If you've missed previous opportunities to tell the SEC to force publicly-traded corporations to disclose the ratio between their CEO's pay and their median worker's pay, then Americans for Financial Reform still helps you do that. Before writing, you might want to check out this fresh new chart from Bloomberg news, which lists the pay disparity between CEOs and median workers at Standard & Poor's top 250 corporations. Long story short: it ain't pretty. Be sure to check out the "comments" offered by the offending corporations, which include variations of "the pay is in line with other executives" (everyone's doing it, so it must be right!), "the pay is performance-based" (their workers' pay doesn't seem performance-based!), "you're counting our CEO's income incorrectly" (a.k.a. "how dare you count our accounting tricks as income!") and "we must retain top talent" (because the architects of economic Armageddon must be "top talent"!). Best one: Wynn Resorts complains that Bloomberg miscalculates their median worker pay figure, such that Mr. Wynn only makes 251 times what his median worker makes, not 499 times as much. Zing! Seriously, either they have no idea how they come off or they don't care how they come off. My money's on the latter.
Meanwhile, the Parents Television Council helps you tell your Congressfolk to support a la carte cable packaging. You'll of course want to amend the PTC's email tool to reflect the fact that Sens. McCain (R-AZ) introduced an actual a la carte cable bill -- S. 912, the Television Consumer Freedom Act -- back in May. If passed, the bill would make it a whole lot easier for you, the consumer, to buy cable channels a la carte rather than just as a huge package. Many folks think hey, I like buying a whole slew of channels relatively cheaply, but many others think hey, this package offers a whole lot of channels I'm never gonna watch, and still others think we ought to be able to refuse to buy channels of which we disapprove, like, well, any of the cable news channels. And I think breaking the "pack" mentality of cable providers is the only way to bring accountability to TV channels -- when the cable channels, for example, see a whole bunch of folks refusing to pay to get them, they'll get the cue to cut with the sensationalism and the shouting and the corporate propaganda, and maybe provide us with some useful information for once. Is that unduly optimistic? Well, I'm an optimist, then. How else would I get through?
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