Like Clockwork
Published by marco on
Accusations fly fast and furious about the mismanagement of car companies and investment banks. Demands are made for reparations, for punishment, for some semblance of shame or accountability on the part of those responsible. Take a $1 salary for a year; forget the exhorbitant bonus for once; tighten your own belt first. Show some humility or basic human decency instead of claiming the market rules above all else like a broken record, as if those of us with principles and ethics care about how justified you feel in your blinkered world-view as you rob us blind.
Amidst all this, we find that, once again, our elected heroes are using their power to pat themselves on the back: Members of Congress Due to Award Themselves $4,700 Raise in 2009 (Market Watch). Said members of Congress would probably gape in amazement that anyone would see anything wrong with their getting a raise, what with how hard they worked all year and it being only 2.8%—barely a cost-of-living increase, really—and hardly worth mentioning. Each member of Congress makes almost $180,000 per year. That’s base salary and not including the rich pension and health insurance benefits and not including proceeds from book deals or under-the-table deals or perks offered by lobbies or speaking fees or anything else that shoots their yearly incomes into the stratosphere.
Remember, too, that they will get this salary for the rest of their lives because winning a seat in Congress is mostly about entitlement and not so much about actual work.[1] It’s about spending the last eight years giving the Bush administration every last little thing it wanted and having the country you see before you today to show for it.
So, yeah, with unemployment in America poised to shoot over 10%[2], benefits and bonuses for mere mortals[3] having disappeared almost entirely—even Googlers are getting one of their shitty phones instead of a bonus—and the whole first world looking like it has a serious Tequila hangover and has just rolled over and figured out why the bed was leaning so precipitiously to one side, it makes sense that Congress gave themselves the same f%$ing raise they think they deserve every year.
They do deserve something for their efforts, though, but more in the form of being the first ones up against the wall when the revolution comes.
[1] Though this sounds like a blanket endictment, it’s really just rounding up. There are some standouts, like Russ Feingold on a good day, Barbara Lee and Dennis Kucinich pretty much every day and, from the Senate, there’s Chris Dodd and good old Bernie Sanders, both of whom have their heads on straight. But those folks are simply drowned out by the majority of egoists.↩
[2] Those projecting only 9% are generously using the heavily massaged numbers from the government, which don’t include people that have been unemployed so long that they no longer receive unemployment checks and people that have given up looking for work.↩
[3] The ass-hats that caused the coming whole recession/depression have squirreled away their gains over the last dozen years. Those who are still employed somewhere are being rewarded handsomely for their dedication in the form of whatever-their-jackass-companies-are-calling-massive-bonuses-this-year, as we’ve repeatedly heard that “executive compensation” will unfortunately not be able to be curtailed in certain cases—which ends up being all of them as the Bush administration smirks.↩