Let’s place private corporations with government contracts under surveillance — to make sure no one is getting rich off our tax dollars.

Only 23 percent of Americans, says a new Reuters poll, consider former National Security Agency employee Edward Snowden a “traitor” for blowing the whistle on the federal government’s massive surveillance of the nation’s telecom system.

Many Americans, the poll data suggest, clearly do find the idea of government agents snooping through their phone calls and emails a good bit unnerving.

But Americans have more on the surveillance front to worry about than overzealous government agents. Government personnel aren’t actually doing the snooping the 29-year-old Snowden revealed. NSA officials have contracted this snooping out — to private corporate contractors.

These surveillance contracts, in turn, are making contractor executives exceedingly rich. And none have profited personally more than the power suits who run Booz Allen Hamilton and the private equity Carlyle Group.

Whistle-blower Snowden did his snooping as a Booz Allen employee. Booz Allen, overall, has had tens of thousands of employees doing intelligence work for the federal government.

Booz Allen alumni also populate the highest echelons of America’s intelligence apparatus — and vice versa. The Obama administration’s top intelligence official, James Clapper, just happens to be a former Booz Allen exec. The George W. Bush intelligence chief, John McConnell, now serves as the Booz Allen vice chair.

All these revolving doors open up into enormously lucrative worlds. In their 2010 fiscal year, the top five Booz Allen execs together pocketed just under $20 million. They averaged 23 times what members of Congress take home.

But the real windfalls are flowing to top execs at the Carlyle Group, Booz Allen’s parent company since 2008. In 2011, Carlyle’s top three power suits shared a combined payday over $400 million.

More windfalls will be arriving soon. Carlyle paid $2.54 billion to buy up Booz Allen. Analysts are now expecting that Carlyle’s ultimate return on the acquisition will triple the private equity giant’s initial cash outlay.

What do all these mega millions have to do with the massive surveillance that Edward Snowden has so dramatically exposed? Washington power players, from the President on down, are insisting that this surveillance has one and only one purpose: keeping Americans safe from terrorism.

But who can put much faith in these earnest assurances when other motives — financial motives — so clearly seem at play?

Corporate execs at firms like Booz Allen and the Carlyle Group are making fortunes doing “systematic snooping” for the government. These execs have a vested self-interest in pumping up demand for their snooping services — and they’re indeed, the Washington Post reported last week, pumping away.

This past April, the Post notes, Booz Allen established a new 1,500-employee division “aimed at creating new products that clients (read: government agencies) don’t know they need yet.” This new division is developing “social media analytics” that can anticipate the latest “cyber threat.”

In other words, this new unit will be figuring out how to get the federal government to pay up even more for investigating who we “like” on Facebook.

In one sense, none of this should surprise us. Corporate executives — particularly in the defense industry — have been enriching themselves off government contracts for years. Post-9/11 political dynamics have only turbocharged that process. America now sports, as Pulitzer Prize-winning analyst David Rohde observed last week, a “secrecy industrial complex.”

Do the Snowden revelations have the potential to upset Corporate America’s long-running government contracting gravy train? Maybe, but only if anger over the revelations translates into real changes that keep private corporate contractors from getting rich off tax dollars.

What might these changes entail? The Affordable Care Act enacted in 2010 — Obamacare — suggests one initial step. Under this new legislation, private health insurance companies can no longer deduct off their corporate income taxes any compensation over $500,000 that they pay their top executives.

A more potent antidote to contracting windfalls would be simply denying government contracts to corporations that overcompensate their top execs, a course of action U.S. senator Hugo Black from Alabama, later a noted Supreme Court justice, proposed back in the early years of the Great Depression.

How might this approach work today? The President of the United States makes about 25 times the compensation of the lowest-paid federal employee. We could apply that standard to federal contracting and deny our tax dollars to companies that pay their top execs over 25 times what any of their workers are making.

Protecting privacy in a dangerous world will never be easy. But we’ll never have even a shot at protecting privacy until we take the profit out of violating it. Ending windfalls for contractors would be the logical place to start.

Labor journalist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, writes widely about inequality. His latest book, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970, has just been published.

For the grasping managers of Corporate America — and the institutions their wealth dominates — no workers deserve dignity, not even the most amazingly accomplished.

Locked-out musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra

What do bank executives who make $19 million a year do in their spare time? They do the same thing they do in the hours they spend in their executive suites. They squeeze America’s middle class.

That’s not, of course, what the flacks at U.S. Bancorp, the nation’s fifth-largest bank, will tell you. They’ll inform you that the CEO of their Minneapolis-based banking giant, Richard Davis, graciously gives of his spare time to serve on the board of the nationally renowned Minnesota Orchestra.

True enough. But CEO Davis brings to that board much more than a fondness for fugues. He brings the same corporate executive arrogance that has shoved labor’s share of the nation’s economic output down to modern-day record lows.

This redistribution — from worker to boss — has been rushing ahead now for over three decades. Since 1980, as analyst David Cay Johnston noted last week, “corporate pre-tax profits have grown at almost twice the rate of pre-tax wages.”

Behind this massive redistribution: a relentless corporate offensive to minimize labor bargaining power by any means necessary. Including “lockouts.”

Richard Davis chairs the negotiating committee at the nonprofit responsible for the Minnesota Orchestra. Last October 1, Davis and his fellow corporate managers who run the nonprofit “locked out” the orchestra’s musicians after they refused to accept a contract offer that would have cut musician pay by up to 50 percent and jumped annual health care premiums by up to $8,000.

