britain.

What this has to do with education:

To state the obvious, the database gives real data to counter the media blitz of the "Save the Rich" cabal (and check out that link, please, for doing an Orwell on the Orwellian doublespeak of the Tea-Baggers). Without it, students are likely not to learn from Fox that Obama's tax scheme restores upper income taxes to those of the Clinton administration - hardly a socialist move:

It’s well known that tax rates on top incomes used to be far higher than they are today. The top marginal rate hovered around 90 percent in the 1940s, ’50s and early ’60s. Reagan ultimately reduced it to 28 percent, and it is now 35 percent. Obama would raise it to 39.6 percent, where it was under Bill Clinton. (source)

Here's a closing video on the value of taxes - it almost made me faint by painting teachers, for once, in a good light:
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