I've often complained about the growing income disparity between the "haves" and the rest of us, which seems to be getting worse and worse each year. Repuglicans love to bitch about "income redistribution" which is their way of saying "Democrats will take your middle class money away and give it to poor people." Well, there is income redistribution going on in our country right now. Only it's the other way around. The 95% of us who aren't "haves" are having our income redistributed to the 5% of us who are "haves."

Don't believe me? According to the World Bank, the United States has the highest disparity between the top 20% and the bottom 20% of ANY INDUSTRIALIZED NATION IN THE WORLD. According to the World Bank, the richest 20% of Americans control 46.5% of the wealth. The poorest 20% only controls 5.2%. If you narrow it down the richest/poorest 10%, the haves control 30% of the wealth and the have nots control only 1.8% of it.

In the 1950's a typical corporate CEO would earn somewhere around 15-20 times more than the typical corporate employee. Today, that CEO is making HUNDREDS of times more. Something is terribly, terribly wrong in this country, and its called GREED. Those people at the top can't get enough. And it can only come from somewhere. US. How many yachts do you need? How many houses do you need? How much money is enough?

What I don't understand is this. Logically, it's in the best interest of the wealthy to not have these huge disparities. Income disparity is one of the biggest seeds of revolution. And, on a more practical note, our whole economy is based on having a thriving middle class to buy all this shit. If everyone is selling hamburgers at McDonald's, how will anyone afford buying those computers we don't make anymore? But then, greed doesn't think logically.

What set me off today was I read an article in a trade magazine about what corporate execs in my industry make. One of them, pretty well known, made $35,000,000 last year. And the article said most of that money was in the form of stock options. Well I find that strange since his company's stock went down 47% last year. And the company has never turned a profit. But he made 35 million in stock options.

Stock options are not supposed to work that way. They are supposed to be an incentive to work harder and make the stock go up. If you're not familiar with them here's how they are supposed to work. When someone is awarded stock options, it means they have the option to buy a certain number of shares at a predetermined price. That price is usually the price of the stock in effect that day. So, it is in the best interest of the person to do everything they can to make sure the stock goes up. Because if it doesn't, the options are worthless.

But that's not how it works for the big cheeses. They are given options with a strike price considerably below the current price. So they're options are automatically worth something whether the stock price goes up or down. And of course, they get millions of these options.

It's just another example of how our society is geared to making sure the rich get richer and the rest of us sink.