{"id":13199,"date":"2020-11-21T11:41:02","date_gmt":"2020-11-21T10:41:02","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/mwehle.eu\/wp\/?p=13199"},"modified":"2020-11-21T12:18:23","modified_gmt":"2020-11-21T11:18:23","slug":"13199","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/?p=13199","title":{"rendered":""},"content":{"rendered":"

Rupert Neate, Guardian<\/a>:<\/p>\n

On Matt Haney\u2019s walk to work at San Francisco city hall he passes the luxurious homes of some of the richest US tech billionaires,<\/a>\u00a0as well as hundreds of the country\u2019s most desperate people living in tent encampments on the street.<\/p>\n

The \u201cextreme, shocking inequality\u201d he and the other 900,000 residents are forced to navigate every day led Haney, a member of the\u00a0San Francisco\u00a0Board of Supervisors, the city\u2019s legislative body, to propose a new \u201coverpaid executive tax\u201d designed to help tackle the problem.<\/p>\n

San Francisco\u00a0voters overwhelming backed a new law<\/a>\u00a0that will levy an extra 0.1% tax on companies that pay their chief executive more than 100-times the the median of their workforce.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

Elon Musk, the chief executive of Tesla and\u00a0the world\u2019s third richest person<\/a>, was paid $595m (\u00a3449m) last year, almost 10,000 times the firm\u2019s median salary of just under $60,000.<\/p>\n

Tim Cook, the chief executive of Apple, was paid $134m in 2019, more than 2,300 times the firm\u2019s median pay of $57,600.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

The pay levels of US chief executives have increased by an average of 940% since 1978, compared with a 12% increase in workers\u2019 pay,\u00a0according to the Economic Policy Institute thinktank<\/a>.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cSan Francisco has some of the most extreme inequality anywhere in the world, and many of the best-known companies growing here have some of the largest gaps between executive pay and worker pay,\u201d said Haney, in an interview over Zoom as he walked to work this week.<\/p>\n

Haney, who represents District 6, which includes the Tenderloin, Mission Bay and South of Market, added: \u201cThe contrasts are especially stark in my district where I represent some of the richest parts of San Francisco \u2013 and the country \u2013 and some of the poorest parts with huge numbers of homeless people without access to healthcare.\u201d<\/p>\n

He said the coronavirus pandemic had exacerbated San Francisco\u2019s inequality problem, which had already created \u201ca city of extreme suffering\u201d that drained local government of resources.<\/p>\n

\u201cThe heath system was already very strained, and the pandemic has exposed it even more,\u201d Haney said. \u201cIt has shown how stark the inequality is, poor people could not afford to shelter and people of colour and essential workers bore the burnt of the pandemic.<\/p>\n

\u201cAt the same time\u00a0the richest have gotten much richer [from the pandemic]<\/a>\u00a0it shows the fundamental flaw of our economic system. A small number of people continue to make massive profits at a time when almost everyone else was suffering more than ever.<\/p>\n

\u2026<\/p>\n

\u201cSan Francisco is a modern day version of a A Tale of Two Cities everywhere you look, we can\u2019t have a nation that turns into that.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

San Francisco is, indeed, a modern day version of A Tale of Two Cities<\/span>. I lived in the San Francisco Bay Area<\/span> for nearly 30 years and can verify the very apparent inequality. Several items in this article caught my eye. San Francisco’s „shocking inequality“ is something Haney is „forced to navigate“. Many of my San Francisco high tech coworkers displayed no sign of being shocked by the inequality around them and in fact showed no indication they even registered inequality, gave no evidence they saw income and wealth disparities as something to avoid. Instead, to be avoided were people sleeping on the streets, human excrement and urine on the streets. The San Francisco<\/span> problem one is forced to navigate is the poor, not poverty.<\/p>\n

„A small number of people continue to make massive profits at a time when almost everyone else was suffering more than ever“: why would they not? Whatever would suggest to Haney or anyone else that increased suffering would dissuade billionaires from maximizing profits? Tim Cook pulls down 134 million US dollars in 2019 while Apple Chinese sweat shop workers are driven to suicide<\/a>, but he’ll have second thoughts if those workers contract a virus?<\/p>\n

When Haney mentions homeless people with no access to healthcare he is describing homeless who seek healthcare from Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital<\/a>, previously known as San Francisco General. I remember when reading Neuromancer thinking Gibson was a bit over the top in his depiction of a corporate-owned future. Earlier in 2020 a Bay Area high tech friend was enthusiastic about reading a new novel about a pandemic. This, I think, is a quintessential comment on the San Francisco<\/span> Bay Area<\/span> high tech view of the world: in the midst of a pandemic one consumes a cultural good about a pandemic. Living in a nation which for decades has experienced increasingly great wealth and income disparity one conscientiously declares the intent to avoid a future where the nation is one of great wealth and income disparity. One is forever nearing the brink. Here, let me recommend just the greatest thing: there’s this great new Netflix series which deals with that.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Rupert Neate, Guardian: On Matt Haney\u2019s walk to work at San Francisco city hall he passes the luxurious homes of some of the richest US tech billionaires,\u00a0as well as hundreds of the country\u2019s most desperate people living in tent encampments … Weiterlesen →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"inline_featured_image":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-13199","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13199","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=13199"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/13199\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=13199"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=13199"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.wehle.ee\/wp\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=13199"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}