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And in the good ole USA:

The income of the executives of the largest US companies in 1992 was 100 times that of ordinary workers, and 475 times higher in 2000.

According to an assessment by the US journal Business Week in August 2000, the income of chief executive officers was 84 times that of employees in 1990, 140 times in 1995, and 416 times in 1999.

Serious infringements upon worker's rights have been reported. Compared with other developed countries, the working hours of laborers in the United States are the longest, while their social security benefits and rights are the worst. According to a report in US News and World Report in March 2000, the average working time of US citizens was 1,957 hours annually, longer than in other developed countries.

In 2002, the median salary for CEOs at the top 100 U.S. corporations was $33.4 million. At the average large company in the U.S., the top dog pocketed $5.2 million. That means median CEO pay at large companies was a whopping $1,017 an hour.

Even Army Gen. Tommy Franks, who led the U.S. invasion of Iraq, earned a pittance by comparison--just $69.10 an hour for the services that he rendered to U.S. oil interests. While CEOs wallowed in millions, doctors made an average of $60.14 an hour, grade-school teachers earned $28.01 an hour and firefighters received $17.16 an hour. The average worker in the U.S. got $16.23 an hour. And workers in downsized or unskilled jobs made only half of that figure.

The 13,000 richest families in the U.S. now have almost as much income as the 20 million poorest. "And those 13,000 families have incomes 300 times that of average families," liberal economist Paul Krugman wrote in the New York Times Magazine.

Does the system work for us? Mired in recession and war, working Americans are having a rough time. At the end of the Cold War with the USSR in the early 1990s, Papa Bush promised us a "peace dividend" that would change our lives for the better. That was a pack of lies.

Now Baby Bush's doctrine of a newly aggressive U.S. imperialism has dashed hopes that the trillion-dollar surplus would be used for national health care, higher teacher pay, secure pensions and revitalized cities--because the trillion-dollar surplus has become a huge deficit.

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