According to corporate research firm Global Market Insight (GMI), Corporate America’s CEOs got big raises in 2010, even though many companies did not perform well!
The CEOs of the top 500 companies got as much as a 36.5% increase in pay. The next 3,000 U.S. corporations gave their CEOs a pay raise averaging 27%! Researchers with GMI said they were surprised, and considered the pay increases way out of line with the poor performance of many of the companies.
This news comes at the same time the U.S. Census Bureau is unofficially calling almost half of the population of the United States poor!
“SPM rates were higher than official poverty rates in 2010, overall and for most groups”-Brookings/Census Bureau Meeting on Improved Poverty Measurment, November 7, 2011
The new poverty statistics take into account “nondiscretionary” cost of living expenses such as income taxes, child care, health care, commuting to work, etc. When cost of living is factored in it raises the official number of poor people in the U.S.
The “official” poverty surveys consider before tax income only! This means the “official” poverty numbers have been way off for decades. However, the Census Bureau says the new SPM poverty numbers “Will not replace the official poverty measure” and “Will not be used for resource allocation or program eligibility”!
The new SPM numbers also include some types of welfare benefits a family might be getting, plus child support, and yet even with that data the number of poor people still went higher than the “official” poverty numbers. This is more evidence of how inaccurate the “official” count is, and how rampant poverty is in the U.S.!
The new data was released on November 7, 2011, yet I don’t recall any mainstream U.S. media reporting it. The data covers the year 2010 only, it’s called Supplemental Poverty Measure: 2010 (SPM).
When using the SPM (aka Improved Poverty Measure) a big jump in the number of poor people were found in the age group of 18 to 64 year olds. But the biggest jump in poverty was found in the age group of people 65 years or older.
If I read the Census Bureau graphs correctly (and if I understood the Bureaus’ explanations of how they figured it), when you add the “official” poverty numbers to the new SPM numbers you get 146.4 million people who are poor (49.1 million “officially” poor + 97.3 million SPM poor). Even if you go by just the new SPM data that’s nearly 100 million poor people in the U.S.
Officially there are 312 million people in the United States.
Back to Corporate America’s big pay raises for their CEOs.
The top earning CEO in 2010 was John Hammergen of McKesson Corporation, getting $145 million, not counting his stock options or retirement benefits! According to GMI, McKesson has essentially lied about how much they paid Hammergen. They reported they paid Hammergen only (hmph, ‘only’) $46.1 million.
GMI researchers said McKesson refused to explain the difference. GMI says Hammergen not only got $145 million in pay, he got $112 million in stock options, a retirement plan worth $13.5 million, and, if he ever got fired his severance package is worth $469 million! For getting fired!!! And the right wing neo-conservative ass holes complain about the average unemployed worker being on unemployment pittance (it certainly is not a “benefit”)!!!
Just like it says in HR 1905, we are slaves!