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While real average hourly earnings for the plantation workers of Slavelandia fell 1.7 percent from January 2021 to January 2022, according to the U.S. Department of Labor, CEOs at the largest 100 companies in the U.S. saw their pay increase an average of 31 percent in 2021, according to a newly released study.
“A lot of these companies did well during the pandemic, that was definitely driving increases in pay,” Amit Batish, the director of content for Equilar, the research firm that conducted the study, said.
The Wall Street Journal reported earlier this month that the median pay for CEOs in the U.S. rose to $14.2 million last year.
The report said most CEOs in the category received a pay increase of 11 percent or more, and one-third of them watched their pay increase by at least 25 percent.
The Trends Journal has reported extensively on how the COVID-19 outbreak widened the gap between the rich and the poor in the country. (See “SPOTLIGHT: THE ‘BIGS’ KEEP GETTING BIGGER” and “COVID WAR: RICH GOT RICHER, POOR GOT POORER.”)
The official poverty rate in 2020 was 11.4 percent, up 1.0 percentage point from 10.5 percent in 2019, the U.S. Census Bureau said. There were 37.2 million people living in poverty, approximately 3.3 million more than in 2019.
As we have reported since governments imposed lockdowns on all non-essential businesses and permitted only the big box stores and other multinational “essentials” to do business when they launched the COVID War, the rich have gotten richer while the rest of the world has gotten poorer.
TREND FORECAST: As Gerald Celente has long said, “When people lose everything and have nothing left to lose, they lose it.” Therefore, as socioeconomic conditions continue to deteriorate, “NEW WORLD DISORDER,” one of our 2020 Top Trends, will escalate as billions take to the streets, demonstrating against the lack of basic living standards, crime, violence, and government corruption.
The Great Divide
Also, the poorer and more desperate people become, the more they will do to flee their homeland, thus increasing the refugee and migrant crisis, which, in turn, will accelerate populist movements in nations not wanting foreigners to enter their country.
Oxfam America conducted a study that found the wealthiest U.S. billionaires are worth a combined $4.7 trillion, which represents a 62 percent jump over the past two years.
Discovery Inc.’s David Zaslav pulled in roughly $247 million and Amazon’s Andy Jassy earned nearly $213 million. The WSJ pointed out that most of their pay was tied up in restricted stock-option awards.
Fortune magazine, citing the U.S. Labor Department, reported that the average hourly wage in the U.S. rose last year about 4.7 percent, which did not keep up with soaring inflation.
The report pointed out that Zaslav pulled in nearly 3,000 times the median salary at the company and Jassy earned about 6,500 times the average salary of $32,855 at Amazon.