Ever since then, the Minnesota Orchestra’s near 100 symphony musicians have gone without salary, health insurance, and pension contributions, the basic building blocks of middle-class security.

These musicians are not striking. Quite the contrary. They offered to keep working while bargaining negotiations continued. They also offered to submit “to impartial, final and binding arbitration under the guidance of the Federal Mediation and Conciliation Service.”

U.S. Bancorp CEO Davis and friends rejected these offers. They chose instead to keep the musicians from working — and wait for them to cave.

Back in America’s middle-class golden age, in the middle of the 20th century, such management behavior would have been unthinkable.

Back then, any corporate chiefs who locked out their employees in the middle of a labor dispute risked becoming pariahs in their communities, the sort of shady operators who would never be invited to sit on the board of a prestigious nonprofit like the Minnesota Orchestral Association.

But elite attitudes toward lockouts started changing in 1975 when an ostensibly liberal pillar of the business community, Washington Post publisher Katharine Graham, replaced striking workers with “replacement workers” and lived to tell the tale. Six years later, a newly elected conservative president, Ronald Reagan, fired and replaced striking air traffic controllers.

A new anything-goes corporate management approach to labor relations soon took hold. Lockouts, in this atmosphere, would become simply another option in the modern American management toolkit — and the federal regulator created to safeguard the right to good-faith collective bargaining, the National Labor Relations Board, would prove too feeble to offer up much resistance.

U.S. Bancorp CEO Davis has had an up-close chance to see how effective a management tool lockouts could be. Nearly two years ago, another major enterprise in Minnesota, American Crystal Sugar, locked out 1,300 workers.

The unionized workers at Crystal, the nation’s largest beet sugar producer, had solid middle-class jobs that averaged $40,000 a year, plus overtime. But in 2011 contract negotiations Crystal management demanded huge health care cuts and work rule changes that would undercut the job security of long-term workers.

The workers voted not to accept the offer Crystal labeled “final.” In August 2011, Crystal then locked them out.

The workers never struck. Crystal replaced them anyway. Last month, the worn-out workers, their unemployment benefits exhausted, voted to accept the same management attack on their middle-class contract they had rejected four times earlier. Crystal management had won a total victory.

U.S. Bancorp’s Davis expected total victory when his lockout began, too. But the musicians have hung tough, buoyed by widespread community support. Still, the hostile environment management has created has taken a toll. About a quarter of the orchestra’s 98 musicians have taken jobs elsewhere or retired.

“This lockout is destroying the Minnesota Orchestra, musician by musician by musician,” viola player Sam Bergman told the audience at one benefit concert late in April.

Richard Davis personally took home $18.8 million in 2010 for his U.S. Bancorp labors, several million dollars more than the annual wage and benefit cost of the entire Minnesota Orchestra. Since becoming Bancorp CEO over six years ago, Davis has averaged about $10 million annually.

Imperial CEOs like Richard Davis owe their grand fortunes, in large part, to the grand squeeze American workers have suffered over the last generation. These execs have been squeezing so long they simply cannot operate any other way.

Even music, turns out, cannot soothe the savage beast.

Aficionados of fine music — and advocates for a more equal America — can now support the musicians of the Minnesota Orchestra online.

Labor journalist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, writes widely about inequality. His latest book,

America’s deepest pockets, a new report shows, are saving big bucks from the U.S. tax code’s wide assortment of income tax breaks. They’re saving even more from the absence of a wealth tax.

A hundred years ago, in 1913, Congress wrote into law a federal income tax. Lawmakers have been dotting the tax code, almost ever since, with an assortment of “never-minds” that hand most of us, at one time or another, discounts at tax time.

These discounts can come in handy. If you buy a home, you get to deduct off your taxes the mortgage interest you pay. If you’re raising a family, you get to claim tax credit for your children. If you retire, you can exclude Social Security income from taxes.

And if you make a killing trading on the stock market, you only have to pay taxes on your windfall at half the normal tax rate.

How much do all these deductions, credits, exclusions, and preferential tax rates cost the federal treasury? Representative Chris Van Hollen, a lawmaker from Maryland, wanted to know. He asked the nonpartisan Congressional Budget Office to calculate exactly how much “tax expenditures” — the wonky label in Washington for tax never-minds — were actually totaling.

Van Hollen also asked the CBO to calculate which American taxpayers, by income level, were benefiting the most from these tax expenditures.

Last week, the CBO reported back — with some big numbers: The top 10 special tax breaks in the federal tax code will cost the federal government $900 billion in 2013 and $12 trillion over the next decade.

And most of the benefits from all these trillions in tax savings, the CBO found, are cascading down to America’s most comfortable.

If tax expenditures operated on a totally neutral basis, America’s most affluent 1 percent would be receiving just 1 percent of the taxpayer savings that tax expenditures generate. In fact, the CBO calculates, the top 1 percent of U.S. taxpayers are receiving 17 percent of tax expenditure benefits.

Project these numbers over a decade, and the tax savings for America’s most affluent really start to add up. Over the next ten years, if current law remains in effect, tax expenditures will pour $3.6 trillion into the pockets of America’s top 5 percent of income earners — and $1.9 trillion into the pockets of America’s top 1 percent, households that make over $450,000.

