Voters in Greece have overwhelmingly rejected the austerity politics of the past three years.  Voters in France agree.  In the UK the governing Conservative-LibDem coalition lost local elections over austerity policies that have plunged the UK back into recession.  A battle over austerity even forced the collapse of consensus government in the Netherlands.  Irish voters have their say on European austerity May 31.

On the other hand bond markets are demanding higher and higher interest rates as the price of financing Europe’s debt as fears of default mount.  The battle lines have been drawn in Europe’s Austerity Wars.  It’s the voters versus the bond markets, and in the short term the bond markets are winning.

Just who are “the markets”?  There are two main groups of investors in Europe’s government bond markets.  The first are Europe’s big banks.  Banks understandably want to be repaid for the loans they make, and they should be repaid.  European countries should institute financial transactions taxes, clamp down on corporate tax avoidance, and impose windfall taxes on bankers’ bonuses in order to raise the money to repay the banks.

Better yet: to reduce tax evasion, European countries should give the European Union the right to collect these taxes at the pan-European level, then put the money collected into a pan-European fund to help out countries in need.

Austerity is nothing more than a way to make sure that banks and vulture funds get paid.

The second main group of bondholders are the vulture funds.  These funds buy up the distressed debt of troubled countries like Greece, Portugal, and Spain at bargain prices, then push for full payment.  This second group has no moral right to full payment.  Where vulture funds have bought bonds at a discount, governments should simply tax them to make up for the discount.  Making money through speculation is, frankly, speculative.  Speculators have no inalienable moral right to a tax-free profit.

Austerity is nothing more than a way to make sure that banks and vulture funds get paid.  It’s about deciding who deserves more of society’s limited resources and who deserves less.  Put that way, it’s hard to see how anyone can think that hedge funds deserve more and minimum wage workers deserve less.  If the law implies a different answer, then the law should be changed.

If a country decides that its contracts are sacrosanct, that’s fine.  Then the contracts must be paid.  But who should be made to pay them?  That’s also for the country to decide.  If justice demands it, a 50% tax on bond interest can be passed and the proceeds used to pay the interest on bonds.  A constitution might require a country to pay its debts, but there’s no constitution in the world that specifies who must be taxed to pay them.

European Austerity: Who Should Pay? is an article on Inequality.org.

Epidemiologists — the scientists who study the health of societies — first began documenting the impact of economic inequality on how long we live a few decades ago. In more equal societies, considerable research since then has shown, people live substantially longer and healthier lives.

How long does the harmful health impact of inequality take to kick in?

And this phenomenon, epidemiologists add, doesn’t just involve the poor. If you have a middle-class income in an unequal society, you’re likely going to have a shorter life span than a middle-income person in a more equal locale.

Why does inequality undermine the health of people who live amid it? Some scientists have emphasized the political dimension.

The more wealth concentrates at the top, these analysts posit, the more the wealthy separate from the rest of society — and the more the wealthy wield their power to feather their own nests at the expense of investments in health and other public services that could help a broader public.

Other analysts emphasize the breakdown in social cohesion that accompanies growing inequality, and still others emphasize the constant stress that ever wider gaps in income and wealth invariably create. Those without great income and wealth come to feel under ever greater pressure to get it — and feel increasingly like failures when they don’t.

But one nagging question has gone largely unanswered in the epidemiological research: Just how long do the negative impacts of inequality take to kick in?

Ohio State University sociologist Hui Zheng has just published new research that takes that question on. He has crunched, over the course of his research, data from two decades of U.S. National Health Interview Survey results and analyzed 79 previous epidemiological studies on income inequality and health.

The negative health impact of growing inequality in any one year, the research shows, start appearing five years later.

Some of these previous studies, Zheng notes, have attempted to match the timing of spikes in death rates to increases in inequality. But these studies have either allowed a mortality follow-up period “too short for income inequality to exert its impact or too long for income inequality to maintain its influence.”

Ohio State’s Zheng has endeavored to avoid these pitfalls and tease out the specific annual impact of growing inequality. And how does Zheng accomplish that feat? If you don’t particularly relish diving deep into data, you probably don’t want to ask. On the other hand, if “time-varying person-specific covariates” do fascinate you, you’ll want to jump into Zheng’s fine print.

But Zheng has also taken pains to make his conclusions accessible. The negative health impact of growing inequality in any one year, he sums up, will start appearing five years later. This impact will peak at seven years and then begin to fade at a dozen.

Of course, if inequality keeps increasing year after year, the fading will never take place. But inequality doesn’t have to keep increasing. We can indeed reduce inequality — and live healthier lives as a result.

