A Poem

... by Danielle Coffyn

If Adam Picked The Apple

There would be a parade,

a celebration,

a holiday to commemorate

the day he sought enlightenment.

We would not speak of temptation

by the devil, rather,

we would laud Adam's curiosity,

his desire for adventure

and knowing.

We would feast

on apple-inspired fare -

tortes, chutneys, pancakes, pies.

There would be plays and songs

reenacting his courage.

But it was Eve who grew bored,

weary of her captivity in Eden.

And a woman's desire

for freedom is rarely a cause

for celebration.

Equity

The CEOs and the rich pricks who never have to lift a finger are using politics to get ahead and stay ahead.

Why aren't you?

The median wage in the US is about $58,000/year

CEOs are getting (again, on average)

$1,300,000 - $14,900,000/year

Equilar | New York Times 100 Highest-Paid CEOs

Compensation Soars Over 20% for America’s Highest-Paid CEOs

The role of chief executive officers (CEOs) is extremely demanding. Chief executives bear the responsibility of steering their organizations towards financial growth while navigating the complexities of economic and regulatory challenges and fending off competitive threats. As such, it comes as no surprise that companies often award their CEOs massive pay packages as incentive to perform at a high level. It seems compensation for public company CEOs continues to rise each year, with the trend persisting in 2023.

For 17 years, Equilar has partnered with The New York Times to uncover trends in CEO compensation across Corporate America. The New York Times recently published coverage* of new findings from the annual CEO pay study, and the results show that compensation packages for executives in the corner office are quite lucrative. For the purposes of this post, Equilar analyzed just a portion of the findings provided to The New York Times. This post examines the 100 largest CEO pay packages among U.S. public companies with revenues of at least $1 billion and that filed a proxy statement by April 30, 2024 (see full methodology in footer).

The introductory page of this feature highlights the top 10 highest-paid CEOs in 2023. Below the highest-paid CEO table, there is a link to view the full list of the Equilar 100 CEOs in an interactive chart that allows you to sort by compensation, compensation actually paid (CAP), revenue and other company measurements. A summary of key findings from the study follows on this page.

1) Jon Winkelried
TPG Inc. (TPG)
$198,685,926

2) Harvey M. Schwartz
The Carlyle Group Inc. (CG)
$186,994,098

3) Hock E. Tan
Broadcom Inc. (AVGO)
$161,826,161

4) Nikesh Arora
Palo Alto Networks, Inc. (PANW)
$151,425,203

5) Sue Y. Nabi
Coty Inc. (COTY)
$149,429,486

6) Christopher L. Winfrey
Charter Communications, Inc. (CHTR)
$89,077,078

7) Ariel Z. Emanuel
Endeavor Group Holdings, Inc. (EDR)
$83,879,504

8)Arash Adam Foroughi
AppLovin Corporation (APP)
$83,361,678

9) John David Risher
Lyft, Inc. (LYFT)
$78,238,027 $4,403

10) William J. Lansing
Fair Isaac Corporation (FICO)
$66,349,962 $1,513

Full List

Key Trends and Takeaways

• CEO compensation soars 20.1%. The median total compensation for CEOs in the study spiked to $29.1 million in 2023, up over 20% from 2022. The highest-paid CEO in the study is Jon Winkelried of TPG, Inc., whose total disclosed pay package was $198.7 million in 2023. The five highest-paid CEOs were each awarded a nine-figure pay package in 2023.
• Large jump in stock award values propels a big pay bump. In 2023, the median value of stock awards granted to CEOs in the study took a large 38.7% leap, increasing to $21 million. The increase in stock award values was largely responsible for total disclosed compensation rising at such a high rate. Stock awards tend to make up the largest portion of an executive’s compensation package, and fluctuations in values will likely have a noticeable impact on total compensation. It’s important to note that the disclosed figures reflect grant date fair values of awards, compensation the CEOs on this list will likely not realize until a future date after achieving targeted performance goals for the organization.
• Meanwhile, total cash compensation for CEOs in the study increased slightly by 2.8%. Cash bonuses increased by 26.5% from $3.4 million in 2022 to $4.3 million in 2023. The uptick in cash bonuses may be a result of the companies in the study recording strong shareholder returns—a median of 23% for the study—as compensation committees rewarded their CEOs for impressive financial growth.
• CEO Pay Ratio reaches 312:1. The CEO Pay Ratio for companies in the study rose to 312:1 in 2023, with the median employee earning $101,947. However, comparing CEO pay to median employee pay can be challenging, as CEOs are largely compensated through stock awards, whereas median employees primarily receive salaries and bonuses. The ratio has appeared in proxy disclosures for seven years now, and while its impact on executive compensation remains limited, it continues to be a contentious issue among the public.
• Compensation Actually Paid (CAP) figures surpass total disclosed pay. The median CAP value for CEOs in the study was $46.5 million in 2023, approximately 60% higher than total disclosed pay. The objective of the CAP calculation is to capture the change in fair value of previously granted awards to CEOs, clearly indicating how much the executive has gained from equity awards over time. The disclosure is in year two, and it remains to be seen if investors and other stakeholders will use this information in their decision-making processes.
• Six women make the 100 highest-paid CEOs list. Six women were among the highest-paid CEOs in 2023, earning $30.5 million—slightly higher than the overall median of the study. Sue Y. Nabi, CEO at Coty, was the highest-paid woman in 2023, earning a pay package of $149.4 million.
• Walmart records the highest revenue in 2023. Retail giant Walmart led all companies in the study with a recorded revenue of $648 billion in 2023. Overall, the median revenue was $21.7 billion for the companies in the study, representing a 7% gain from the prior year.

