This writer has loved professional football and baseball my whole life. Going with my father, little baseball glove in hand, to watch Dem Bums at Ebbets Field in the mid 1950s was such a joy. In those days the players were getting royally screwed by the owners, so much so that most of them needed off season employment to make ends meet. Ditto for pro football players, as the college game dominated fan support and revenue up until the early 60s. Now the ‘ worm has turned’. With Aaron Rogers of the Green Bay Packers earning mega money ( $ 50 million per year) and the Yankees Aaron Judge now earning $ 36 million per year ( on a 9 year deal) their compatriots are doing well themselves. In the NFL the median salary is close to $ one million per year. In Major League baseball it is $ 4 million annually. Don’t just start pointing fingers at the players yet. Of course, the team owners are mostly all billionaires who are making so much money from the sport that they can afford to pay those salaries. The television networks are also raking in the moolah like never before. And who pays for all this wealth? You do, sucker fans and sucker customers of their advertisers.
Wherever you look, whether it be movies, sports, television shows, the Super Rich have their hands in our pockets, from team owners, athletes, entertainers or media executives. We pay as they play! Obscene! Between outrageous cable television bills to the ticket costs for events, and of course all those licensed products, working stiffs must pay the piper. These Super Rich are not even the so called one percent- rather the 1/4 of one percent. Is that enough to piss you off? And don’t ever think that your elected officials, many of them also mega millionaires, will come to our defense. As we said in Brooklyn: ‘ Forgedaboutit’! Both political parties are so far up the rear end of the Super Rich that it is a wonder they can even breathe!
You turn on the boob tube to check out what they now call ‘ News Talk Shows’. If you support either of the ‘ Two Party / One Party Cabal the media personalities you celebrate are NOT like you! Going by last year’s information : Sean Hannity, coming off like everyman, earns around $40 million. Anderson Cooper, who seems to ‘ Bleed for you’ earns $ 12 million. Joe Scarborough, sitting next to his wife Mika Brzezinski ( daughter of the super Neo Con Zbigniew Brzezinski, earns $ 8 million. Maria Bartiromo, who obviously forget her working stiff Brooklyn roots, is the business bulldog on cable who earns $10 million. George Stephanopoulos, former advisor to the Clintons and die in the wool Democratic Party minion, earns $ 15 million. Poor little Tucker Carlson, the new king of nighttime cable talk, was earning $ 6 million, but who needs a salary? Little Tucker has a net worth of over $ 500 million from inheritance- aren’t the Super Rich lucky? One of his Fox News cohorts, Bret Baier, who pulls no punches ( says he), earns $ 7 million. MSNBC Neo Con host Rachel Maddow earns $ 7 million and gets millions of dollars from her book sales ( that her diehard fans run to buy). Need I go on?
Do I even have to go into the corporate world, where the average salary of a Fortune 500 CEOs is over $ 15 million annually? Wherever you look there is a preponderance of Super Rich people controlling our working stiff lives. What must be understood is that all those people make up perhaps LESS than one million of a US population of 330 million. Plus the fact that today’s Super Rich are being taxed at the rate of 37% before massive deductions. In the 1960s the top rate was 90%, and in subsequent decades it usually was anywhere from 70% down to 50%. Something is not right here folks. So, here is a solution, at least a solid one to alleviate things a bit: Legislate a 50% Flat Surtax with NO deductions on ALL income over $ two million a year. Do you mean to tell me that someone making all that money couldn’t be satisfied with keeping HALF of those earnings tax free? Ask any working stiff to be honest enough to acknowledge that they would be happier than a pig in **** having a couple of million dollars each year tax free. Then ask them if Uncle Sam was able to use those extra billions to strengthen our safety net , how would they feel? Because that is what it translates into: more federal funds for so many needed programs.
Fellow working stiffs: STOP CELEBRATING THE SUPER RICH! For every person who became Super Rich through hard work or genius there are a myriad of others who either ‘ Stepped in **** like Tucker Carlson or stepped on others to secure that wealth. So many of us out there are struggling to stay above water financially, or perhaps are OK now, but worry about the retirement days to come. If we are not ready as a culture to transform into more of a Socialist society, then at least cut down the Super Rich a bit.
Philip A Farruggio is regular columnist on itstheempirestupid website. He is also frequently posted on Nation of Change and Countercurrents.. He is the son and grandson of Brooklyn NYC longshoremen and a graduate of Brooklyn College, class of 1974. Since the 2000 election debacle Philip has written over 500 columns on the Military Industrial Empire and other facets of life in an upside down America. He is also host of the ‘ It’s the Empire… Stupid ‘ radio show, co produced by Chuck Gregory. Philip can be reached at [email protected].
