By Sarah ANDERSON

During the pandemic, low-wage workers have lost income, jobs, and lives. And yet many of the nation’s top-tier corporations have been fixated on protecting their wealthy CEOs, even bending their own rules to pump up executive paychecks.

A new Institute for Policy Studies report finds that 51 of the country’s 100 largest low-wage employers moved bonus goalposts or made other rule changes in 2020 to give their CEOs 29 percent average raises while their frontline employees made 2 percent less.

Among these 51 rule-rigging companies, average CEO compensation was $15.3 million in 2020, while median worker pay was $28,187 on average. The average CEO- worker pay ratio: 830 to 1.

How exactly did these companies rig their CEO pay rules? Let’s look at a few examples.

Hilton CEO Christopher Nassetta had the largest paycheck among the rule-rigging companies. After he failed to meet the goals associated with his multi-year stock awards, the board “modified” the awards by disregarding poor 2020 financial results and changing the performance metrics. Those maneuvers inflated his total compensation to $56 million — 1,953 times as much as the company’s median worker pay of $28,608 in 2020.

At YUM Brands, the owner of KFC, Pizza Hut, and Taco Bell, CEO David Gibbs garnered positive media coverage by donating $900,000 of his salary to pay for $1,000 bonuses for restaurant general managers. But the board changed its bonus metrics to give Gibbs a special cash bonus and stock grant worth more than 2.5 times his voluntary salary cut. This largesse boosted Gibbs’s total compensation to $14.6 million — 1,286 times as much as median worker pay of $11,377. The fast food giant did not offer hazard pay to these frontline employees, whose average wages are just $9.75 per hour, according to Payscale.

At Coca-Cola, none of the top executives met their bonus targets last year either, but the company board used “discretion” to give them all bonuses anyway. For CEO James Quincey, that $960,000 bonus, combined with new stock-based awards, drove his total compensation package above $18 million, over 1,600 times as much as the company’s typical worker pay. In December 2020, Coca-Cola announced plans to cut about 2,200 jobs, or 17 percent of its workforce. About 1,200 of the layoffs will hit U.S. workers.

How did corporations justify such extreme disparity in a year of extraordinary hardship for workers?

The most common defense was the “talent retention” argument. In a report filed with the SEC, for example, Hilton explained that the “projected zero payouts” on the CEO’s performance stock awards would’ve “impaired the awards’ ability to retain key talent.”

This is the Great Man Theory: one heroic individual in the corner office almost single-handedly creates company value, so pay him whatever it takes to prevent him from abandoning ship.

The notion that one CEO is worth hundreds — if not thousands — of times more than their workers has always been absurd. But in the middle of a pandemic crisis, when frontlines employees are demonstrating just how essential they are to our economy and health, it’s even more preposterous.

So what can we do about it?

One bill pending in Congress, the Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act, would use tax policy to incentivize corporations to narrow their pay divides by reining in executive compensation and lifting up worker wages.

Under this proposal, companies with pay gaps between their highest-paid executive and median worker of less than 50 to 1 would not owe an extra dime. Corporations that refuse to narrow their gaps below this threshold would face graduated rate increases starting at 0.5 percentage points on ratios of more than 50 to 1 and topping out at 5.0 percentage points for companies with gaps above 500 to 1.

The Tax Excessive CEO Pay Act would generate an estimated $150 billion over 10 years that could be used to create good jobs and meet human needs. If the bill had been in place in 2020, Walmart, with a pay gap of 1,078 to 1, would have owed an extra $1 billion in federal taxes — enough to fund 13,502 clean energy jobs for a year.

Amazon, with a 1,596-to-1 pay ratio, also would have owed an extra $1 billion, enough to underwrite 115,089 public housing units for a year. (Amazon’s highest-paid exec last year was Worldwide Consumer CEO David Clark, with $46.3 million.)

Home Depot, with a 511-to-1 gap, would have owed an extra $800 million, enough to create 18,329 jobs that pay $15 per hour with benefits for a year.

