Too little outrage over pay inequity
THE SHORT paragraph on your Aug. 25 editorial page ("CEO salaries: executive excess," Short Fuse) may have sounded like the punchline of a Jay Leno joke, but the subject matter was deadly serious: The average chief executive makes 344 times as much as the average worker in major US corporations.
Why this stupefying fact merited such blithe treatment by the Globe is indicative of a larger problem, namely, that there is little collective sense of outrage within our society about injustice and lawlessness perpetrated by the wealthy and powerful.
I challenge any "free"-market apologists, clutching their Ayn Rand and Milton Friedman books, to come up with a reasonable explanation for this execrable distribution of wealth.
Unfortunately, as long as poor and middle-class people continue to be manipulated into voting against their economic interests, sidetracked by issues of relatively minor importance such as abortion and gay marriage, then wealth inequality will only get worse and will remain unexamined as the underlying cause of so much of our country's malaise, from lack of affordable healthcare all the way to the bloody sands of Iraq.
BRYAN L. TUCKER
Jamaica Plain 