We had better start that reducing. None of us, after all, are getting any younger.

For more background on inequality and health, including a comprehensive Annual Review of Public Health article published earlier this year, check the resource section of the University of Washington-based Population Health Forum.

An Epidemiological Stopwatch on Inequality is an article on Inequality.org.

On every day of the year, save one, America’s corporate CEOs can confidently strut about and face no open, unscripted public challenge. That one: the day their annual corporate shareholders meeting takes place.

CEO pay critics have a new weapon in their arsenal, ‘say on pay.’

On that dicey day, in theory at least, America’s top corporate executives actually have to face Americans they can’t boss around or defiantly ignore.

All this makes the annual shareholder meetings that blossom every spring a prime stage for political theater, a wonderful opportunity to spotlight corporate greed grabs and the senior execs who make them.

Activists of the Occupy Wall Street movement have this spring been seizing this opportunity, week after week, at the annual meetings of companies that have ranged from Wells Fargo and Verizon to General Electric and Bank of America. Their Occupy movement protests have made headlines coast to coast.

But some CEO critics this spring have had more than political theater on their minds. They’ve been seeking to actually change corporate behavior, particularly on executive pay, via ballot battles on shareholder annual meeting resolutions.

These critics have a new weapon in their arsenal. The two-year-old Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act gives shareholders the right to hold advisory votes on top executive pay plans.

Last year, the first with this “say on pay” mandate in play, shareholders voted no on pay plans at 36 U.S. companies. Shareholders so far this year have delivered as many as 14 no verdicts, reports compensation analyst Broc Romanek, most famously at the annual meeting of the bailed-out banking colossus Citigroup.

Some observers see a veritable business revolution unfolding right before our eyes.

These votes, shareholder advocate Greg Ruel claimed last week, have America’s corporate elite, running scared. Top execs are “taking the non-binding say on pay vote very seriously” and accepting “undeniable” change in CEO pay policy.

Some observers of our corporate world even see a veritable business revolution unfolding right before our eyes.

“The weapons might be proxy forms rather than Molotov cocktails, and the rebellions might be staged in hotel conference rooms rather than on the streets,” as Wall Street Journal MarketWatch analyst Matthew Lynn gushed Wednesday. “But there is still a whiff of insurrection in the air.”

Other analysts are hearing echoes of Tahrir Square. They’ve taken to calling the current round of corporate annual meetings our “shareholder spring.” Even Felix Salmon, the widely respected and normally unflappable Reuters financial analyst, is sensing a fundamental shift.

Corporate boards, Salmon wrote last week, are now realizing “they answer to shareholders, and that the biggest shareholders — pension plans, mutual funds, that kind of thing — are ultimately representing the interests of the 99 percent.” With shareholders mobilizing, contends Salmon, CEOs who’ve been awarding themselves “ever more obscene quantities of money” now know their “gig is up.”

CEO pay down the road stands poised to escalate even more sharply.

In fact, despite the ‘say on pay’ hoopla, the CEO “gig” is still going strong. The most notorious of America’s CEOs — the execs who run the nation’s top banks — are doing just fine. Bank CEO pay, reports the American Banker trade journal, rose a median 16 percent in 2011, the first year with “say on pay” on the books and the same year that bank stocks lost an average 23 percent.

Overall U.S. chief executive compensation, adds GMI Ratings, jumped over 15 percent in 2011, about 15 percent more than overall share values. And CEO pay down the road, GMI observes, stands poised to escalate even more sharply. Top execs are sitting on a “sleeping time-bomb of stock option grants.”

Back in 2009, GMI’s Paul Hodgson explains, corporate boards reacted to Wall Street’s nosedive by showering top execs with “mega” grants of stock options. Execs who had been receiving 200,000 option grants annually when their company shares were fetching $50 would suddenly — with their company shares selling for only $10 — find their pockets stuffed with a million option grants.

Today, with those $10 shares now back at their pre-crash $50 level, these fortunate execs now stand to pocket $40 million in profits on their 2009 options.

The mainstream shareholder movement, unfortunately, buys into the CEO ‘performance’ line.

Corporate flacks will no doubt defend those windfalls as “performance” related. Executives who “perform” and raise their share price, the argument goes, deserve all the good fortune that comes their way. The mainstream shareholder activist movement, unfortunately, buys into this “performance” ethos.

One shareholder movement stalwart, the advisory firm Investor Shareholder Services, counts as progress any move that ties CEO pay to “performance” — and won’t recommend a no “say on pay” vote, notes analyst Steven Davidoff, if a corporate board has tied most of its CEO pay to a performance “metric,” even if the resulting payout to the CEO could mount into the tens of millions.