But the enormity of these trillions only hints at how light a tax burden rests on our rich, suggests another new study released last week, the annual global wealth survey from researchers at the Boston Consulting Group.

Just under 5 percent of America’s households, says this new study, now hold at least $1 million each in financial wealth, assets like stocks and other securities, the dollars in savings and checking accounts, and the like.

In 2012, the total net worth of these top 5 percent households pumped up America’s total financial wealth to $39 trillion, a total a trillion dollars higher than the combined financial wealth of Japan, China, and Germany, the world’s next three richest nations.

America’s wealthiest households pay no annual federal taxes on any of these trillions. Why? The United States has no annual federal tax on financial wealth.

We do, on the other hand, have a tax on property wealth. This property tax — a state and local government levy — essentially amounts to a tax on America’s middle class. That’s because residential property makes up most of American middle class wealth — 66 percent, on average, the latest Fed figures show.

For households in America’s richest 1 percent, by contrast, home sweet home accounts for only 9.4 percent of household net worth.

In other words, in America today, we tax the wealth of the middle class on an annual basis. We essentially give the wealth of the wealthy a free pass.

Other nations do tax the wealth of the rich. One of these nations, France, has just upped the rates on its “wealth tax.” French households with over $21.5 million in wealth are now paying this wealth tax at nearly a 2 percent annual rate.

How much would an annual 2 percent wealth tax raise from America’s millionaire households? Recent research from the Deloitte Center for Financial Services can help us here. Deloitte researchers have calculated that American millionaire households in 2011 held $38.6 trillion in total, not just financial, net worth.

In 2020, Deloitte estimates, U.S. households worth at least $1 million will hold $87.1 trillion in wealth, over five times the size of that year’s entire estimated federal debt. A 2 percent annual tax on this $87.1 trillion would raise over $1.7 trillion. Some perspective: In 2020, the Congressional Budget Office estimates, the personal income tax bill for all Americans will total $2.16 trillion.

The new CBO numbers on tax expenditures, says Representative Chris Van Hollen from Maryland, show clearly that current federal income tax deductions, credits, exclusions, and preferences skew “disproportionately to the highest 1 percent of income earners.”

America’s absence of any national annual tax on the wealth of our wealthy skews this lopsided, top-tilting tax picture a good bit more.

High-profile prosecutions only hint at the crime and ethical misbehavior rampant in America’s most rewarding high-finance suites.

They’re hunkering down at SAC Capital, the hedge fund empire billionaire Steven Cohen has spent over two decades building. Federal prosecutors have been picking off SAC’s current and former second bananas one by one, plea bargaining for information that brings them ever closer to Cohen.

This past March SAC coughed up $616 million, without admitting guilt, to settle a federal civil suit charging the hedge fund with insider trading. A defiant Cohen then went out and plopped down $155 million for a Picasso and $60 million more for a new Hamptons manse, just to show how little he’d miss the $616 million.

Now the feds are chasing Cohen on criminal charges, and SAC has announced the hedge fund will no longer cooperate — on an “unconditional” basis — with government requests for information.

The information already out in public has considerably dimmed Cohen’s “financial genius” aura. The astounding 30 percent annual returns his SAC has been averaging, a vivid Vanity Fair chronicle details this month, rest on a gusher of insider tips that SAC spends hundreds of millions to keep flowing.

Whether prosecutors can prove all this, in a court of law, remains to be seen. But the hedge fund industry’s recurring response to scandal — “every industry has a few rotten apples” — is wearing thin. The hedge fund universe, one Harvard Business Review commentary observes, has become a “crimogenic” environment that encourages those enmeshed in it “to ignore legal and ethical rules.”

We’re no longer “talking simply about the occasional corrupt individual,” adds Preet Bharara, the hard-charging federal prosecutor going after Steven Cohen. We’re “talking about something verging on a corrupt business model.”

That’s certainly the view of Les Leopold, the veteran labor educator who has made demystifying America’s financial order his own personal mission ever since the 2008 Great Recession meltdown threw millions of Americans out of work and wiped out the life savings of millions more.

Leopold’s 2009 book, The Looting of America, zeroed in on America’s big banks and how their chase after fortune crashed an entire economy. His new book, How to Make a Million Dollars an Hour: Why Hedge Funds Get Away with Siphoning Off America’s Wealth, refines that story.

Hedge funds, argues Leopold, have played a much larger role in our ongoing economic woes than analysts have generally acknowledged. That doesn’t surprise Leopold — and shouldn’t surprise us. Hedge funds, after all, operate in the shadows, behind layers of secrecy that outsiders rarely get to penetrate.

In fact, most Americans would have a hard time even defining “hedge fund.” Again, no surprise here either. Hedge funds have only been around, in a serious way, the last 30 years. They started gaining traction in the 1980s as wealth started concentrating at America’s economic summit.

Financial industry insiders saw a fabulous new market in this concentration. They could make millions — billions — managing all the cash the titans of America’s new Gilded Age had sloshing in their pockets. All they had to do: promise — and deliver — high investment returns to wealthy investors.

Hedge funds made the perfect vehicle. Like mutual funds, hedge funds take in money from investors and charge a fee for their investing know-how. Unlike mutual funds, hedge funds face precious little federal regulation, since they don’t service the general public, only deep pockets with at least $1 million to invest.

