CORPORATIONS ARE NOT HUMANS : NOT EVEN CLOSE ---Episode 20

                                                               THE GREAT DIVIDE

   The gap that separates the world's rich and poor, both within and between countries, is unconscionable and growing. In 1992, the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) dramatized the inequity by representing the world's income distribution with a graph in the shape of a champagne glass. 
   The 20 percent of the world's people who live in the world's wealthiest countries receive 82.7 percent of the world's income ; only 1.4 percent of the world's income goes to the 20 percent who live in the world's poorest countries. In 1950, about the time the commitment was made to globalize the development process, the average income of the 20 percent of people living in the wealthiest countries was about thirty times that of the 20 percent living in the poorest countries. By 1989, this ratio had doubled to sixty times. 
   Based on national averages, these figures represent disparities among countries and substantially understate the disparity among people. For example, all Americans are placed in the world's top income category, including the homeless, the rural poor, and the urban slum dwellers. When the UNDP estimated the global distribution based on individual incomes rather than on national averages, the average income of the top 20 percent was 150 times that of the lowest 20 percent.
   Even this figure masks the extreme inequity revealed when the incomes of the top 20 percent are desegregated. Although global data are not available, data from the United States illustrate the point. In 1989, the top 20 percent of American households had an average income of $109,424 a year. However, those households in the eightieth to ninetieth percentiles received, on average, a relatively modest $65, 900. Those in the top 1 percent averaged $559,795---receiving as a group more total income than the bottom 40 percent of all Americans. 
   Yet this is mere pocket change to Wall Street investment bankers such as Michael Milken, who in one year took home from Drexel 
Burnham a salary of $587 million for his labors in peddling junk bonds on Wall Street, and to the chief executive officers of America's major corporations and the top-earning celebrities. In 1992, Thomas F. Frist Jr., CEO of Hospital Corporation of America, led the pack of overpaid American executives with $127 million , nearly 780, 000 times the average per capita income of the poorest 20 percent of the world's people. {This is criminal. HCA peddles health care, not screw drivers or widgets.} The 1992 average take of the CEOs of the 1,000 largest corporations surveyed by Business Week was $3.8 million ---up 42 percent from the previous year. Furthermore, the gap between the pay of top executives and the pay of those who work for them is growing rapidly. In 1960, the average CEO of a major company received forty times the compensation of the average worker. In 1992, he (there were only two women among Business Week's top 1,000 CEOs) received 157 times as much. 
   These well-paid executives are, however, only pretenders to wealth compared with the wealth of those who live by the earnings of their investment portfolios. Forbe's "fortunate four hundred richest people in America" enjoyed an increase in their combined net worth of $92 billion between 1982 and 1993, bringing them to a total of $328 billion ---more than the combined 1991 gross national products (GNPs) shared by a billion people living in India, Bangladesh,  Sri Lanka, and Nepal. 
    Eager to assure its wealthy readers that their good fortune was not at the expense of others, Forbe's prefaced its inventory of the wealthiest Americans with the following caveat : 

     Aha ! Then the redistributionists are right. The rich have gotten richer. Yes and no. The truly rich may have gotten richer, but there's no evidence that their proportionate share of the nation's wealth has grown. The price of admission to the Fortunate Forbe's Four Hundred has increased approximately as much as the stock market, as measured by the Dow Jones index. The tremendous increase in the stock market --- which has rubbed off nicely on the super rich --- rubs off on every pension holder and shareholder in America as well . . . 
   Weep not for the rich. But don't get the dumb idea that they have gotten rich off the rest of us. 

   Surely there were some widow and pensioners of modest means among the beneficiaries of the stock market gains. However, the protestation of Forbe's that equity has been maintained is but one manifestation of the isolation of the Stratos dwellers and their belief that their world is the world. The 400 richest Americans may not have increased their share of total stock wealth, bt apart from stocks owned by pension funds,83.1 percent of the stock market wealth owned by American households is owned by the wealthiest 10  percent. Moreover, 37.4 percent of stock wealth is owned by the richest 0.5 percent.
   From 1977 to 1989, the average real income of the top 1 percent of U.S. families increased by 78 PERCENT, whereas that of the bottom 20 percent decreased by 10.4 percent.Thus the poorest among us became not only relatively poorer but also absolutely poorer. What these figures don't tell us is that these absolute decreases occurred in spite of the fact that those who were employed in 1989 were working longer hours than they had in 1977, and far more families had two people working longer hours than they had in 1977, and far more families had two people working full time as more women entered the workforce. For many U.S. families among the bottom 60 percent, even longer hours and an extra breadwinner were not enough to make up for the decline in wages. 
   The simple truth is that the Forbe'seditors and other Stratos dwellers are prone to ignore is that each time a major corporation announces a cut back of thousands of jobs, the stratos families get richer and the incomes of the thousands of workers whose jobs have been eliminated decline. It is part of an ongoing process of shifting wealth and economic power from those who are engaged in the production of real value to those who already have large amounts of money and believe it is their right to see that those amounts grow without limit, regardless of their own needs or productive contributions. 
   Is it possible for those who sip from the lip of the champagne glass to truly appreciate the lot of the vast mass of humanity that shares only the meager dregs that settle into the stem ? If they were to acknowledge that their own abundance is the cause of the plight of those so deprived, could any person bear the terrible moral burden ? There is substantial incentive to avoid facing such moral contradictions by maintaining the reassuring cultural illusions of Stratos.