But not all activists in the shareholder wars are swallowing the “pay for performance” line. True enterprise success, as AFL-CIO president Richard Trumka is emphasizing, hinges on far more than what the “performance” of any single executive might contribute.

“If a CEO is treated to a windfall after a profitable year, there is no good reason for others at the same company to be left in the dust with minimal raises or no raises at all,” Trumka observed earlier this month. “Ultimately, the economic prosperity of our country is a shared effort, and it should be a shared reward.”

That reward over recent decades, of course, has been anything but shared. Back in 1980, the latest data show, CEOs averaged just 42 times U.S. worker pay. Last year’s average: 380 times.

True enterprise success hinges on far more than what the ‘performance’ of any single executive might contribute.

America’s unions and other public interest groups active in Americans for Financial Reform are now pushing to have a “shared success” framework built into corporate compensation. More specifically, they want individual U.S. corporations measured by a “pay ratio” yardstick.

This “pay ratio” measuring should already be taking place. The same Dodd-Frank legislation that requires “say on pay” also requires publicly traded corporations to annually disclose the ratio between their CEO and worker pay.

This disclosure, notes the AFL-CIO’s Trumka, would make for “a simple and easy way to encourage companies to consider CEO pay in the context of their entire workforce and restrain the level of CEO pay.”

But America’s power-suit brigades have no interest in restraining CEO pay, and they’ve been feverishly lobbying to derail the Dodd-Frank pay-ratio mandate. The Securities and Exchange Commission, the federal watchdog agency with authority over Wall Street, has so far played along with the derailing, by dragging its feet on writing the regulations necessary to enforce pay-ratio disclosure.

The AFL-CIO and other groups are demanding that the SEC move swiftly to issue those regulations and allow the Dodd-Frank disclosure to begin. They’ve organized a public campaign to help speed that demand. And some top media editorial writers are now actively backing the disclosure push.

This drumbeat for a pay-ratio standard — beyond the “pay for performance” metrics that CEOs can so routinely game — figures to pound still louder in the months ahead. That’s because newly elected French president Francois Hollande has pledged to apply a 20-to-1 ratio between the pay of top executives and workers at corporations where the French government owns a controlling interest.

Applying this ratio would drop CEO pay at the French utility giant EDF from about $2.1 million in U.S. dollars to under $700,000.

U.S. federal officials, with Dodd-Frank’s pay-ratio disclosure mandate enforced, could easily press for the same standard at bailed-out corporations where American taxpayers still hold a shareholder stake. With Dodd-Frank’s pay ratio in effect, even stronger steps would become feasible.

Congress, for instance, could deny government contracts to U.S. corporations whose top executives are taking home over 20 or 50 or 100 times what their workers are making. That sort of move just might give us a real “whiff of insurrection.”

Will CEO Pay Excess Outlast Our ‘Shareholder Spring’? is an article on Inequality.org.

Most other European countries are suffering, even if they’re not facing debt crises.  France has just kicked out its austerity president, and other countries look to follow.  The popularity of Britain’s austerity government is at an all-time low, and even in Germany Chancellor Angela Merkel is not immune from criticism.

If Germany has avoided the worst of the European downturn, it’s only because Germany has been in austerity mode for the past 12 years.  That’s how long it’s been since the average German worker has gotten a raise.  If Greek and Irish workers are being forced to give up a decade’s gains, German workers never had the gains in the first place.

It’s a sad and strange world that makes a virtue of austerity-chic terms like “government cutbacks” and “wage moderation.”  In a healthy world, government services expand.  In a healthy world, wages go up.  Government cutbacks and wage moderation are only virtues for the rich, not for the rest.

It’s a sad and strange world that makes a virtue of austerity-chic.

Take HSBC, Europe’s richest bank.  For the first quarter of 2012 HSBC reported a profit of almost $7 billion.  Its executives stand to benefit enormously from the UK government’s proposed reduction in the top individual tax rate from 50% to 45% (with an eventual target of 40%).  Do HSBC bankers care much about cuts in low-income housing allowances, student tuition assistance, and social services?  Probably not.

On the other hand, by cutting 14,000 jobs in 2011 HSBC has contributed mightily to the very social problems that government exists to solve — and that the current British government shrinks from solving.

Banks like HSBC can only make profits when their debtors repay their loans — and that means governments.  Europe’s austerity budgets have clearly set national priorities to put debt repayment first, low taxes for the wealthy second, and the good of everyone else last.  That recipe serves the rich very well, but it doesn’t serve anyone else.