With regulators seldom looking over their shoulders, hedge fund managers can do virtually anything they please with the money deep pockets hand them. They can buy stocks, just like mutual funds, and hope they appreciate in value. They can buy up companies, like private equity firms, and hope to make a killing on a resale. And they can lay bets — on anything.

Leopold has a useful metaphor for exposing the dangers in all this wagering. Imagine how you would feel, he asks, if total strangers could buy insurance on your home — and collect a windfall if your home burned down. Total strangers with a motive for torching your house? What could be more terrifying?

Well, total strangers can’t buy insurance on our homes. Insurance industry regulations prevent that. But hedge funds can bet on assets they don’t own. They can wade into exotic speculative markets and bet against a company’s share price or a nation’s currency or a mortgage-backed security.

The rewards if the bets pan out? Amazingly huge. In 2010, Leopold calculates, the hedge fund industry’s top ten earners averaged $842,788 per hour.

Rewards this outrageous give power suits at hedge funds an irresistible incentive to behave outrageously. And they do, as Leopold makes plain.

These suits connive to create investment securities certain to fail and then lay bets anticipating the failure. They plant rumors to rig markets. They exploit high-tech wizardry to buy and dump stocks “in nanoseconds, fleecing slower buyers and sellers,” and, in the process, “pocketing a hidden sales tax on our mutual funds, pension funds, and 401(k)s.”

Hedge funds, in short, operate as a “drain on our economy and society.” We need to plug the drain. Imposing a tiny tax on every financial transaction would be one step. Such a levy, says Leopold, could put about $150 billion a year of “downward pressure” on the “inflated incomes” of our financial elites.

The European Union is actually making some promising moves to taxing financial transactions. In Washington, meanwhile, neither the White House nor Congress has so far displayed any interest in following suit.

Our financial apples are still rotting.

If President Obama played basketball with the king of Bhutan, would the world have a better shot at becoming a happier place?

What makes us happy? A simple question. In America, we’ve been asking it ever since 1776, the year we declared for “life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.”

Back in those days, Americans hoping to encourage happiness had little more than guesswork to go by. Today we have help: a new science of happiness, with years of research findings.

John de Graaf, the executive director of the Seattle-based Take Back Your Time and the co-author of What’s the Economy For, Anyway? has done as much as any American to share what this science has to offer. I caught up with de Graaf last week for an exchange on the factors that make for happiness — and how inequality impacts them.

Our conventional global economic wisdom, of course, ignores any possible relationship between happiness and inequality. To make us happier, this standard wisdom assumes, we just need to grow economically. Higher GDPs will bring us higher levels of “life satisfaction” and “subjective well-being.”

In fact, as de Graaf points out, beyond a certain level of Gross Domestic Product — about the current GDP of Portugal — we have no research evidence that countries become happier as they become richer.

“We do have evidence that other factors — reduced stress and greater leisure time, good health and social connections — do contribute to greater happiness,” he adds. “And so does the opportunity to do meaningful work and live in a democratic society that fosters trust and personal safety, with access to education, arts, culture, and nature.”

Which societies in the world today rank highest on factors like these? The world’s most equal nations. These societies discourage the flaunting of wealth and encourage social connectivity. People in them have among the shortest working hours and the best “work-life” balance in the world.

“In the United States,” says de Graaf, “we have about the worst work-life balance among rich countries.”

In our society, nothing signals status and success more than personal wealth, and people labor ever longer hours to grab as much of it as they can. But this chase after fortune undercuts our ability to take the satisfaction that comes from leisure time, purposeful work, and all the other quality-of-life dimensions so critical to happiness.

“When we gain personal wealth at the expense of these dimensions, our personal well-being suffers,” observes de Graaf. “When a whole society pursues personal wealth for the few at the expense of these dimensions for the many, that entire society suffers. That’s what we see in America today.”

We see a good bit more as well.

“Our ever-greater piling on of personal wealth,” de Graaf notes, “is threatening to leave future generations a barren planet.”

Americans are already exhausting the world’s resources and waste sinks more rapidly than they can naturally replenish. If everyone on earth lived the American consumer lifestyle, as the Global Footprint Network details, humanity would need five planets to provide the resources and absorb the wastes.

“We simply cannot grow on like this,” says de Graaf. “We need to find a different approach to well-being for the sake of the future.”

This sort of talk, he acknowledges, scares those Americans who believe that we have no alternative to the status quo if we want “the economy” to thrive.

“These Americans accept the notion that we’re here to serve the economy,” says de Graaf. “But the economy should be serving us.”

In Bhutan, the tiny Himalayan nation de Graaf recently visited as part of an international advisory group, policy makers have been working to re-orient their economy in this direction. Bhutan has become the first society on earth to make the pursuit of happiness its prime driver of public policy.

Over recent years, de Graaf relates, life expectancy, literacy, and happiness levels have all “increased spectacularly” in Bhutan. The nation ensures all workers a month of annual vacation. Small touches matter for happiness, too. In winter, workdays run from 9 to 4, to keep workers from having to travel to and from work in darkness.

The Bhutanese are now asking the United Nations to explore new progress markers — linked to sustainable well-being and happiness — that can replace traditional GDP measures, and next year, in June, the young king of Bhutan will be traveling to the UN and the United States to help make that case.

Will anybody be listening? De Graaf certainly hopes so — and thinks a little basketball game might help. Turns out that Bhutan’s 33-year-old king plays a mean game of hoops, among the best in his country.