It’s time for public policy to shift corporate America away from a business model that creates obscene wealth for a few at the top and economic insecurity for so many of the rest of us. By inflating executive compensation while their workers struggled during a pandemic, corporate boards have just strengthened the case for tax penalties on huge CEO-worker pay gaps.

inequality.org

Generally, when reading material of an intellectual nature, the words “growing up in the ghetto” don’t fit very well, however there are some of us who rose far above their station in life and have certain life experiences that may be valid in making an argument. Normally this would not be the case but Coca-Cola’s bizarre anti-“Whiteness” campaign being pushed on their employees has forced my hand to break the rules and break this issue down from a very personal perspective. Coca-Cola’s now infamous PowerPoint-style document is deeply rooted in the mentality of the ghetto – one of hopelessness and entrapment in a wretched existence that no one wants and yet all subconsciously perpetuate that I was born into.

The demographics of my neighborhood radically shifted due to White Flight in the late 80s and early 90s. By my preteen years as a person with a Slavic exterior I was by far in the minority. In high school our region of Cleveland was 55% Black with all other ethnicities combined making up the remaining 45%. This region of America is called the Rust Belt not because the leaves are pretty in fall but because NAFTA and Nixon’s little trip to China resulted in our cities’ factories rotting away from disuse leaving former factory workers to fend for themselves. Long story short, by American standards everyone around me was urban poor. Given time to reflect back on this environment after escaping it for the Motherland (Eastern Europe) you start to see that there are some truly horrible accepted “truths” in the Ghetto that keep things from ever getting better which line up very well with the thinking of the management at Coke.

The most relevant is the age old-question, or should I say accusation, lobbed between my African-American classmates of yesteryear – “Why are you acting White!?”. This phrase was uttered on an almost daily basis when one Black person went beyond the Overton Window’s field of acceptable behavior in the eyes of another, leaning towards this “Whiteness” behavior that is all the rage among today’s trendy self-hating rainbow-haired activist freakshow.

Image: NPR rules Blacks and Latinos who betray them to be Whities – pure bigotry.

On the surface there would seem to be nothing wrong for African-Americans who have for generations not particularly felt welcome on “team America” to want to maintain some sort of cultural cohesion separate from everyone else. It is human nature to want the guys in your tribe to be on the same page. In-group and out-group dynamics are part of human nature, but the problem was the definition of this evil Whiteness.

If we try to imagine stereotypically “white” activities in America we’d probably come up with a list like – bowling, duck hunting, listening to heavy metal. These sort of “redneck” or “blue-collar” things that have the “stain” of the colonizers on them never really seemed to trigger this “stop acting White” response. The Blackness of the people I know who have bowled a perfect game, love shooting bottles with big guns, and drive a massive hillbilly pickup truck has never been questioned. When our caring Liberal friends speak of the horrors of Whiteness they must be referring to something else.

Now if a Black man tries to start a business, speak eloquently, wear a suit or any form of “playing the game” to become successful – that was the ultimate blasphemy in my garbage dump of a neighborhood, where selling “weed” was praised, but the one African-American kid who wore a blazer and tie to school every day caught hell for it. You could brag about the money you made on weekends driving to work at a country club (everyone drove starting at 16), but you’d have to keep your “White” behavior while working there on the down low. “Acting White” is not a localized Cleveland phenomenon but a national cultural tendency from New York to L.A. that even has its own lengthy wikipedia article. It is something hard to explain but the cultural pressure was easily felt. As an outsider I was well aware of this, if I were to have been born a different race I may have felt this influence ten times stronger.

Somehow the idea of becoming successful (outside a few acceptable professions like sports and music) became the ultimate evil in the Ghetto. It is this mindset, whether naturally evolving or being consciously pushed, that results in people in the Ghetto shaming others from childhood into making sure they never even try to leave. It is like some sort of caste system where the “untouchables” work hard to make sure that everyone around them grows up with their hopeless mentality and desire to stay at their exact station in life no matter what.

Image: Coca-Cola’s ideological message to “better” our lives.

Taking a look at Coca-Cola’s presentation we can see the same overall theme – that a condition of total submission is the “cool” way to be. Essentially, all the positions in the list pictured above create a person who is eternally on their knees, accepting all information with zero resistance. This fight against “Whiteness” looks more like an attempt to breed an international multi-class multi-racial ghetto mentality. A person who does not assert any positions and yet openly absorbs information without question is the very definition of subservient and that is exactly whom Coca-Cola’s Liberal management wants in society.

