Salaries spike for CEOs that lay-off thousands of workers, while 99ers seeking jobs & Tier 5 suffer

It appears that laying-off workers is one of the best strategies for CEOs to earn outsized salaries. While over 8 million jobs have been lost during this continuing jobless recession, CEOs of major companies have reaped the rewards from those layoffs. 

CEOS earn big salaries amid large layoffs

The 10 highest-paid CEO layoff leaders with firms that let people go between Nov. 1, 2008 and April 1, 2010 are: Fred Hassan, Schering-Plough, earned $49.7 million last year, $33 million after leaving the company when the firm merged with Merck. About 16,000 were laid off; Johnson & Johnson's William Weldon earned $25.6 million, laying off 8,900; Hewlett-Packard's Mark Hurd earned $24.2 million and laid off 6,400; Roger Iger, Walt Disney, earned $21.6 million, let go 3,400; Samuel Palmisano, IBM, $21.2 million, laid off 7,800; Randall Stephenson, AT&T, $20.2 million, laid off 12,300; Michael Duke, Wal-Mart, $19.2 million, 13,350; Alan Mulally, Ford, $17.9 million, laid off 4,700; Louis Chenevert, United Technologies, $17.9 million, laid off 13,290 and Ivan Seidenberg, Verizon, $17.5 million, laid off 21,308.
Five of the 50 top layoff leaders were helped by the financial sector bailout in 2008. Of those, American Express CEO Kenneth Chenault took home the most last year, $16.8 million, including a $5 million cash bonus. American Express has laid off 4,000 employees since receiving $3.39 billion in Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) funding.

At the same time that many of these greedy, parasitic CEOs grab taxpayer funds by using government contracts and government bailouts, the working or laid-off American is suffering from lost and declining wages, no healthcare or high healthcare costs, and income inequality is at a point not seen since the Great Depression.

Let’s take a look at how Americans are faring during this Great Recession while the malevolent CEO is padding his paycheck. 

Suicides Among the Unemployed in America

But looking at individual counties' or cities' data in the U.S., there are ominous signs of a real spike. Some counties show no change. Others show dramatic climbs. In rural Elkhart County, Indiana, where the unemployment rate is 13.7%, there were nearly 40% more suicides in 2009 than in a normal year. In Macomb County, Michigan, where the unemployment rate is also 13.7%, an average of 81 people per year committed suicide between 1979 and 2006. That climbed to 104 in 2008 and to more than 180 in 2009.
The suicide prevention hotlines also show signs of stress. In January 2007, as the recession started, there were 13,423 calls to the National Suicide Prevention Lifeline, a nationwide toll-free hotline. A year later, there were 39,467. In August 2009, the call volume peaked at 57,625.

Tammerlin Drummond: Time to recognize long-term unemployment is a national emergency

FOR MONTHS on end, he had been desperately looking for work to no avail.
Then on March 16, 2009, the 61-year-old man killed himself -- the day before his electricity was about to be shut off and two weeks before he was due to be evicted.

He left a suicide note for his children and a choice of two burial suits. Rep. Anthony Weiner, D-Forest Hills, N.Y., received a letter from one of the man's children who described how the financial and emotional pressures of long-term unemployment had driven his father over the edge. The letter writer did not live in the congressman's district.

Nonprofit braces for influx of unemployed "99ers"

(Harrisburg) -- A statewide nonprofit is preparing to help the more than 157,000 Pennsylvanians who may use all 99 weeks of their unemployment benefits by the end of the year. United Way of Pennsylvania President Tony Ross says the organization will bring together both state and local leaders to aid these people known as "99ers." 

Jobless millions signal death of the American dream 

The headline jobless figure of 9.5% is bad enough but does not begin to convey the problem as it fails to measure those who have stopped looking for work. Over the past three months alone more than a million Americans have fallen into that category: effectively giving up hope of finding a job and dropping out of the official statistics. Such cases now number some 5.9 million and their ranks are likely to grow as millions more find their jobless status becoming a permanent state of hopelessness. Surveys show that with each passing week on the dole their chances of finding a job get slimmer.

Though corporations, especially in the banking sector, are posting healthy profits, they are not hiring new workers. At the same time, government cuts are sweeping through city and state governments alike, threatening tens of thousands of jobs and slicing away at services once thought vital. Schools, street lighting, libraries, refuse collection, the police, fire services and public transport networks are all being scaled back.

America appears to be a society splitting down the centre, shattering the middle class that long formed the cultural bedrock of the country and dividing it into a country of haves and have-nots. "A once unthinkable level of economic distress is in the process of becoming the new normal," warned Nobel-prize winning economist Paul Krugman in a recent New York Times column. Or, as Steven Green, an economics lecturer at Baylor University, put it to the Observer: "We are really in a tough spot right now."