These policies are certainly driving levels of inequality in Europe up toward American levels.  Statistics are only released with a time lag of several years, but the impacts of austerity are obvious.  Europe’s austerity policies are making the rich richer and everyone else poorer.  The European Union, the European Central Bank, and Europe’s establishment political parties seem to be doing everything they can to turn Europe into a new United States.

The United States has been in permanent austerity for so long that we have forgotten what normal once looked like.

Lest Americans cheer that outcome, Americans should understand that American wages have been stagnant for almost forty years.  The United States has been in permanent austerity for so long that we have forgotten what normal once looked like.  Germany has been following in America’s footsteps for 12 years, the rest of Europe for two or three.  But American workers have been treading Austerity water for decades.

America’s political system has become so dysfunctional that Americans may no longer have a choice.  It’s austerity or emigration.  As France’s voters have shown, Europeans at least have a choice.  Europe hasn’t yet passed the point of no return.  Europe can follow America down the river to a premiumized world for the few and perdition for the many, or Europe can return to sanity.

European austerity is a transparent ploy for profitability being made by wealthy banks, bankers, and investors at the expense of European populations.  European voters can still reject this future for their continent.  Europeans must have the courage to take a stand for themselves, and for the future of the world.

Someone somewhere must decide whether our societies are to be governed by the people, for the people or by the market, for the market.  Many Americans are heartbroken that it’s not America taking this stand.  But if America won’t, someone else must.  Liberté, égalité, fraternité?  Bonne chance.

European Austerity: Following in America’s Footsteps is an article on Inequality.org.

By Sam Pizzigati

Back in 1863, in the middle of the Civil War, a short story took the American reading public by storm. Edward Everett Hale’s “The Man Without a Country” told the tale of a poor treasonous soul sentenced to spend the rest of his life endlessly sailing the seven seas, in perpetual exile, as a prisoner aboard Navy warships.

The number of Americans who’ve formally renounced their U.S. citizenship has jumped by over seven-fold.

How sad, sighed 19th-century Americans.

How quaint, muse many of our 21st-century super rich. These awesomely affluent simply do not see statelessness as a penalty. They see statelessness as a goal.

And the ranks of our contemporary “men without a country” are increasing. The number of Americans who’ve formally renounced their U.S. citizenship has jumped by over seven-fold, from 235 in 2008 to 1,780 last year.

The spark for this surge in statelessness? Since 2008, U.S. tax officials have been endeavoring to clamp down more firmly on overseas tax evasion. Swiss private banks, for instance, have come under new pressure to divulge data on the millions wealthy Americans have stuffed in secret accounts.

That pressure has some of those wealthy irritated enough to renounce their ties to Uncle Sam. The cost to renounce: a $450 paperwork fee and an “exit tax” on unrealized capital gains for renouncers who hold assets worth over $2 million — or have paid over $151,000 to the IRS in any recent year.

But the affluent who’ve gone to the trouble of formally renouncing their citizenship make up just a tiny share of what the Financial Times has labeled the “stateless super rich.” These uber wealthy have no interest in the notoriety of renunciation. They just live their lives as if they had no nation to call their own.

Most uber wealthy have no interest in the notoriety of renunciation.

The most celebrated of these casually stateless? That would have to be Nicolas Berggruen, a 52-year-old worth over $2.3 billion who has spent the last decade hopping the world from one five-star hotel to another.

The German-born Berggruen grew up in Paris and went to college in New York. He made a fortune in hedge funds and now hobnobs with world political leaders and Hollywood celebrities. Reporters have dubbed him the “homeless billionaire.”

Few stateless super rich follow Berggruen from hotel to hotel. Most all of the vagabonding wealthy have personal residences. Lots of them.

Typically, the Financial Times reported last month, a stateless super-rich household will have one or two properties in their “country of principal residence,” another in London, New York, or some other “global city,” a “holiday home” in a soothingly warm climate, and maybe still another in the Alps. They’ll shift their household, by season, from one to the other.

Among the super rich, this perpetual-motion existence has become almost de rigueur, notes Jeremy Davidson, a London property consultant who handles properties that cost at least £10 million, the equivalent of over $16 million.

Price counts as no object in ‘super-prime’ real estate.

“The more money you have,” explains Davidson, “the more rootless you become because everything is possible.”

In their chase after ever fresher possibility, the stateless super rich have created an entirely new real estate market category. Realtors generally define this new “super-prime” category as the top 5 percent of properties in the global urban hotspots the world’s deepest pockets most enjoy frequenting.

Price counts as no object in “super-prime” real estate. The rich see, the rich like, the rich refuse to take “no” for an answer. They merely up their offers, until they get legal title to the prime properties they most covet.

