Ronnie Moas, Founder of Standpoint Research and Creator of www.PhilanthropyandPhilosophy.com
On the stock exchange Apple is now valued at $510 BILLION dollars and they sit on $140 BILLION in cash (Q1, 2014). Their assembly line workers in Asia make $3 an hour – and many have already committed suicide. Philip Morris is now valued at $135 BILLION dollars and they continue to operate legally in an industry that is responsible for 5,000,000 deaths annually -- including 500,000 innocent second-hand smoking victims. In China alone, 180,000,000 children are exposed to second-hand smoke. Amazon is now valued at $185 BILLION and their Founder and CEO Jeff Bezos sits on $27 BILLION – his warehouse employees have nothing and barely survive on their ~ $10 an hour wage. This is a disgusting system we have. Extreme capitalism spiraling out of control where shareholders in just these three companies now have $830 BILLION while the Apple assembly line workers and Amazon warehouse employees have NOTHING. As for the death and destruction coming from Philip Morris – 50% of their tobacco customers are either dead or dying.
Income Inequality and Corporate Abuse of Power
It was reported recently that CVS has one of the highest gaps between CEO salary and median employee salary. CEO Larry Merlo -- 2013 pay was $12.1 million. Median employee pay at CVS -- $28,700. The ratio of CEO-to-worker pay is more than 400-to-1. This a disgusting example of the extreme capitalism that is so infuriating and nauseating to me and tens of millions of people in this country. Enough is enough. The shareholders are now sitting on $90 BILLION with Directors and Executives Brown, Piccolo, Benton and Merlo sitting on more than $50,000,000 worth of stock and taking home a combined $25,000,000 in pay for the year. According to my math the score right now is: CVS shareholders: $90 BILLION …Money in the savings accounts of the hundreds of thousands of workers who worked on the bottom half of the CVS ladder in the last few decades: Near Zero.
Consumers need to boycott rackets like this -- or at the very least cut back on what they spend. Employees need to strike until they are treated like human beings and not animals. There is no place in society for this anymore. CVS earned Net Income after taxes of $4.78 billion last year. They could have paid out a $10,000 bonus to every one of their 70,000 employees who are below $12 an hour and still turned a $4 bln profit. Unfortunately the greedy millionaire and billionaire shareholders have a problem with this. They want to continue to stuff their faces and bank accounts while others – the very employees who made the $4.78 billion possible -- struggle to survive.
CVS gives everything to the insiders and shareholders and nearly nothing to the employees –they let the CVS employees work 40 hours a week for $500 that allows them to afford life in a poor, rat, drug, prostitute and roach infested neighborhood. How can anyone with a heart and conscience accept this?
To add insult to injury, CVS is now replacing the cashiers who barely make more than minimum wage with check-out kiosk machines, so that they can turn a higher profit this year (2014) and pay the shareholders and insiders more than what they made in 2013. Kick the cashiers to the street and put more money into the millionaire and billionaire shareholder pockets. There are hundreds of examples of this kind of corporate behavior present. This disgusting system needs to end once and for all – and it is going to!
Capitalism is a RIGGED system
The current system disproportionately benefits a few at the top -- at the expense of the middle and lower classes. The top one percent in this world is now worth $110 TRILLION. The bottom 50% -- 3.5 BILLION people -- has less than $1.7 trillion dollars and lives on less than $4 a day. The top 1% has 65 times what the bottom 50% has. The 100 wealthiest individuals in the world now control more wealth than half of the world population. Anyone who argues against my demand for wealth redistribution is either immoral / unethical / selfish / greedy and/or disconnected financially / emotionally / physically from reality and the poor/unfortunate in this world. I have heard ALL of the arguments against wealth redistribution and none of them make any sense. Mainly, the arguments are coming from the wealthy, and right-wing (conservatives) who are happy with everything as is and do not really give a damn about anyone or anything outside the bubble they live in. Everyone is to share the blame for the condition this world is in with five billion people at, near or below the poverty line. That being said, I pin most of the blame on one group in particular and that is the wealthy conservatives. Their trickle down economic theories are bullsh*t. Nothing ever trickles down to the poor. Starbucks is now valued at more than $50 BILLION – the coffee-bean pickers in Central America have absolutely nothing – barely surviving on $4 a day while the billionaire and millionaire shareholders feast off the bean pickers’ blood, sweat and tears. The American Way. We criticize communists, socialists, Venezuela, Russia, Cuba and others. We are no better than anyone else. Those who support the current system as is, should be ashamed. Do they not have a conscience or know right from wrong? Everyone else must boycott companies who trounce on their employees. In order to get to the top of the mountain, they stepped on many along the way and those at the top will not change until they realize that it is more costly not to change.