A game on the White House court with the king and President Obama, says de Graaf, just might attract some global media attention.

“Add a few celebrities and NBA stars to the game,” he dreams, “and you could have an international event of great import, an event that could get people talking about measuring ‘equitable and sustainable well-being’ instead of GDP.”

And that would be something to truly get happy about.

Labor journalist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, writes widely about inequality. His latest book, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970, has just been published.

Looking for a quick fix to the deep inequality that so afflicts us? Stop your searching. We need to strategize instead for the long-term. A riveting new work from a leading historian helps us see how.

The 79-year-old corporate gadfly Robert Monks, the former top federal regulator over America’s pension system, earlier this year opined that Corporate America operates “for the personal enrichment and glorification of its manager-kings.”

Too harsh a judgment? Hardly. Current standard corporate operating procedures only make sense if we acknowledge that America’s biggest private enterprises have essentially become the private preserve of an elite executive class.

How else to explain today’s most routine corporate behaviors? The endless rush to mergers that create little more than chaos in newly consolidated workplaces. The ongoing corporate refusal to invest significantly in research and development and employee training. The billions of dollars corporations spend to “buy back” company shares of stock on the open market.

All these moves leave corporations less equipped to succeed in the long term. But all these moves generate multiple millions, sometimes even billions, in the here and now for the corporate executives who make them.

Corporations, of course, have always done well by the executives who run them. But a half-century ago the United States had institutions that kept this enrichment within somewhat reasonable bounds. Trade unions acted as a brake on executive greed grabs. A progressive tax system — with rates as high as 91 percent on income over $400,000 — discouraged the greed grabbing in the first place.

But both these institutions — trade unions and progressive taxes — have atrophied over recent decades. Income and wealth, without these institutional checks in place, have concentrated at America’s economic summit. Below that summit, daily life for average Americans has become ever more insecure.

The United States, in effect, has slid into what University of Maryland historian and political economist Gar Alperowitz calls a “systemic crisis.” For the nation’s vast majority, America has simply stopped working. Daily life has turned into an ever-faster treadmill. And no real relief looms anywhere on the near horizon.

In this dreary environment, an understandable disillusionment — with our political leaders — runs deep. So does a decapacitating cynicism. Why bother struggling against an unjust status quo when nothing ever changes?

Historian Alperovitz has a new book out that aims to rouse us from this suffocating political stupor. In his new What Then Must We Do? Straight Talk about the Next American Revolution, he endeavors to show that societies in “systemic crisis” can change. Revolutions do happen. Indeed, he suggests, “we may now be well into the prehistory of the next American revolution.”

Just what does Alperovitz mean by that? In any social order, he explains, political power reflects the ongoing distribution of wealth. Meaningful change only begins when that existing distribution starts coming under challenge.

Alperovitz sees the challenge needed today as much more than any single campaign for a candidate or cause. He has something deeper in mind: an “evolutionary reconstruction” of our society, a decades-long shift that aims to democratize wealth, to build “a community-sustaining economy from the ground up.”

Pie-in-the-sky fantasy? We already, Alperovitz stresses, have the seeds of an alternate, wealth-democratizing economy in place. Well over 100 million Americans belong to credit unions and co-ops. Ten million Americans labor in worker-owned enterprises. Millions more Americans live in municipalities where public institutions generate electric power — or even provide Internet service.

Alperovitz envisions a steady expansion of wealth-democratizing institutions like these. Over time, over decades, the people these institutions touch begin to see from their daily experiences that alternatives to our dominant corporate status quo do exist. They begin to hold “clear ideas” about what can be done.

In times of acute crisis — say another banking failure — people with clear ideas about democratizing wealth won’t let their tax dollars bail out billionaires. They’ll demand public banks. They’ll carve away at private corporate power, bit by bit.

What Then Must We Do? mixes these intoxicating visions of a future yet to be with concrete descriptions of wealth-democratizing efforts already underway all across the nation, from Cleveland and Chattanooga to Portland and Sacramento.

These descriptions can surprise. One example: In Texas, the heart of red-state America, Dallas has opted to build a city-owned convention center hotel. Quips Alperovitz: “Everyday socialism, all the time, American-style.”

The pages Alperovitz has penned here hold a promise that goes beyond the compelling clarity of his prose. National networks are already working to advance his strategic vision, efforts like the community wealth-building initiative of the Maryland-based Democracy Collaborative and the New Economy Working Group, a center for both local and global thought and action.

America, Alperovitz reminds us, has become the wealthiest nation in the history of the world. The nation’s annual income, if divided equally, would be enough to bring each family of four $200,000. We can, in other words, do far better for average Americans than we do today. Why not try?

Labor journalist Sam Pizzigati, an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow, writes widely about inequality. His latest book, The Rich Don’t Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class, 1900-1970, has just been published.

America’s top corporate executives love lecturing the rest of us about ‘fiscal responsibility.’ They want us to expect less from government. But they expect more, and a new report shows how they’re getting it.

Last week, federal unemployment benefits for the 400,000 Californians out of work since last fall dropped almost 18 percent, a $52 cut out of an average $297 weekly check. Similar cuts have already started rolling out in other states.

In all, 3.8 million long-term unemployed Americans will on average lose near $1,000 each by September 30, the date that ends the 2012 federal fiscal year.

The direct cause of all these cuts: the “sequester,” the $85 billion in federal austerity budget reductions that kicked in this past March 1.