Image: Joe Biden attempted to shame-dominate Black America by saying if you didn’t vote for him “you ain’t Black”.

This path of total submission does not work and the “Ghetto mentality” at its core has become obvious to many successful and intellectual Black Americans. “Whiteness” seems to have little to do with being European but a lot to do with being successful so it is no surprise that there are many who want to push for the opposite, for Blacks to fight and compete at becoming successful too. But those individuals who advocate this “strive to be the best” attitude are generally attacked by those with the cursed mindset for being “race traitors” or “Uncle Toms”, this became especially evident when certain notable Black Americans took the big risk of siding with Trump’s view that the Constitution applies to all U.S. citizens. Fantastic “journalism” like the Atlantic’s “The Black People Who Voted for Trump Know He’s Racist“ may as well have been written by Coca-Cola middle-management for how much it reinforces the Ghetto mentality. NPR tried to push the narrative that celebrities like 50 Cent and Ice Cube voted for Trump because their “monetary goals outweigh his views on where the Black community is” bluntly implying their great success has made them non-Black. The “P” in NPR must stand for plantation.

If someone feels that the West has had vastly too much influence over their culture that is one thing, but playing this game of Whiteness will not yield the results they want. If you actually want to fight against the rich Whiteman, then you should start by rejecting their attempts to “free” you from the invisible chains of Whiteness that they claim are keeping you down.

A whistleblower inside of the Coca-Cola Company has revealed the shocking bullet points of a training seminar that expounds the racist idea that character traits allegedly inherent to the pale face tribe – like oppressiveness, arrogance and lack of apathy – should be rejected. Has corporate America finally crossed the line of acceptability?

In these crazed days of hyper political correctness, when it is verboten to point out the physical differences between racial groups, to the point where ‘cultural appropriation’ is actually a thing, it is hard to imagine that one of America’s largest transnational corporations would promote stereotypes against the approximately 50 percent of people on the planet who make up the Caucasian race, not to mention its consumer base. But that is exactly what Coca-Cola, in cooperation with academia, has done.

In a training session entitled, “Confronting Racism. Understanding what it means to be white. Challenging what it means to be racist,” employees are coached on how they can “be less white.”

“To be less white is to be less oppressive, be less arrogant, be less certain, be less defensive, be less ignorant, be more humble, listen, believe, break with apathy, break with white solidarity,” the page reads, before advancing to the dangerous conclusion that white people feel themselves “superior” on the basis of nothing more than their skin color.

To fully appreciate how offensive that paragraph is, or should be, simply substitute the term ‘white’ with any other racial identification – black, Asian, Spanish. The lewd lecture, however, does not end there.

“In the U.S. and other Western nations, white people are socialized to feel that they are inherently superior because they are white,” according to the slide show. “Research shows that by age 3 to 4, children understand that it is better to be white.”

Wut…. this seems like blatant racial discrimination to this employment lawyer. https://t.co/IEmpycTP6P

— Harmeet K. Dhillon (@pnjaban) February 19, 2021

Now imagine what may happen during a staff meeting when a white Coca-Cola executive wants to suggest an alternative plan of action, or simply speak his mind. Fellow colleagues will be tempted to roll their eyes in disdain while thinking, “there goes another closet white supremacist, trying to dominate the room with their privileged sense of superiority.” This type of not-so-subtle indoctrination, which promises to go mainstream under the Biden administration, may even cause white people to become more withdrawn and “less certain,” for fear of appearing like one of those grotesquely caricatured white people that everyone – and not least of all white people themselves – are fretting over.

Take Robin DiAngelo, for example, the diversity consultant who supplied Coca-Cola, and a number of other corporations with the above talking points on the evils of “inherent white racism.” DiAngelo, the author of the New York Times 2018 bestseller ‘White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard For White People To Talk About Racism,’ takes the position that “even a minimal challenge to the white position [of supremacy] becomes intolerable, triggering a range of defensive moves including: argumentation, invalidation, silence, withdrawal and claims of being attacked and misunderstood. These moves function to reinstate white racial equilibrium and maintain control.”

