Egregious subjugation of the working class continues. Workers get 2.6% pay raise for critically important work while Jamie Dimon sees salary double

Another example of egregious subjugation of the working class. Long Island Railroad Workers were given a 17% pay raise, spread out over 6.5 years, but they must kick in more toward their health care payments, so it works out to even less than the paltry, 2.6% annual increase.

The Long Island Railroad is the largest commuter railroad in the country. A strike would have affected hundreds of thousands if not millions of people, businesses, etc in the region. In other words these workers' jobs are absolutely essential to the economy and peoples' lives.

In contrast, Jamie Dimon gets a near DOUBLING of his pay (from $11.4 million per year to $20 million) in one year even though he guided his bank to a 0.7% return on assets. In other words if Jamie Dimon were gone no one would see the difference. Even worse, the bank could have held Treasuries and made a heck of a lot more than what Jamie Dimon delivered.

That's the state of our tragic society.

The divide and conquer strategy of the plutocrats has worked very well

Michigan's New Corporate Servitude Law: It Takes Away Worker Rights

Michigan has just passed a corporate servitude law. It is designed to take away many of the worker rights that unions have conferred throughout their history: the right to a living wage. The right to equal pay for women. The right to deferred payments in the form of pensions. The right to negotiate workplace standards and working conditions. The right to overtime pay.

The divide and conquer strategy of the plutocrats has worked very well. With most private unions having already been decimated, turn the common workers' envy toward public unions and decimate those, too. What remains is an environment where there is ZERO countervailing force to corporate /corporate-state power. This ensures a deep pool of low wage, highly subservient workers to draw from to sustain the profits and wealth of the plutocracy. If you're not in that plutocracy, you're rapidly being reduced to a slave. That's a reality.

The plutocracy owns the government, so we have no real power. Voting is a sham. You'll always be voting for the status quo by definition and the status quo is everything that supports and advances the plutocracy.

How the hell did we get here?