Who deserves the “credit” for this meat-axe sequester? Credit the power suits who occupy Corporate America’s loftiest executive suites. These top corporate executives — organized in groups like “Fix the Debt” and the Business Roundtable — have been lobbying relentlessly for deep cuts in federal spending.

Only significant cutbacks in programs near and dear to average Americans, these executives proclaim, can save the nation from debt disaster.

But these same top executives, says a new report released last week, are actually running up the federal debt — purely to enrich themselves.

The giant firms these execs manage, details this new report from the Institute for Policy Studies and the Campaign for America’s Future, “are exploiting the U.S. tax code to send taxpayers the bill for the huge rewards they’re doling out to their top executives.”

How huge do these rewards go? UnitedHealth Group CEO Stephen Hemsley, a “Fix the Debt” endorser, pulled in $199 million between 2009 and 2011.

A convenient federal tax loophole — in place since 1993 — let UnitedHealth deduct $194 million of that windfall compensation on its corporate tax return. That deduction, in turn, saved UnitedHealth — and denied the federal treasury — $68 million, enough to extend full federal unemployment benefits for the rest of the 2013 fiscal year to over 65,000 jobless Americans.

The loophole UnitedHealth so lucratively exploited lets companies deduct off their taxes every dollar of “performance pay” they shovel into their executives’ personal pockets. UnitedHealth, of course, hardly stands alone here. All American corporate and banking giants play the “performance pay” game.

The 90 giant firms that belong to “Fix the Debt” play the game particularly well. Between 2009 and 2011, the deductions these 90 claimed for top executive “performance pay” added at least $953 million — and maybe as much as $1.6 billion — to America’s national debt.

The U.S. tax code’s exceedingly bountiful “performance pay” loophole has its roots in an earlier epoch of American public outrage at excessive CEO pay. Back in 1992, Bill Clinton campaigned against over-the-top executive pay in his drive for the White House. Congress, just months after Clinton’s inauguration, would go on to pass legislation that lawmakers hailed as a check on CEO excess.

The new law allowed corporations to deduct off their taxes no more than $1 million in compensation per executive. But the law had a huge escape hatch. Firms could exempt any “performance-based” pay from the $1 million limit.

The predictable result? An explosion of “performance-based” compensation, particularly in the form of stock options, an explosion that would keep CEO pay soaring. CEOs had been averaging 42 times U.S. worker pay in 1982. By 1992, the gap had jumped to 201 times. The average gap today: 354 times.

The “performance pay” loophole, the new Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America’s Future report stresses, has served “as a critical subsidy for excessive compensation.”

“The larger the executive payout, the less the corporation pays in taxes,” the report explains. “And average taxpayers wind up footing the bill.”

That footing would end if legislation Representative Barbara Lee from California has introduced ever became law. Her Income Equity Act would deny corporations a tax deduction on any executive compensation that runs over 25 times the pay of a company’s lowest-paid workers, or $500,000.

Interestingly, the Affordable Health Care Act enacted in President Obama’s first term sets a $500,000 cap, effective this year, on how much health insurers like UnitedHealth can deduct for executive compensation.

With this cap now law for health care execs, notes the new Institute for Policy Studies and Campaign for America’s Future report, “taxpayers won’t have to worry so much about their hard-earned dollars going to subsidize fat paychecks for CEOs like Stephen Hemsley of UnitedHealth.”

“But,” sums up the study, “taxpayers may want to wonder why — at a time of scarce government resources — their tax dollars are subsidizing fat paychecks at any American corporate giant.”

If we let wealth continue to concentrate — and corrupt every element of our contemporary societies — we’ll all end up crying ‘96 tears.’

Aging baby boomers may remember, from way back in 1966, a one-hit-wonder rock band that sported an all-time great of a name. That band — Question Mark and the Mysterians — may now have a worthy rival on the name front. Make way for Reinhart-Rogoff and the Austerians.

Harvard economists Carmen Reinhart and Kenneth Rogoff don’t make smash records. They write learned economic papers that make austerians happy — and help smash the life prospects of average working families.

Austerians preach the absolute necessity of whacking away at government spending for public services. We must, these champions of austerity solemnly intone, discipline ourselves to reduce government deficit and debt, no matter the pain austerity may bring us.

And austerity does bring pain. People lose access to basic services. People lose jobs. People even go hungry. But some people — extremely affluent people — don’t mind austerity at all.

These affluents don’t send their kids to public schools. They don’t spend weekend afternoons at public parks. They never step aboard public transit. These wealthy don’t need public services and resent having to pay taxes to support them.

Austerity works for these affluents. Cutbacks in public services won’t, by and large, bring any discomfort to their daily lives.

And if austerity should create some unanticipated discomfort, they can always get their friends in high places to intervene — as Americans saw last week when lawmakers rushed to undo recent austerity cutbacks in the Federal Aviation Administration budget that had affluent people cooling their heels in airports.

Austerity cutbacks, notes Center for Economic and Policy Research economist Dean Baker, promise even greater payoffs — for the rich — down the road. The austerity push for cuts in programs like Social Security, he points out, “opens the door for lowering tax rates on the wealthy in the future.”

“If these sorts of social commitments can be reduced,” Baker writes, “then the wealthy can look forward to being able to keep more of their income.”