Such “super-prime” bidding wars have kept the price of luxury real estate soaring at the same time the more ordinary global housing market is still reeling. So far this year in Manhattan, four luxury co-op apartments have sold for over $30 million each, a total, notes Crain’s New York Business, that matches the combined sales at that level over the previous three years.

Just how many potential stateless super rich are currently roaming the world? Late last year, the Singapore-based Wealth-X consulting firm put the overall number of global ultra wealthy worth at least $500 million at about 4,650. These super rich together hold an estimated $6.25 trillion in assets.

That’s more than enough, note urban planners, to create havoc in the hotspots where the stateless super rich most often gather. Their gathering, a veritable gentrification on steroids, tends to supersize prices for all sorts of local products and services — and price out local residents.

The massive mansions and apartments pf the stateless super rich also exacerbate local housing shortages — and constitute as assault on any healthy sense of urban community. These super-rich properties sit idle most of the year. The resulting emptiness, notes Columbia University sociologist Saskia Sassen, sucks the neighborhood vitality out of great urban centers.

The super rich don’t notice. Or care. They have no interest in putting down roots. During their brief seasonal sojourns, they live in isolation from the greater community around them. They venture out into local public life only long enough to corrupt it with trinkets for local pols who promise to keep tax rates toothless.

The stateless protagonist in the classic short story Edward Everett Hale penned nearly 150 years ago ends up desperately yearning to rejoin the society he so treasonously spurned. Today’s stateless super rich don’t figure to display any similar yearning. They’re having too grand a time. At our expense.

Wealthy People of the World, Unite — and Party! is an article on Inequality.org.

A brick factory makes 10,000 bricks a day. But then the factory happens on a new brick-making technique, reorganizes production, and starts making 15,000 bricks a day, with the same workers working the same hours.

Over the course of the 1950s and 1960s, Americans shared the wealth that higher productivity created.

Those workers have, in economic terms, become more “productive.” Who should benefit from this increased productivity? Should the benefits flow to the factory owner, as higher profits, or to the workers themselves, as higher wages? Or should that increased productivity translate into lower prices for consumers?

Or should all of the above — owner, workers, and consumers — benefit?

America’s answer in the decades right after World War II: all of the above.

Corporations did just fine in the immediate postwar decades as the nation’s productivity rose steadily. But so did average Americans, as both workers and consumers. Over the course of the postwar years, Americans shared the wealth that higher productivity created. The nation would experience the greatest epoch of middle class prosperity the world had ever seen.

What happened next? That’s the story that Lawrence Mishel, the president of the Washington, D.C.-based Economic Policy Institute, tells in his just-released preview on productivity from the upcoming new edition of EPI’s biannual economic factbook series, The State of Working America.

Mishel tells his story with lots of useful numbers. But we can sum up his data in just three quick words. The sharing stopped. Since 1973, average Americans have realized little benefit from rising U.S. economic productivity.

Average U.S. hourly pay increased by just 39.2 percent between 1973 and 2011, less than half the increase in productivity.

Between 1973 and 2011, that productivity most certainly did rise substantially, by 80.4 percent. That increase, EPI’s Mishel notes, would have easily been “enough to generate large advances in living standards and wages if productivity gains were broadly shared.”

But those gains would not be shared. Average hourly compensation in the United States increased by just 39.2 percent between 1973 and 2011, less than half the increase in productivity.

This 39.2 percent figure actually overstates the increase in compensation average Americans realized — because this hourly compensation total includes the pay of all “employees,” from CEOs to day laborers.

Median U.S. workers — the nation’s most typical workers — didn’t come close to that 39.2 percent. Their pay increased only 10.7 percent from 1973 to 2011.

We have, Mishel explains, two different dynamics at play here. That “wedge” between productivity (up 80.4 percent) and overall hourly compensation (up 39.2 percent) reflects “an overall shift in how much of the income in the economy is received in wages by workers and how much is received by owners of capital.”

Average American working people simply no longer have the economic and political clout they held back in the middle of the 20th century.

Between 1973 and 2011, owners clearly won. Much more of the gains from productivity went to profits and dividends than to wages and salaries.

The second wedge — the gap between “average” hourly earnings (up 39.2 percent) and median hourly earnings (up 10.7 percent) — reflects the exploding gap between executive pay and typical worker pay. Between 1973 and 2011, CEOs clearly won. Their sky-high rewards jacked up our “average” pay figures.

And what about consumers? Average Americans as consumers, like average Americans as workers, haven’t done so well since 1973. Workers have suffered, Mishel relates, as “the prices of things they buy (i.e., consumer goods and services) have risen faster than the items they produce.”

