Written by William Scoble   

E PLURIBUS UNUM?

“Ill fares the land…

Bloomberg reported recently, with thinly disguised alarm, that pilots who fly for a regional carrier, Republic Airways, now make a starting (and apparently startling) wage of $40 an hour.

Not too bad, considering, well, considering most recent economic inequality news in America. Pilots with Republic are thought to be positively rolling in dough, and other airlines CEOs are scrambling to figure out how to keep up without impinging too dramatically on their well-upholstered bottoms or, as disguised in the media, their bottom lines.

So - suppose these Republic Airways pilots with the heady wages got to work an impossible 2,000 hours a year - the gold standard of 8hrs/day X 50 weeks, the stuff of legend today - they’d make a before-tax 80 large. Before you wax apoplectic, consider that a) they surely will not (and absolutely should not) work an impossible 2,000 hours; and b) the hours they do work are fraught with responsibilities for their passengers’ lives, as well as for multi-million dollar aircraft. Who knows exactly how many hours they’ll fly, under what serene or harrowing conditions, what unpredictable delays, what sleep deprivations, back-to-back flights, and so forth? So, since they obviously don’t work 2,000 hours, they don’t make $80K, nor anything like it. But they probably beat the US average of $27,000 for a single earner, as reported by the US Census Bureau.

To hastening ills a prey…

For context, perhaps an enlightening comparison. Pick a CEO of a Hedge Fund, or a bank…any one of a hundred. Pick, say, Jamie Dimon of JPMorgan/Chase, number 16 on the list of the most richly rewarded CEOs. Dimon seems like a decent sort. Must be plenty smart. He has responsibilities, to be sure, to his shareholders, and one assumes that they are properly demanding of the safe, responsible piloting of their enterprise. Or not. At any rate, it seems that Jamie flew the ship a bit too high or too recklessly last year - or so the pesky regulators at the SEC contend - and they clipped his wings to the tune of thirteen billion - with a ‘b’. Well, not his wings, of course, but rather those of his employer, the bank. What on earth happened to the proverbial buck stopping at the head guy’s desk? Oh, please! Sooo last century.

Nevertheless, one might reasonably suppose that any employee - for such Dimon is - might find him or herself severely reprimanded; 13 billion, after all, is fairly serious money, even in today’s stratospheric financial climate.

But, no. Dimon’s Board of Directors did not see it that way. Rather than a reprimand, he was given a reward: his total disclosed compensation for 2016 was increased from a paltry 13 million last year to an oxygen-free $27,701,709. Why? Because the profit under Dimon - garnered by improper means according to even the highly elastic standards of the SEC - was apparently so large that a 13 billion dollar fine was merely chump change. Make the bucks, pay the fine. Who questions the old adage: It is easier to get forgiveness than permission?

So, it was reported a few weeks back, Jamie Dimon has just now officially become a billionaire, courtesy of the banking business. One lousy billion. Ho-hum. And how does his 27 million dollar package break down? Well, if he worked the now-mythical 2,000 hours a year, that would be just a bit over 13,500 dollars an hour, every hour of every work day. But, like millions of Americans, albeit for vastly different reasons, Jamie Dimon surely does not work a 40 hour week. So he will earn in maybe an hour or two what the average American takes home in a full year. Wait - did I just say “earn”? How easily one falls into euphemism. “Get” is the appropriate term; one wonders what anyone could possibly do on this planet to “earn” $13,500 an hour. Cure cancer? Make peace among all nations? End hunger throughout the world? Only maybe.

So what work of value to the ordinary American, what products, what material benefits, what goods and services do Dimon and his bank contribute to the commonweal?

Well, hardly anything at all. He and his bank are engaged in the financialization of the American economy, which is to say they use money to make money, while providing hardly anything of substance. It could be likened to a huge poker game, a hermetic operation, nothing in, nothing out - except gigantic amounts of money for the very few. As I said, Dimon seems like a pretty stand-up guy - savvy, at any rate. And who among us would turn down 27 million? But the system that provides it? What outrage is excessive?

Where wealth accumulates…

However, as noted, Dimon is only a lowly #16. The others will surely stupefy - if we have any capacity for stupefaction left. Just above Dimon on the list is Philippe Dauman of Viacom, whose compensation of $44,344,858 nearly doubles Dimon’s. At # 13, Disney’s Robt Eiger at $46,497,018 - maybe more than all Disney’s worker bees combined? But with #5 Satya Nadella at Microsoft, we are in another realm altogether: $84,308,755.

Finally, deserving a paragraph all his own, is David Zaslav of Discovery Communications, who tops the list at an astronomical $156 million. Who can begin to comprehend this figure? It is nearly 6 times what Dimon takes home - a staggering 80,000 clams every hour for 2,000 hours. This is enough chowder for many, many multitudes, inviting biblical comparison.

And men decay.” (Oliver Goldsmith, 1770)

Who doubts that the multitudes could use help? In the richest country in the history of the world, there are 47 million people needing food stamps, 27 million without health insurance, 1 in 5 children living in poverty, and a true unemployment rate of at least 10% - by some measures double that. In only a very few selected locales has the minimum hourly wage been bumped to $15/hr. The leading contender for the Democratic nomination for President of the United States - with a personal net worth of some $45,000,000 - thinks that is too high, is against it.

Note that all figures above are only yearly compensation - not net worth. In that category we find the 16,000 richest Americans with wealth equal to the bottom 256,000,000…

And that is the point - and I do hope you’ve seen it coming: It’s not only that the few make so much; it’s that the many make so little by comparison. I do not begrudge Dimon and the others a nickel. But where’s the E Pluribus Unum concept? The core concept of the United States? Gone? Forgotten? The commonweal abandoned? We are many - to be sure - but who could honestly say that we are remotely close to being one people in opportunity? Not outcome. Just opportunity.

Come to think of it, perhaps those pilots at Republic Airways are not so overpaid after all.