The Root of Economic Fragility and Political Anger

America's median wage, adjusted for inflation, has barely budged for decades. Between 2000 and 2007 it actually dropped. Under these circumstances the only way the middle class could boost its purchasing power was to borrow, as it did with gusto. As housing prices rose, Americans turned their homes into ATMs. But such borrowing has its limits. When the debt bubble finally burst, vast numbers of people couldn't pay their bills, and banks couldn't collect.

Each of America's two biggest economic downturns over the last century has followed the same pattern. Consider: in 1928 the richest 1 percent of Americans received 23.9 percent of the nation's total income. After that, the share going to the richest 1 percent steadily declined. New Deal reforms, followed by World War II, the GI Bill and the Great Society expanded the circle of prosperity. By the late 1970s the top 1 percent raked in only 8 to 9 percent of America's total annual income. But after that, inequality began to widen again, and income reconcentrated at the top. By 2007 the richest 1 percent were back to where they were in 1928--with 23.5 percent of the total.

We all know what happened in the years immediately following these twin peaks--in 1929 and 2008.

Recession hits workers’ paychecks 

Income growth has disproportionately accrued to those at the very top of the scale, not just in the 2000-07 business cycle, but for most of the roughly 25 years preceding it. For example, over the 1989-2007 period, which includes a period of broad-based income growth in the late 1990s, about 56% of all income growth accrued to the upper 1% of households, with more than a third (34.6%) accruing to the top one-tenth of that upper 1%. In contrast, the bottom 90% of households received about 16% of all the income growth. Not surprisingly, the share of income received by the upper 1% hit a peak of 23.5% in 2007 that was higher than in any year since the late 1920s, right before the Great Depression. Three decades of growing disparity laid the foundation for the current Great Recession.

For four out of five unemployed workers, there are no jobs 

The total number of job openings in June was 2.9 million, while Current Population Survey data for that month shows that the total number of unemployed workers was 14.6 million. This means that the ratio of unemployed workers to job openings was 5.0-to-1, a slight improvement from the revised May ratio of 5.1-to-1. Importantly, this ratio does not measure the number of applicants for each job. There may be throngs of applicants for every job posting, since job seekers apply for multiple jobs. The 5-to-1 ratio means that there is literally only one job opening for every five unemployed workers (that is, for every four out of five unemployed workers there simply are no jobs).

Mike here: I could go on and on about the current state of economic disparity between the working class and the CEO class, but I think you get the picture. So let me summarize:

• Many CEOs are rewarded handsomely will multi-million dollar paychecks and bonuses for laying-off workers.
• 99ers – unemployment benefit exhaustees – are increasing in number by upwards of 50,000 a week and there are going to be 157,000 99ers in PA by year’s end.
• Suicides are much higher in high unemployment areas and suicide hotline calls are increasing dramatically.
• The middle class is being shattered by the need for the wealthy and connected class to gain further gains.
• Income disparity between the wealthy and middle class is currently at levels not seen since the 1920s, just prior to the Great Depression. 
• There are five unemployed for each job opening. 

Today must have been a fun-filled day for many CEO as the jobless claims came in at 472,000; a few thousand less than last week’s results. As CEOs reap the rewards of continuing elevated layoffs, the unemployed and middle class suffer with the results. Democracy is the loser in all this as a wealthy and connected few make the rules and the majority live with the consequences. Call it a plutocracy, corpocracy, or oligarchy, but certainly the US is no longer a true democracy.

Keep contacting your representatives or they will ignore your needs even more than they do now. 

I want to apologize again for the poorly planned and implemented Examiner “upgrades.” After months of planning, beta’s and promises, the upgrades have been spotty and the results are mediocre. Writers and readers have been affected by this and I hope that they address the many remaining issues quickly.

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How has unemployment affected you and your family? Have you applied for hundreds of jobs and received no job offers? Have you been rejected for a job because you are unemployed? Have you been rejected for a job because of your credit score? Has age discrimination played a part in your job hunt? Send your letters to mike@layofflist.org.

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Congress.org has a great media contact list:http://www.congress.org/congressorg/dbq/media/
Another media contact list is located at:http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_oet&address=358x1903

Keeping the Tier 5 and extended unemployment issues alive is going to be up to you, so be sure to contact your congressional representatives as often as you can. You need to continue to pressure Congress to act responsibly and to extend benefits for those unable to find work. Send your representative a fax using FaxZero.com. As has been mentioned in the comments section, you can send up to two free faxes a day.

Here's a great site where you can find both state and federal contact information: http://conservativeusa.org/mega-cong.htm

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