What accounts for all these “wedges” since 1973? Average American working people simply no longer have the economic and political clout they held back in the middle of the 20th century. The shrinking percentage of Americans who belong to trade unions has left collective bargaining a rarity in the private sector.

And without strong unions on the nation’s political stage, basic labor standards — like the minimum wage — have lost much of their capacity to guarantee workers a fair share of the wealth that increasing productivity creates.

So what does the future hold? Probably continued higher productivity. But that higher productivity, EPI’s Mishel reminds us, won’t translate into better lives for all Americans — unless we share the wealth that higher productivity creates.

Why So Few Celebrate Our Rising Productivity is an article on Inequality.org.

Better living through chemistry. So promised the flacks for DuPont over a generation ago. Our corporate flacks today have a much jazzier message. Better living through gadgets — the smart phones and tablets and whatevers that almost all of us obsess over.

Imagine no more wasted minutes waiting endlessly at bus stops.

These gadgets certainly can perform wonders. In San Francisco, for instance, a small band of volunteers last summer created an Apple iPad app that can track the whereabouts of every city bus in “real time.”

Imagine that. No more wasted minutes waiting endlessly at bus stops. Smoother commutes for passengers, easier trouble-shooting for bus system managers. Better living indeed.

The folks at San Francisco’s Municipal Transportation Agency couldn’t agree more. They can’t wait to put the new app into operation. Unfortunately, they can’t afford to put the new app into operation. The agency, an official explains, is running millions over budget and can’t come up with enough dollars “to buy the iPads required to run the software.”

Why the shortfall? The short answer you’ll never hear a bureaucrat give: class war. The long answer: Our world’s incredibly unequal distribution of wealth and power is keeping us from enjoying better lives through gadgets, chemistry, and just about everything else that ought to be improving our human condition.

Let’s start our San Francisco transit backstory with that Apple iPad. At the end of last year, notes Economic Policy Institute analyst Ross Eisenbrey, Apple was selling the iPad to wireless carriers for an average $630 per unit.

Most all high-tech giants are exploiting workers and fleecing consumers — and handsomely rewarding those execs who exploit and fleece.

What made the gadget so costly? Not labor costs. Apple’s Chinese manufacturing supplier, the notorious Foxconn high-tech factory colossus, was shelling out only $15 per unit to the workers who were actually making the iPads. An additional $296 per unit was going for components and other costs.

That left Apple, back in the United States, with a profit of $319 per every $630 iPad sold. Profits this ample have made Apple’s executive brass enormously rich.

Apple top dog Steve Jobs passed away last year with a fortune estimated at $8.3 billion. His successor, Timothy Cook, inked a pay deal last summer worth $378 million. Cook “makes in 2 hours and 12 minutes,” the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette noted last week, “what the president of the United States makes in a year.”

Apple, of course, hardly stands alone in the high-tech world. Most all America’s high-tech giants are exploiting workers and fleecing consumers — and handsomely rewarding those execs who do the exploiting and fleecing.

We don’t have overall high-tech industry executive pay figures in yet for 2011. In 2010, Silicon Valley’s top execs pocketed paychecks up an average 37 percent.

But exploiting and fleecing, we need to keep in mind, haven’t just made high-tech execs exceedingly rich. The wealth this exploiting and fleecing have generated has left high-tech movers and shakers extraordinarily powerful in the political sphere as well, powerful enough to carve mammoth loopholes into the tax code.

America’s top 30 tech companies paid on average only 16 percent of their 2011 profits in income tax.

How deep do those loopholes go? The California-based Greenlining Institute last week revealed that America’s top 30 tech companies paid on average only 16 percent of their 2011 profits in federal income tax, less than half the 35 percent tax rate that corporations are supposed to be paying.

Apple paid out even less. The company pulled in over $34 billion in 2011 profits and paid federal corporate income tax at just a 9.8 percent rate.

High-tech giants are doggedly dodging local taxes as well. In San Francisco last May, elected officials saw fit to exempt the city’s big high-tech players — Twitter and gaming giant Zynga among them — from the full bite of a 1.5 payroll tax supposed to apply to all income, windfall cashouts from stock options included.

Under the new tax exemption enacted in San Francisco last year, individual high-tech powerhouse corporations need not pay more than $750,000 in payroll tax on stock-based compensation.

The impact of that decision? Zynga’s initial public stock sale took place last December and made the company’s CEO a billionaire two times over. On the Zynga stock compensation windfall alone, the high-tech tax break adopted last year cost the San Francisco city treasury at least $6 million.

