How to reverse Bloomberg-era inequality in NYC

New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg's wealth grew to $31 billion during his three terms, while poor people's lives grew more miserable. Al Jazeera reports:

After 12 years of Michael Bloomberg, family homelessness has increased dramatically, rents skyrocketed and the minimum wage froze for the past six years – all while the city's controverisal"stop-and-frisk" policy has been criticized for being disproportionatly applied on minorities and the poor.

New York Teamsters often disagreed with Bloomberg's efforts to increase inequality. They fought his job-killing contract provisions with school bus monitors, his ban on 16-oz. sodas, his tolerance for unequal pay for school safety agents, and his veto of mandatory paid sick leave. Teamster snowplow drivers bore the brunt of a smear campaign (until members of the Screen Actors Guild stood up for them) after Bloomberg botched the city's emergency response to a blizzard. And Teamster art handlers at Sotheby's were incensed by his girlfriend's high-handed treatment of them during a months-long lockout.

The new mayor, Bill de Blasio, has a chance to change the worship of Wall Street at the expense of ordinary New Yorkers. The Wall Street on Parade blog has some suggestions where he can start. We'll share a few with you here: 

• Remove Wall Street personnel from the Lower Manhattan Security Coordination Center. This high tech spy center, monitoring the comings and goings of law abiding citizens in the streets of Manhattan via over 4,000 street cameras is questionable in itself. Allowing staff from Wall Street firms under Federal criminal investigation to sit side by side with law enforcement is an outrage to a democratic society.
• The jailing of peaceful protestors must end and a new era of protecting and enshrining the right to peaceful assembly and protest must begin. This will require a careful and thoughtful vetting of the next Police Commissioner.
• Wall Street’s back-door money coming into the NYPD through its Foundation must end. No more lavish expense accounts for the Police Commissioner; no more $5 million grants from JPMorgan; no more gilded age balls with the social jet set. The NYPD serves the people of New York and its funding must come from all taxpayers with cronyism removed from the equation. The Foundation needs to die a quick death.

All good ideas. Read the whole thing here.

Inequality in Renaissance Italy was nothing compared to today in America

The Medici family home. Today's CEOs are doing even better. 

Inequality in 15th century Italy was nothing like it is today.

Today, it's worse.

Visit the Renaissance palaces of Florence, Italy, and you'll be struck by the fairy tale extravagance of the leading family, the Medicis. You may ponder the unfairness of a system that allowed a lucky few to live in splendor while everyone else struggled to survive.

But consider this: At the turn of the 15th century, Giovanni di Bicci de Medici, the founder of the Medici family fortune, had an annual income of 1,900 florins. The average worker then earned less than 100 florins a year. So the richest guy in town earned 19 times what the average worker earned.

Standard and Poor's 500 CEOs today "earn" an average of 204 times as much as their workers.

A new report unveiled by Bloomberg states the now-former CEO at J.C. Penney Co. made 1,795 times more than the average worker at his stores (43,000 of whom were laid off last year). Meanwhile the CEO at Abercrombie and Fitch Co. made 1,640 times more than rank-and-file employees there.

It's getting worse: A survey of Standard and Poor’s 500 Index companies placed the average multiple of CEO compensation to that of their workers at 20 percent higher between 2011-12 and 2009.

The Bloomberg piece is the latest to show a growing gulf between those in corporate leadership and the employees who work for them. The AFL-CIO’s Executive Paywatch also details the soaring divide between executives and their workers.

While Bloomberg’s study on the topic is insightful, however, it is not a definitive measurement of the CEO-to-worker pay gap. The revamped financial service rules require reporting of CEO-to-worker pay gap numbers. That hasn't happened yet.

Almost three years after Congress ordered public companies to reveal actual CEO-to-worker pay ratios under the Dodd-Frank law, the numbers remain unknown. As the Occupy Wall Street movement and 2012 election made income inequality a social flashpoint, mandatory disclosure of the ratios remained bottled up at the Securities and Exchange Commission, which hasn't yet drawn up the rules to implement it. Some of America's biggest companies are lobbying against the requirement.

"It's a simple piece of information shareholders ought to have," said Phil Angelides, who led the Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission, which investigated the economic collapse of 2008. "The fact that corporate executives wouldn't want to display the number speaks volumes." The lobbying is part of "a street-by-street, block-by-block fight waged by large corporations and their Wall Street colleagues" to obstruct the Dodd-Frank law, he said.

The leading opponent of mandatory pay-ratio disclosure is a Washington-based non-profit called the HR Policy Association, which represents top human resources executives at about 335 large corporations.

Of course, we owe much to the corporate fat cats: the 40-hour work week, vacation, sick time, the middle class.

Oh wait, no we don't...