Overheard

Somebody working at a McDonalds franchise in Denmark makes about $21 an hour.

They're in a union. They get 5 or 6 weeks paid vacation every year. They can take up to a year paid maternity leave. They get life insurance, healthcare insurance, and a pension plan if they're over 20 years old.

A Big Mac in Denmark will run you about $5.50

Somebody working at a McDonalds franchise in USAmerica Inc makes about $9.50 an hour with no benefits.

A Big Mac in the US goes for about $5.50

McDonald's gross profit for the twelve months ending December 31, 2023 was $14,563,000,000 - 14½ billion dollars - a 10.26% increase year-over-year. And they paid the CEO almost $20 million.

Disparities

"In America, we value each and every individual."

The NYT piece is an example of how racism manifests itself at the level of 'systemic', without much conscious effort to be racist.

There was undoubtedly some racial consideration on the part of some of the decision-makers, but even without it, this shit would still have just grown naturally out of the policies that put major traffic carriers thru poorer (ie: brown) neighborhoods because the richer (ie: white) neighborhoods had the political power to influence the decisions.

American Road Deaths Show an Alarming Racial Gap
Why dangerous streets are concentrated in minority neighborhoods, and what to do about it.

An estimated 19 pedestrians a day, on average, were struck and killed by automobiles in this country in 2022. The year before, pedestrian deaths reached a 40-year high.

While these deaths spiked across the board during the pandemic, the fatalities follow a clear and consistent pattern: Across the country, Black and Hispanic pedestrians are killed at significantly higher rates than white pedestrians.

A study published last year by Harvard and Boston University deepened our understanding of this phenomenon by controlling for the distance traveled by different racial groups when driving, walking or riding a bicycle. It found that Black people were more than twice as likely, for each mile walked, to be struck and killed by a vehicle as white pedestrians. For Black cyclists, the fatality risk per mile was 4.5 times as high as that for white cyclists. For Hispanic walkers and bikers, the death rates were 1.5 and 1.7 times as high as those for white Americans using the same modes of transportation.

The design of our cities is partly to blame for these troubling disparities. Pedestrian and cyclist injuries tend to be concentrated in poorer neighborhoods that have a larger share of Black and Hispanic residents. These neighborhoods share a history of under-investment in basic traffic safety measures such as streetlights, crosswalks and sidewalks, and an over-investment in automobile infrastructure meant to speed through people who do not live there. Recent research from the University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, found that formerly redlined neighborhoods — often the targets of mid-century “slum clearance” projects that destroyed residences and businesses to allow for new arterial roads and highways — had a strong statistical association with increased pedestrian deaths. The neighborhoods graded D for lending risk by the federal Home Owners’ Loan Corporation had more than double the pedestrian fatality rate than neighborhoods graded A.

Decades of civic neglect, collapsing property values and white flight took a further toll on pedestrian safety. Sidewalks — which many cities rely on property owners to maintain — were left to crumble along with vacant buildings, turning a simple walk down the street to a bus stop or store into a perilous journey. One study of Florida roads found that the likelihood of a crash involving a pedestrian was three times as great per mile on roadways with no sidewalks.