The revenue this tax break is costing San Francisco’s treasury will rise appreciably higher next year. Twitter, an online goliath that dwarfs Zynga in size, will likely start hawking shares on Wall Street in 2012. The resulting stock option windfalls will be immense.

And that brings us all the way back to the San Francisco Municipal Transportation Agency, the underfunded public transit operation that can’t afford to buy enough iPads to start using that nifty app that would make life so much easier for every city bus rider.

In our contemporary United States, these bus riders simply do not rate. Modern societies, their story reminds us, needs more than great gadgets. We need less inequality. Much less.

Gadgetopia: Chasing After an Elusive Dream is an article on Inequality.org.

Sadly, the lamenters are right.

If only the three big forces of American politics would faithfully serve their constituents, the 2012 election could be about real choice.  Instead, all three forces — the Republican party, and Democratic party, and the elite media — have come to serve only themselves, and by extension the corporations and rich individuals who pay their bills.

To start with the Republicans, the Republican party is nowhere near as extreme as most committed Republicans.  Rank-and-file Republicans’ top issues are, in order, to end women’s right to an abortion, to fire all government employees, to keep all sex offenders in jail forever, and to invade any country suspected of “hating America.”  The Republican attitude toward climate change is “bring it on.”  Republican leaders are far too tame for most active Republicans.  That’s why Mitt Romney had such a hard time in the primaries.

Democrats, on the other hand, really do hold extreme left-wing views.  The vast majority of active Democrats want universal government-provided health insurance — now.  Grassroots Democrats want an end to high pay for bankers and executives.  Democratic unionists want the closed shop.  Nearly all Democrats believe in people’s rights over their own bodies and our shared human responsibility to preserve the natural world.  Many committed Democrats even believe that white America should pay financial reparations for slavery.

A real election in 2012 would see these two visions of the future pitted against each other, a Republican vision of a heavily-armed Dodge City America of gun-toting vigilante lunatics battling it out for supremacy over the Earth versus a Democratic vision of tree-hugging bleeding hearts who want everyone to live together in fairness and harmony.

A real election in 2012 would see these two visions of the future pitted against each other, a Republican vision of a heavily-armed Dodge City America of gun-toting vigilante lunatics battling it out for supremacy over the Earth versus a Democratic vision of tree-hugging bleeding hearts who want everyone to live together in fairness and harmony.

Instead we have Mitt Romney versus Barack Obama.

The elite media is complicit in our lack of choice.  Voters decide elections but the media decides what views will be taken seriously and what views will be derided or ignored.  The candidates fall in line with the media.  Given that the elite media are wholly owned either by large corporations or rich individuals, it is not surprising that the views of large corporations and rich individuals define what is considered reasonable by the elite media.

As Karl Marx wrote in 1846, “the ideas of the ruling class are in every epoch the ruling ideas.”  In practical terms this means that a Constitutional amendment to ban abortion — a staple of grassroots Republican politics since the late 1970s — has never been put forward by Republican politicians, even when they controlled all three branches of government.  Similarly, no Democratic president since Franklin Delano Roosevelt has raised taxes on the rich.  On the contrary: in December 2010 President Obama extended the Bush tax cuts.

What America deserves is a straight-out choice between the extreme right and the extreme left.  I sincerely believe that given the choice, few Americans would choose the right.  A lot more Americans want to plant trees than cut them down.  Unfortunately, the Republican party, Democratic party, and elite media won’t give us that choice.  The only choice they’ll give is between pro-wealthy Barack Obama and actually wealthy Mitt Romney.  It’s the only “respectable” choice.

Give me a Democratic politician who’s willing to speak for Democratic voters to run against a Republican politician who’s willing to speak for Republican voters.  At least the Republicans have their Michelle Bachmanns, Rick Santorums, and Sarah Palins.  Who speaks for grass-roots Democrats?  If people would they might find themselves wildly popular — if the elite media would let them be heard.

Gun-Toting Vigilante Lunatics versus Tree-Hugging Bleeding Hearts is an article on Inequality.org.

Every once in a while, our plutocrats drop all democratic pretense and arrogantly offer up a raw display of their ample political might. One such display came last week. On Monday, a proposal to fix a minimum tax on America’s rich — the “Buffett rule” — went nowhere in the U.S. Senate.

The latest IRS estimate, released this past January, puts the tax gap — the difference between taxes owed but not paid on time — at $385 billion.

The Buffett rule proposal needed 60 votes to beat back a filibuster. The actual votes the proposal received: just 51.

But last week’s most impressive show of plutocratic power actually came the next day — and made no headlines. On Tuesday, the annual federal income tax filing deadline came and went with America’s super rich once again stiffing Uncle Sam for hundreds of billions of dollars in taxes due.

