Wages and Benefits: Real Wages (1964-2004)

REAL WAGES 1964-2004 Average Weekly Earnings (in 1982 constant dollars) For all private nonfarm workers
Year	Real $	Change
1964	302.52
1965	310.46	2.62%
1966	312.83	0.76%
1967	311.30	-0.49%
1968	315.37	1.31%
1969	316.93	0.49%
1970	312.94	-1.26%
1971	318.05	1.63%
1972	331.59	4.26%
1973	331.39	-0.06%
1974	314.94	-4.96%
1975	305.16	-3.11%
1976	309.61	1.46%
1977	310.99	0.45%
1978	310.41	-0.19%
1979	298.87	-3.72%
1980	281.27	-5.89%
1981	277.35	-1.39%
1982	272.74	-1.66%
1983	277.50	1.75%
1984	279.22	0.62%
1985	276.23	-1.07%
1986	276.11	-0.04%
1987	272.88	-1.17%
1988	270.32	-0.94%
1989	267.27	-1.13%
1990	262.43	-1.81%
1991	258.34	-1.56%
1992	257.95	-0.15%
1993	258.12	0.07%
1994	259.97	0.72%
1995	258.43	-0.59%
1996	259.58	0.44%
1997	265.22	2.17%
1998	271.87	2.51%
1999	274.64	1.02%
2000	275.62	0.36%
2001	275.38	-0.09%
2002	278.91	1.28%
2003	279.94	0.37%
2004	277.57	-0.84%

Source: U.S. Bureau of Labor Statistics

amazing! Another Sweet Day For Goldman Sachs

 

Another Sweet Day For Goldman Sachs

by Jonathan Tasini
Monday 12 of May, 2008
Posted to Front Page Posts

    A year and a half ago, I wrote about the scam that is Goldman Sachs--a company that was about to shower billions of dollars on its executives after it had gotten stupendous tax breaks from New York's city and state governments; a few days later, we also learned that the company's top dog was going to get a tidy little bonus of $53 million, while the janitors and secretaries got pennies. Well, it seems like public money is the gift that doesn't stop giving to Goldman Sachs.

    This morning, The New York Daily News reports this:

New Yorkers are on the hook to hand over $321 million to Goldman Sachs, America's  richest investment bank, because the Port Authority failed to rebuild the World Trade Center as fast as promised.

Under the hidden terms of a deal that then-Gov. George Pataki and Mayor Bloomberg approved in 2005, the city and state agreed to pay huge penalties to the firm if the Port Authority didn't complete major portions of the Ground Zero redevelopment by next year, a target now impossible to meet.

Goldman wanted speedy construction because the Wall Street giant is building its own $2.4 billion tower across from the site on West St.

Now, Goldman could snare 64 years of free rent worth $161 million that it's supposed to pay for leasing the state land. Goldman could also recoup an additional $160 million in sales tax payments.

    Ah, yes, our mayor--the guy that is supposed to be the great manager of the city and watch its money (no wonder he and our City Council speaker are so friendly--can't find better folks to watch how our money is spent). Funny how the till is quite open and ready for use when it comes to rewarding corporate friends. No word yet on the mayor's position about using public money to help people caught up in the sub-prime mortgage scam--a scam aided and abetted by the mayor's Wall Street friends.

no man is an island

 

John Donne

Meditation XVII: No man is an island...

"All mankind is of one author, and is one volume; when one man dies, one chapter is not torn out of the book, but translated into a better language; and every chapter must be so translated...As therefore the bell that rings to a sermon, calls not upon the preacher only, but upon the congregation to come: so this bell calls us all: but how much more me, who am brought so near the door by this sickness....No man is an island, entire of itself...any man's death diminishes me, because I am involved in mankind; and therefore never send to know for whom the bell tolls; it tolls for thee."

Some stood up once and sat down

From a talk by Howard Zinn:

 

I want to end by reading a poem by Daniel Berrigan, the longtime peace activist. He has long struggled against war and militarism. He wrote this poem in the memory of his friend Mitch Snyder, who had worked for many years for the homeless in Washington, DC. He became disconsolate at what the government was unable to do even while it was building jet planes and bombers and nuclear submarines and  nuclear missiles but it didn't have enough money to take care of the homeless.  He became so disconsolate that he killed himself. Berrigan wrote this poem.

In Loving Memory - Mitchell Snyder

Some stood up once and sat down,
Some walked a mile and walked away.
Some stood up twice then sat down,
I've had it, they said.
Some walked two miles, then walked away,
It's too much, they cried.
Some stood and stood and stood,
They were taken for fools,
They were taken for being taken in.
Some walked and walked and walked.
They walked the earth,
They walked the waters,
They walked the air.
Why do you stand?, they were asked.
And why do you walk?
Because of the children, they said,
Because of the heart and because of the bread.
Because the cause is the heart's beat.
And the children born and the risen bread

.

interesting quotes from Edward R. Murrow: "A nation of sheep"

• A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves.

 

• A great many people think they are thinking when they are really rearranging their prejudices.

• A reporter is always concerned with tomorrow. There's nothing tangible of yesterday. All I can say I've done is agitate the air ten or fifteen minutes and then boom — it's gone.

• Anyone who isn't confused really doesn't understand the situation.

• Fame is morally neutral.

• He mobilized the English language and sent it into battle.
  • On Sir Winston Churchill (Churchill, Volume V, p. 346)

• I have always been on the side of the heretics against those who burned them because the heretics so often turned out to be right. Dead, but right.

• Just once in a while let us exalt the importance of ideas and information.

• Language is one of the greatest gifts man has devised for himself. It ranks, alongside the discovery of fire and the wheel, as a major influence in making modern man what he is today.

• Language is the memory of man. Without it he has no past, a paltry present, and an empty future. With it he can bring his dreams to life.

• Learn your language well and command it well, and you will have the first component to life.

• Most truths are so naked that people feel sorry for them and cover them up, at least a little bit.

• No one can terrorize a whole nation, unless we are all his accomplices.

• Our major obligation is not to mistake slogans for solutions.

• People say conversation is a lost art; how often I have wished it were.

• The newest computer can merely compound, at speed, the oldest problem in the relations between human beings, and in the end the communicator will be confronted with the old problem, of what to say and how to say it.

• The obscure we see eventually. The completely obvious, it seems, takes longer.

• The speed of communications is wondrous to behold. It is also true that speed can multiply the distribution of information that we know to be untrue.

• To be persuasive we must be believable; to be believable we must be credible; credible we must be truthful.

• We must not confuse dissent with disloyalty. When the loyal opposition dies, I think the soul of America dies with it.
  • Variant: Dissension is not disloyalty. These remarks are similar to the sourced remarks of 9 March 1954 above.

• When the politicians complain that TV turns the proceedings into a circus, it should be made clear that the circus was already there, and that TV has merely demonstrated that not all the performers are well trained.

• A nation of sheep begets a government of wolves.