The broken streetscape is only part of the problem. These neighborhoods are “much more likely to contain major arterial roads built for high speeds and higher traffic volumes at intersections, exacerbating dangerous conditions for people walking,” according to a recent report from Smart Growth America, a nonprofit focusing on urban planning and sustainability. These roads and highways, designed in the middle of the last century to provide convenient access to the city from the ever-sprawling suburbs, often brought misery to the minority communities they hurtled through.

In Los Angeles, for instance, a 2020 analysis by U.C.L.A. researchers found that although Black residents made up 8.6 percent of the city’s population, they represented more than 18 percent of all pedestrians killed and around 15 percent of all cyclists. From 2016 to 2020, the Los Angeles metropolitan area had more pedestrian deaths than any other metro area in the United States and a pedestrian death rate higher than the metropolitan areas around New York, Philadelphia or Washington.

As a society, we have been laying the blame for pedestrian traffic injuries on the victims ever since the 1920s, when pro-car groups backed by the automobile industry coined the term “jaywalking” to suggest that pedestrians were at fault when hit by drivers. But an emphasis on individual responsibility for road safety doesn’t seem to help, even when it’s shifted back to drivers. In its most recent report, the National Highway Traffic Safety Administration gave driver training an effectiveness rating of one star out of five as a strategy to increase pedestrian safety, noting, “There is no evidence indicating that this countermeasure is effective.”

Engineering solutions like speed humps, lane narrowing, better lighting, the installation of sidewalks and “complete street” designs are far more effective at reducing pedestrian deaths. The ubiquity of speeding is not necessarily because people are bad drivers, but because the design of our roads — wide, straight stretches of asphalt meant for high speeds above all else — encourages them to do so.

Many American cities have already introduced what are known as “Vision Zero” campaigns based on the idea that even a single pedestrian death is one too many.

Vision Zero can be remarkably effective. Death rates have dropped in many cities properly carrying out the program. Oslo and Helsinki, which adopted Vision Zero in the 1990s, recorded zero traffic deaths in 2019, and Helsinki had just two pedestrian deaths in 2021. But it requires a committed redesign of city streets and bikeways, not just rhetoric and ribbon-cutting ceremonies.

In the United States, minimal funding, political inertia and a lack of state and federal participation have limited the effectiveness of these programs. In Los Angeles, Philadelphia and Washington, pedestrian deaths have actually risen since the adoption of Vision Zero. “All these safety efforts come to die in the United States,” said Beth Osborne, the director of the transportation arm for Smart Growth America. “All of these could be incredibly effective, but we have to be willing to change our approach, not just make plans and talk about changing our approach.”

Last year, 312 people died in traffic accidents in Los Angeles, the majority of them pedestrians and cyclists. “If 300 people died of something in the city, whether it was something violent or whether it was something else like Covid, the resources were put behind it to try to prevent those things, to respond to those things,” said Eunisses Hernandez, a member of the Los Angeles City Council. “We have not seen that same urgency with people dying in traffic accidents as pedestrians and as cyclists.”

The United States can reverse the trend of rising traffic deaths, a trend that disproportionately affects Black and Hispanic communities, by investing in safer road design: narrowing streets, reducing the amount of space devoted to cars, enforcing speed limits and adding trees to provide visual cues for drivers to slow down. While these interventions may seem simplistic compared to the scale of the problem, other countries have proved that they can work. City planners must recognize that we all should be able to walk or ride a bicycle through our own neighborhood without fearing for our life.

For Councilmember Hernandez, it is a matter of justice. “I have pictures of bike racks that are full inside of these high schools, yet there are no bike lanes around the high schools,” she said. More than one high school in her district is bordered by busy four-lane streets. And at least two pedestrians in the district have already been killed by vehicles this year.

Secretary of Transportation Pete Buttigieg recently said that “every infrastructure choice is a safety choice,” and in 2022 launched a $1 billion pilot program to redesign roads with a focus on racial equity. Whether this federal action will be able to bend the statistics remains to be seen. For decades, the United States has prioritized the needs of people driving through cities over the well-being of the people living in them, and largely at the expense of communities with the least political clout. Adopting the framing of Vision Zero without finding sufficient funding and political will for road redesign is simply not good enough. Our elected officials must be willing to face an unpleasant set of facts: that the appalling racial disparity in road deaths continues on their watch, and that nearly every killing of a cyclist or pedestrian by a car is preventable.