All this may help explain why pollsters have found, as economist Paul Krugman pointed out last Friday, that wealthy Americans “by a large majority” consider budget deficits “the most important problem we face.”

America’s wealthy make their personal predilection for austerity equally plain to the politicians who seek their favor. These pols, for their part, want to be helpful to their deep-pocketed patrons. But these pols, Dean Baker reminds us, also have needs of their own. They need “evidence” they can use to show the general public that “austerity serves the general good and not just the rich.”

Three years ago, Harvard’s Reinhart and Rogoff supplied that “evidence,” via an academic paper that purported to show a clear and imminent danger whenever government debt hits a particular percent of Gross Domestic Product.

This Reinhart-Rogoff paper rushed to the “top of the charts” in elite public policy circles. Austerians worldwide waved the paper at every opportunity. They cited Reinhart and Rogoff’s work as an unassailable justification for cutting government spending quick and cutting government spending deep.

Reinhart and Rogoff made no meaningful move to discourage the austerians. They basked instead in their global celebrity — until earlier this month when a team of unorthodox economists at the University of Massachusetts exposed the Reinhart-Rogoff paper as essentially a sloppy scholarly fraud.

This Massachusetts work quickly went viral. By last week, Reinhart and Rogoff’s Excel spreadsheet errors had become fodder for late-night TV comics.

End of story? Not quite. We have much more here than a spectacularly failed attempt to make the case for a doctrine that suits the sensibilities of the richest among us. We have powerful proof that inequality corrupts every corner of contemporary societies, even — and especially — our ivory towers.

The academic peers of Reinhart and Rogoff, the scholars who hold the nation’s most prestigious endowed chairs in economics, never once made any effort to check out the Harvard pair’s findings. The unraveling of their bogus case for austerity started with the digging of a skeptical grad student.

The lesson in all this? In a staggeringly unequal society, as Paul Krugman summed up last week, “what the top 1 percent wants becomes what economic science says we must do.”

The rest of us, of course, don’t have to listen.

How much did America’s top execs make last year? The scorekeepers don’t all agree. But that won’t matter if we keep our eyes on the most important figure of all: the pay gap between CEOs and workers.

The new numbers on executive pay have been coming fast and furious the last few weeks. So how are America’s top execs faring these days? Last Wednesday, two business correspondents gave two totally different answers.

CEOs are once again “scoring big pay increases,” journalist Darcy Keith reported. The data, countered analyst Rick Newman, show that shareholder activists now have “more power to rein in bloated executive pay packages.”

Why all this uncertainty about how well top execs are doing? In theory, none of this confusion should exist. By law, after all, U.S. corporations must publicly disclose exactly what they’re paying their top execs.

But exactly how corporations pay their top execs can get tricky. Straight salary — the stuff of standard paychecks — only makes up about 10 percent of typical big-time corporate executive compensation.

Most executive pay today comes as stock-related compensation, as either stock “options” or “restricted” stock. Options give executives the right, down the road, to buy shares of their company stock at today’s share price. If that share price rises, the execs can buy low and sell high. Instant windfall.

“Restricted” stock awards give executives actual shares of stock, not just an option to buy them. Execs do have to wait a few years before they can actually claim these shares. No big deal. The shares will still have value, in future years, even if a company’s share price falls.

But how should we value right now all this share-related compensation? Should CEO pay scorekeepers, in their annual tallies, estimate how much stock awards granted this year will be worth in years to come?

Or should scorekeepers only tally stock-related awards when execs actually profit personally from them, either by “exercising” their options or gaining title to restricted shares that have “vested”?

Different executive pay scorekeepers give different answers. Some estimate the future value. Others wait until execs actually profit personally.

Scorekeepers also keep score on different sets of corporations. USA Today’s new scorecard for 2012 tallies pay at 170 firms, the New York Times at just 100.

Out of all this scorekeeping confusion come — no surprise — substantially different results. USA Today last month found an 8 percent hike in 2012 CEO pay. “CEO pay rockets,” the paper reported. The New York Times earlier this month found CEO average pay up 18.7 percent.

But Towers Watson, a corporate consulting firm, announced last week that CEO pay growth “slowed considerably in 2012,” rising at just a 1.2 percent rate.

This Towers Watson finding came one day after researchers at the AFL-CIO, America’s national labor federation, reported that U.S. CEOs are now making 354 times the pay of average U.S. workers, the “largest pay gap in the world.”

Wait, things actually get even more complicated. Rick Newman at US News and World Report looks at the same data as the AFL-CIO and pronounces that the CEO-worker pay gap “is actually narrowing.”

This gap, the AFL-CIO acknowledges, did drop in 2012, from 380 to 354 times, but only because the dip in Apple CEO Tim Cook’s pay — from over $376 million in 2011 to $4.2 million in 2012 — wildly lowered 2012′s overall CEO pay average.

What matters most, the AFL-CIO stresses, remains the trend line, and that trend tells a crystal-clear story. Three decades ago, in 1982, American CEOs averaged 42 times more than average U.S. workers. Two decades ago, in 1992, the gap stood at 201 times. A decade ago: 281 times. The latest ratio: the 354 times.

How do we reverse this growing gap? Identifying the specific pay gap ratio between CEOs and their own workers would be a good first step.

Corporations have had to publish, for decades now, how much they pay their top executives. They haven’t had to tell us how much they pay their workers. The Dodd-Frank Wall Street Reform and Consumer Protection Act enacted in 2010, at least on paper, changes this dynamic.

