Take a look at the top two stories on todays Detroit Free press front page.

At the same time that Delphi is demanding a 63% pay cut (along with cuts in pensions, vacation, and health benefits) they are giving their top executives a boost in severance packages if they lose their jobs. Here’s a thought if your company is on the verge of bankruptcy, why would you pay them more for helping to ruin the company. If anything they should be cutting their pay and benefits before they ask any rank and file employee to take a pay cut. Until American workers start to rebel against all this corporate thievery, America will just continue it’s decline into irrelevance. This kind of behavior is led right from the top by the likes of George Bush and his cronies.

This must be stopped. Corporate America must be truly reformed. The pay of executives needs to be capped at some reasonable multiple (say 10X) the average of all employees. Stock options if used at all must be declared as an expense and the timeline for excercising those options needs to be extended out to a minimum of 5-10 years to discourage all the short term shenanigans that executives are using to pump their stock prices. And people have to realize that if they are not employed at reasonable wages actually making real stuff, they will not be able to afford to buy stuff.

Finally, it is totally disgraceful that the likes of Bill Ford, Rick Wagoner and others are not speaking out loudly and forcefully about truely reforming the broken health care system in this country. Clearly the for profit health insurance system in this country doesn’t work. The only people who benefit are the shareholders of the for profit companies. Health care should be a basic right. The money spent on health care should be used to provide care not line the pockets of insurance executives. Executives who are whining about health care costs should be yelling the loudest for a single payer system. Clearly the free market has not worked and shows no signs of improving the health care system. I believe in market economies. I am not a communist. But I also believe that markets don’t work for everything. Competition has not lowered costs or improved outcomes for patients. America spends more on health care and has the lowest lifespan and highest infant mortality of any of the major industrialized countries. The health care system needs to be removed from the free market and run for the benefit of the people.

But as I said, unless people rise up and demand some real change America will be an irrelevant third world country in the next 5-10 years. Call your representatives and demand that they ignore the entertainment industry and their demands for more copyright, ignore the wealthy elite and their demnands for more tax cuts, ignore the religious extremists and their demands for a theocracy, and get to work on fixing health care, reducing corporate welfare, do some real reform of minimum wages and social security. The only thing trickling down is the shit and piss of the wealth elites. After all who are they really supposed to represent!