According to Market Watch, Aetna CEO Ronald Williams “earned” nearly $43 million in total compensation in 2007. The census bureau set the 2007 poverty line for a single person at $9944 (over 65) or $10,787 (under 65); let’s just call it a nice round $10,000.

Meanwhile, this painter/sculptor might dispute the use of the word “earned” in the Market Watch story:  Read more 

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog.

The book I want to start this conversation on social class is Robert Frank’s Richistan - A Journey Through The American Wealth Boom and The Lives of the New Rich. It is an ethnographic overview of the lifestyles of the new superrich. What does Richistan mean? According to Frank,

"Today’s rich had formed their own virtual country. They were in fact wealthier than most nations. By 2004, the richest 1 percent of Americans were earning about $1.35 trillion a year - greater than the total national incomes of France, Italy or Canada.

And with their huge numbers, they had built a self-contained world unto themselves, complete with thwie own health-care system (concierge doctors), travel networks (Net Jets, destination clubs), separate economy (double-digit income gains and double-digit inflation), and language ("who’s your household manager?"). They didn’t just hire gardening crews; they hired "personal arborists." The rich weren’t just getting richer; they were becoming financial foreigners, creating their own country within a country, their own society within a society, and their economy within an economy.

They were creating Richistan." (3-4)  Read more 

Means Testing, for Medicare

Shorter version of this article, the biggest items in our federal budget are entitlement programs, therefore they must be cut, therefore we need to means test Medicare, which really means turn it into Medicaid. And we should not move to single payer because it lacks transparency. At no time does the author express an interest in providing quality healthcare to all Americans.  Read more 

Cross-posted from The Global Sociology Blog

This third part of my report from the GSA conference (part 1 and part 2 ) was truly the best, from my point of view, because it featured a speech by one of my favorite sociologists (if not THE favorite), William Robinson, of UC Santa Barbara. He is the author of what I consider the authoritative social theory book on globalization: A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World.

In his presentation, Robinson contrasted his approach to globalization as qualitatively different phenomenon (transnationalism) as opposed to the school of thought he labeled "new imperialism." Robinson’s view of globalization involves specific features:

• the rise of truly transnational capital with integration of all countries into that system;
• the rise of the transnational state (TNS) where class power is exercised through networks and by the transnational capitalist class (TCC - especially its political / executive component);
• the development of new relations of power and inequalities on a global scale
• the increased power of the transnational corporation (TNC)

So, for the maths-oriented among us: Globalization = TNS + TNC + TCC = true transnationalism.  Read more 

The Republican party is an organized crime cartel that has been systematically stealing money from hard-working Americans and stuffing it all into the pockets of the very rich for 40 years.  Read more 

Forbes rates “America’s smartest cities” based on percentage of college graduates.

In a world where George W. Bush gets undergrad and graduate degrees from the two most venerable names in education, one might imagine that economic opportunity plays a bit of a role in that, doncha think?  Read more 

Elizabeth Warren has a great article in Harvard Magazine about how polarization by wealth in the United States is increasing under Republican rule. (The coming bursting of the mortgage bubble is one piece of this puzzle, thanks to “Bubbles” Greenspan pushing the Adjustable Rate Mortgage. The Man in the Grey Turtleneck has had his hair on fire on this one for some time.)

If you think of “making it” in the United States today as walking a tightrope, what the Republicans are doing is forcing you to do more tricks on the rope, while they’re also yanking the rope to make you fall off, and removing the safety net so that when you fall, you never walk again. Yes, there is class warfare. And most of us are losing it, without even knowing we’re at war.

Here’s her conclusion:

Every day, middle-class families carry higher risks that a job loss or a medical problem will push them over the edge. Although plenty of families make it, a growing number who worked just as hard and followed the rules just as carefully find themselves in a financial nightmare. The security of middle-class life has disappeared. The new reality is millions of families whose grip on the good life can be shaken loose in an instant.

During the same period, families have been asked to absorb much more risk in their retirement income. In 1985, there were 112,200 defined-benefit pension plans with employers and employer groups around the country; today their number has shrunk to 29,700 such plans, and those are melting away fast.

For younger families, the picture is not any better. Both the absolute cost of healthcare and the share of it borne by families have risen—and newly fashionable health-savings plans are spreading from legislative halls to Wal-Mart workers, with much higher deductibles and a large new dose of investment risk for families’ future healthcare. Even demographics are working against the middle class family, as the odds of having a frail elderly parent—and all the attendant need for physical and financial assistance—have jumped eightfold in just one generation.

From the middle-class family perspective, much of this, understandably, looks far less like an opportunity to exercise more financial responsibility, and a good deal more like a frightening acceleration of the wholesale shift of financial risk onto their already overburdened shoulders.

For those of us who are middle class—not all of us, I know—I think Warren’s description matches our worries if we’ve been lucky, and our experience if we have not been.

She also goes into some of the causes. Interestingly (to me, at least) much of her analysis conforms to my general sense that everything went to shit in the mid-1970s; that’s when the rules changed. (And, coincidentally or not, that’s when the winger billionaries started to fund the VRWC.)  Read more 

The Times has had intermittent, though reasonably good coverage of class warfare:

When a new mother returns to Starbucks’ corporate headquarters in Seattle after maternity leave, she learns what is behind the doors mysteriously marked “Lactation Room.”

Whenever she likes, she can slip away from her desk and behind those doors, sit in a plush recliner and behind curtains, and leaf through InStyle magazine as she holds a company-supplied pump to her chest, depositing her breast milk in bottles to be toted home later.

OK, that sounds like “business class.” What about coach?  Read more