We’re not talking loopholes here, those entirely legal tax code provisions — like lower tax rates for capital gains — that give the rich preferential treatment at tax time. We’re talking outright tax evasion, the willful misreporting of income.

The IRS periodically tries to measure how much of this cheating goes on. The latest estimate, released this past January and covering 2006, puts the tax gap — the difference between taxes owed but not paid on time — at $385 billion.

Some of this gap represents “innocent” tax return mistakes, the rest outright fraud. Taxpayers at all income levels, of course, cheat. But the only fiscally consequential cheating comes from the super rich. They both cheat at a higher rate than Americans of modest means and — given the enormity of their incomes — deny Uncle Sam far more tax dollars when they do cheat.

Why can’t Uncle Sam get at those lost tax dollars? Have the super rich and their handsomely paid handlers simply become too skilled at squirreling income in tax havens? Do the complexities of the global economy simply make collecting taxes from the rich an impossibly difficult task?

The new IRS task force targeting tax evasion by the wealthy has so far completed intensive audits on a few dozen super rich.

IRS officials certainly don’t think so. In 2009, they confidently launched a new task force dedicated to scoping out the super rich. This “Global High Wealth Industry Group,” the IRS Commissioner Doug Shulman predicted early in 2010, would bring a “game-changing strategy” to the battle against ultra wealthy tax cheats and their most sophisticated tax evasion stratagems.

Now, over two years later, an analysis of IRS data by tax experts at Syracuse University suggests that the tax game hasn’t yet changed. The IRS super-rich task force, reports the Syracuse Transactional Records Access Clearinghouse, has so far completed intensive audits on only a few dozen super rich.

That few dozen represents only about 0.4 percent of the more than 8,300 U.S. taxpayers currently reporting over $10 million a year in income.

On the bright side: The tiny handful of audits the special IRS task force has completed did recover $47.7 million in unpaid taxes. At that recovery rate, if the IRS had completed audits on all the taxpayers making over $10 million, the federal treasury would likely have picked up over $200 billion.

With a return on audit investment this high, why aren’t IRS officials doing more to audit the super rich? Agency officials, for their part, insist they are doing more to make sure the rich pay the taxes they owe. They point to the rising number of traditional “correspondence” and “field” audits on high-income taxpayers.

The IRS is spending less time per wealthy taxpayer on traditional audits.

In 2011, the IRS conducted these traditional audits on 29.9 percent of all taxpayers reporting over $10 million in income, a considerable hike over the 18 percent of these deep pockets audited traditionally in 2010.

But analysts at the Syracuse tax center note that the IRS is spending less time per wealthy taxpayer on these traditional audits, only 2.6 hours, on average, for each by-mail “correspondence” audit and only 31.4 hours on the average “field” audit, down from 41.7 hours in 2007.

The much more intensive audits that the new IRS high-wealth unit conducts, by contrast, can take months of staff time to complete. The agency simply does not have a large enough staff complement to put in that sort of time for more than a relative handful of no-holds-barred audits. The reason: Congress over recent years has consistently declined to adequately fund IRS tax-collection operations.

In just the last two years alone, budget cuts have cost the agency some 3,000 enforcement staff positions. The bigger picture: Just 20 years ago, in 1992, the IRS had 114,758 staff to cover a U.S. population of 249.4 million. In 2011, the agency’s 94,709 staff had to cover a total U.S. population of 312.6 million.

More taxpayers, fewer staff. The tax lawyers, accountants, lobbyists, and private bankers who make up what Northwestern University economist Jeffrey Winters has dubbed the “income defense industry” couldn’t be more pleased. They’re making millions cutting tax corners for the super rich, at precious little risk either to themselves or their clients.

In a fairer tax universe than ours, tax collectors would have all the resources they need to scour the tax returns of the super rich and squash their tax-evasion games. And in that fairer tax universe, tax collectors wouldn’t just scour tax returns. They would scour, just as finely, the haunts of the rich and famous.

In Greece and Italy, two nations with a history of chronic and massive tax evasion by the rich, tax collectors are now doing that broader scouring. They’re checking license plates at elite ski resorts, for instance, to pinpoint high-spenders, then checking the incomes these high-spenders have filed on their tax returns.

Aggressive tactics like these are identifying tax evaders that traditional audits have hardly ever snared.

Could our IRS ever become this aggressive? In Italy and Greece, tax collectors only stopped playing footsie with the wealthy after economic calamity hit. The Greeks and Italians never saw calamity coming. We don’t have that excuse.

So Much Tax Evasion, So Little Accountability is an article on Inequality.org.