Dodd-Frank requires corporations to annual disclose the gap between what they pay their CEOs and their most typical workers. But a Corporate America lobbying blitz has kept the Securities and Exchange Commission from writing the federal regulations needed to enforce this Dodd-Frank pay disclosure mandate.

The SEC chairman who let corporate lobbying bury the mandate, Mary Schapiro, left the agency in December. Corporate America takes care of its friends. This week Schapiro will join the General Electric board of directors.

Schapiro’s successor, Mary Jo White, hails from the same corporate world Schapiro is now joining. Americans for Financial Reform, a coalition helping to lead the charge against CEO pay excess, is urging White to start up fresh and move expeditiously to start enforcing Dodd-Frank.

America’s major corporations are still pushing the other way. Why do they so relentlessly oppose pay ratio disclosure? Disclosure, by itself, won’t shove down CEO pay levels. But disclosure could open the door to other significant steps that could put a damper on CEO pay excess.

Lawmakers could, for instance, choose to deny government contracts or subsidies or tax breaks to corporations that pay their top executives over 25 or 50 or 100 times what their own workers are making.

Far-fetched? Current law already denies government contracts to companies that discriminate by race or gender in their employment practices.

As a society, we’ve concluded that our tax dollars must not go to corporations that widen racial or gender inequality. So why should we let our tax dollars enrich corporations that widen our economic divide?

A colossal gift from a fabulously rich patron of the arts has the museum world buzzing. But hold the hosannahs. The rich aren’t saving our culture.

Thomas Campbell didn’t have a good week last week. He had a great week.

Campbell directs the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York. Last week he announced “something museum directors only dream about”: the donation to the Met of a collection of paintings, drawings, and sculpture worth over $1 billion.

The donor: cosmetics magnate Leonard Lauder. His gift: 33 pieces by Pablo Picasso and dozens of other landmark works from Picasso’s fellow artists, activists all in the “cubist” movement that ushered in the modern era of abstract art.

Forbes estimates Lauder’s overall net worth at well north of $8 billion. Chunks of this fortune have been going to the art world for some time now. In 2008 alone, Lauder gave $131 million to the Whitney Museum.

Philanthropy this bold simply thrills apologists for inequality. Immense concentrations of private wealth, these cheerleaders for grand fortune love to claim, bring culture to our civilization.

Only the truly wealthy, the argument goes, have the time and resources to cultivate a real appreciation for the finer things in life.

“The rich make life more interesting,” as the prominent business editor William Davis gushed in the early 1980s. “Walk around any museum and look at the treasures they have left us, and ask yourself what there would be to see if Communism had arrived four centuries earlier.”

Editorial writers at the New York Post echoed those sentiments last week in a tribute to Lauder’s latest king-sized gift to the art world. Let’s hope this gift, their editorial opined, helps change the way our society “thinks about billionaires.”

“Being rich doesn’t make you evil,” the Post editorial continued. “And the accumulation of wealth can enrich others — in countless ways.”

Let the Lauder gift especially be a lesson, the editorial huffed, to those who may still want to subject the rich to “millionaire taxes” meant to “share the wealth.”

In reality, of course, we’ve seen precious little “sharing the wealth” over recent decades. Billionaires like Leonard Lauder have watched the tax rates on their incomes plummet. And the resulting squeeze on the public purse has had a substantial — and troubling — artistic impact, especially in America’s schools.

In New York City, as one local arts group relates, budget cuts have painted a “grim picture for arts education.” Kids in New York live “surrounded by a priceless array of arts and cultural institutions.” Yet they’re growing up “culturally isolated.” Nearly a quarter of New York’s schools have no certified arts instructor in them.

New York hardly stand alone. In Los Angeles, one arts activist noted last fall, 53 percent of elementary-age kids are getting no exposure to arts instruction. In Detroit, 60 percent of schools “lack art education as part of the curriculum.”

Nationwide, the same pattern. The U.S. Department of Education reported last spring that 4 million elementary school students are going without visual arts instruction. Adds Dan Domenech, the executive director of the American Association of School Administrators: “We haven’t hit bottom yet.”

The “top” for arts education came back in America’s share-the-wealth golden age in the mid 20th century, the years when America’s wealthiest faced federal income tax rates as high as 91 percent, over double the top current rate.

In 1960, lawmakers in Albany okayed the creation of the New York State Council on the Arts. Four years later, Congress established the National Endowment of the Arts. The federal government became, for the first time ever, a major player in arts funding. In community after community, federal dollars began leveraging a vital partnership of nonprofits and public agencies. The arts flourished.

We can’t, of course, totally blame the demise of this golden age on shrinking billionaire top-bracket tax rates. Other factors have been at play, most particularly the rising pressure on school systems to narrow the curriculum to subjects that lend themselves to endless rounds of standardized testing.

But who’s bankrolling this intensely market-driven approach to education that has no patience for “frills” like art? America’s billionaires, through the vast network of think tanks and foundations they’ve so lavishly underwritten.

So let’s keep in mind what really happens — to the arts — when we let wealth concentrate. Museums get paintings from the awesomely affluent. These affluent get plaques in the museums testifying to their generosity — and lucrative deductions on their tax returns for the art they donate.

And the rest of us? We pay our $25 admission fee to enter museums like New York’s Met and watch art education fade away from our schools.