Photo by Jayson Photography
Wall Street
Wall Street is the financial district of New York City. It is the home of the New York Stock Exchange, the world's largest stock exchange by market capitalization of its listed companies.
For the past 35 years, the Shepherd Express has worked with Project Censored to help get these important, yet seldom reported, stories out to the American people. We have great respect for the researchers and reporters at Project Censored and are privileged to be able to work with them.
From Dec. 11-15 and Dec. 18-22, we will post the Top 10 censored stories in countdown order, starting with 10 and working up to #1.
10. Corporate Profits Hit Record High as Top 0.1% Earnings and Wall Street Bonuses Skyrocket
“Corporate profits in the U.S. surged to an all-time record of $2 trillion in the second quarter of 2022 as companies continued jacking up prices, pushing inflation to a 40-year high to the detriment of workers and consumers,” Jake Johnson reported for Common Dreams in August 2022.
“Astronomical corporate profits confirm what corporate executives have been telling us on earning calls over and over again: They’re making a lot of money by charging people more, and they don’t plan on bringing prices down anytime soon,” the Groundwork Collaborative’s chief economist, Rakeen Mabud, said.
This followed Johnson’s reporting in March that the average bonus for Wall Street employees rose an astounding 1,743 percent between 1985 and 2021, according to an analysis by Inequality.org of New York State Comptroller data. Then, in December 2022, he reported that “earnings inequality in the United States has risen dramatically over the past four decades and continues to accelerate, with the top 0.1% seeing wage growth of 465% between 1979 and 2021 while the bottom 90% experienced just 29% growth during that same period,” according to research by the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). As a result, the average incomes of the top 0.1% rose from 20 times that of the bottom 90% in 1979 to more than 90 times as much in 2021.
“The fossil fuel industry has enjoyed especially lavish profits,” Project Censored notes, citing Jessica Corbett’s July 2022 reporting for Common Dreams that the eight largest oil companies’ profits spiked a whopping 235 percent from the second quarter of 2021 to the second quarter of 2022, for a combined $52 billion profit, according to an analysis by Accountable U.S.
|
|
“Make no mistake; these profits mark a large transfer of wealth from working- and middle-class people to wealthy oil executives and shareholders,” Jordan Schreiber of Accountable U.S. told Corbett. “While many consumers were feeling the heavy burden of a life necessity suddenly doubling in price, oil executives were keeping prices high to maximize their profits.”
“ExxonMobil profited $17.85 billion; Chevron, $11.62 billion; and Shell, $11.47 billion,” Project Censored notes. “Notably, in 2021-2022, the oil and gas industry spent more than $200 million lobbying Congress to oppose climate action.”
Coverage of all this was scant. “The establishment media have reported intermittently on record corporate profits, but this coverage has tended to downplay corporate use of inflation as a pretext for hiking prices,” Project Censored sums up, citing examples from Bloomberg, ABC News and the New York Times where the role of greedflation was debated. “The Times quoted experts from EPI and Groundwork Collaborative but refused to draw any firm conclusions,” they note.
In addition, “The EPI study on the accelerating incomes of the ultrarich was virtually ignored” while the massive Wall Street bonuses got some coverage, they report: “Reuters ran a story on it, as did the New York Post. CNN Business noted that ‘high bonuses are good.”
