[This article is by my friend John Lacny, a Pittsburgh-based labor activist. He wrote it at my request for my blog, Fire on the Mountain. Lacny possesses a pitiless eye for the mechanisms of domination employed by big capital, which make his pieces, like this one, a delight to read.]
One of the first bitter lessons you learn as an activist is the fact that just because people know the truth does not mean that things are going to change. People have to actually do something about it -- and organizing them to do something about it is one of the toughest things in the world, not least because it requires you to inspire people to believe that it is possible to change things.
That said, our adversaries are well aware that mass-based knowledge is a dangerous thing for them, which is why they invest so much effort in obscuring the facts. An especially illuminating example of this can be found in an article that appeared in the house organ of capital, the Wall Street Journal, just before Thanksgiving. It is entitled "The Boss Makes How Much More Than You? Controversial New Rule Would Make Companies Disclose Data," and it is accompanied by an illustration in which the average CEO is represented as a gigantic pig. (The average worker is portrayed as a much smaller piggy bank, but what do you expect from the WSJ.)
The subject is a new rule by the Securities and Exchange Commission, which would require US companies traded on Wall Street to disclose the ratio of pay between their CEO and their median employee. This rule has been a long time coming, and is the result of 2010's Dodd-Frank financial reform act. Dodd-Frank was a mild financial reform that has more than a few shortcomings, but much like the Affordable Care Act -- which is of similar vintage -- even its mildly progressive features have a way of causing vested interests to break out in hives.