Eat The Rich

I'm totally uninterested in sob stories about how badly the obscenely wealthy are being treated.

Not when Jeff Bezos could end poverty and homelessness in this country all by himself, and still have more wealth than over 99% of us.

Elizabeth Warren, in WaPo: (pay wall)

Now that the Senate has passed a budget resolution, we’re one step closer to realizing President Biden’s transformational agenda: a once-in-a-generation investment in child care and Medicare, combating climate change and other efforts that would actually make our government work for families. The other half of the package — how to pay for these investments — is equally important.

The already huge gap between the 0.1 percent and everyone else is just getting wider. Billionaire wealth surged by $1.8 trillion from the early days of the pandemic through last month. The 400 richest Americans had more total wealth, as of 2019, than all 10 million Black American households, plus a quarter of Latino households, combined. Yet the ultrarich pay only 3.2 percent of that wealth in taxes, while 99 percent of families pay 7.2 percent. And scores of giant U.S. corporations pay zero.

I’ve proposed measures that would raise more than $5 trillion in revenue — far more than we need to enact the Biden plan. Though not every Democrat agrees with every one of my ideas, Biden campaigned aggressively on a suite of progressive tax policies, and voters embraced these changes at the ballot box. No matter how loudly Washington lobbyists bleat otherwise, progressive tax policies are wildly popular. Americans understand that our tax system has been rigged to reward the rich and powerful at the expense of everyone else. So let’s fix it.

First, it’s time to start taxing wealth, not just income. When Jeff Bezos takes a joyride to space, he isn’t paying for it with his declared income of $80,000. Bezos, who owns The Post, and lots of other billionaires have gamed the system so they have plenty of spending money and close to zero tax obligations. The best option to stop that is a two-cent wealth tax that applies only to the wealthiest 100,000 U.S. households — with a few cents more for the billionaires. Such a wealth tax would raise roughly $3 trillion in revenue over the next decade, without raising taxes on 99.95 percent of Americans. It’s supported by 68 percent of the country, including a majority of Republicans. And there are lots of ways to advance this principle — including a one-time wealth tax that would raise over $1 trillion.

Second, let’s turn to highly profitable giant corporations. In the three years following the 2017 Republican tax cuts, 39 megacorporations, including Amazon and FedEx, reported more than $122 billion in profits to their shareholders while using loopholes, deductions and exemptions to pay zero in federal income taxes.

These companies boosted their stock prices and increased CEO pay by telling their shareholders they raked in hundreds of millions of dollars in profits, while simultaneously telling the Internal Revenue Service that they don’t owe any taxes. The president supports taxing the profits that large companies report to their shareholders. Sen. Angus King (I-Maine) and I have a plan that mirrors this. We would require any company that earns more than $100 million in profits to pay a 7 percent tax on every dollar earned above that amount. Only about 1,300 public companies would pay the tax, raising nearly $700 billion over 10 years.

Finally, rules don’t mean anything if nobody enforces them, so let’s enforce the law. Currently, the top 1 percent of Americans fail to report more than a fifth of their income. The difference between taxes owed and taxes actually paid exceeds an estimated $1 trillion annually.

The superrich get away with not paying their taxes because decades of politically motivated budget cuts have hollowed out the IRS. Since 2010, the agency’s enforcement budget has declined by more than 20 percent, and it has lost one-third of its enforcers. It’s no surprise that audit rates for taxpayers making more than $10 million have plummeted. This should enrage every American who plays by the rules. That’s why over 70 percent of Americans support giving the IRS more resources to make sure the wealthy and corporations aren’t evading taxes.

Biden has proposed giving the IRS about $8 billion in additional annual funding. I’ve suggested a step further: $31.5 billion in permanent annual funding to track down wealthy and corporate tax cheats. The IRS also needs better reporting from banks and other financial institutions so it can sniff out the hidden cash of the ultrarich. These changes could raise as much as $1.75 trillion from tax cheats.

I’ve put these three proposals — a wealth tax, a tax on real corporate profits and closing the tax gap — on the table. There are other ideas worthy of consideration, but the standard should be writing rules that target wealthy freeloaders and corporate grifters and then enforcing those rules. American workers and families don’t want handouts. They want everybody to play by the same rules. The Democrats’ infrastructure plan is about investments and tax fairness — changes that would help build a strong future for not only a handful of people at the top but for everyone. This is what we were sent here to do. It’s time for us to do it.