That’s a pretty harsh indictment against white people, especially considering that the United States is one of the most culturally diverse countries in the world, and one which has allowed millions of minorities – through a gaping hole in the US-Mexico border, no less – to join its ranks. I would be among the first to point out America’s failures and problems, but full-blown racism – while certainly latent among a very narrow and insignificant subgroup of the population, and not just among whites – is nowhere near the epidemic proportions that DiAngelo wants her readers to believe it is. In fact, even Black Americans have taken exception with such notions.

Writing in The Atlantic, John McWhorter, professor at Columbia University, described DiAngelo’s ‘White Fragility’ as “the prayer book for what can only be described as a cult,” that teaches the reader “how to be racist in a whole new way.”

“I have learned that one of America’s favorite advice books of the moment is actually a racist tract,” McWhorter writes with refreshing courage from the college campus, especially considering the threat of banishment for simply questioning the leftist inquisition. “Despite the sincere intentions of its author, the book diminishes Black people in the name of dignifying us. This is unintentional, of course, like the racism DiAngelo sees in all whites.”

McWhorton then proceeds to describe his own experience as a Black man growing up in the United States, which I would imagine mirrors those of many others.

“In my life, racism has affected me now and then at the margins, in very occasional social ways, but has had no effect on my access to societal resources; if anything, it has made them more available to me than they would have been otherwise…” he writes. “Being middle class, upwardly mobile, and Black has been quite common during my existence since the mid-1960s, and to deny this is to assert that affirmative action for Black people did not work.”

Statement from @CocaCola: https://t.co/Jzur7zuXFz pic.twitter.com/DBIpsj5706

— Chris Pandolfo (@ChrisCPandolfo) February 20, 2021

That is certainly not the rosier depiction of America circa 2021 that academics like DiAngelo want her readers to hear. But then again, she has the entire federal government supporting this deranged cause now that the Biden administration has rescinded the Trump administration’s executive order prohibiting Critical Race Theory training at the federal level.

Instead of having the good sense to understand the dangers of embracing and propagating such bigoted myths about an entire race of people, the management at Coca-Cola seem to have embraced it. Yet, as history has demonstrated on numerous occasions, notably during World War II with the deranged racial theories put forward with terrible efficacy by the Nazis, race-based stereotypes are one bus stop away from subjecting one group of people to outright violence, possibly even genocide.

At this point, one can only make wild guesses at the true purpose for such a program. One possible reason for corporate America deliberately fanning the flames of racial tension is to deflect attention away from the massive wealth divide, which, coincidentally, exploded in the very same year that Big Business, and various concerned philanthropists, like George Soros, was dumping huge amounts of money into various social justice groups, not least of all Black Lives Matter.

According to the New York Times, the donations represent “a huge financial undertaking that will support several Black-led racial justice groups for years to come.” Where this tremendous push at the corporate and governmental level will take race relations is not clear, but the writing is on the wall.

Kendall Jenner launched a tequila brand this week and faced immediate, vicious backlash for culturally appropriating Mexicans.

I honestly can’t comprehend how stupid and unbearable American woke-society is becoming.

— Candace Owens (@RealCandaceO) February 18, 2021

Today, white people in the United States find themselves in the impossible position of having to prove they are not racist, when it is being argued at the academic level that feelings of “white superiority” is practically a genetic trait built into their DNA visible under a microscope. Therefore, as this warped quasi-logic goes, the crimes of their ancestors are their crimes too. Nothing that white people have done to correct past historical wrongs matters.

And therein lies the evil cunning behind this radical bunkum: the very moment a white person attempts to counter such odious claims, they will appear to be conforming to the very woke definition that has been attributed to them – oppressive, arrogant, defensive, confident, etc, etc. Even maintaining their silence, according to DiAngelo, is a sign and symptom of “white guilt.”

In other words, white people have no recourse against these outrageous claims, except to pray that more people across the political and racial divide will speak out against the madness. Otherwise, we may be heading for another horrific human catastrophe down the road, and probably sooner than anyone can imagine.

Who could have imagined just 10 short years ago that the simple act of “enjoying a Coke” could be loaded with so much unnecessary political baggage?