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This is outrageous. The University fought tooth-and-nail against giving the 4,500 clerical and technical workers at Harvard (whose average pay is $50,000) even a modest raise. Yet it doles out millions of dollars to its top executives and administrators.

It certainly is cold comfort for this article to “assure” us, however, that the President of Harvard’s compensation package is actually not the most disgustingly outrageous of all the university presidents in the U.S.

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University President Drew G. Faust received $899,734 in salary and benefits in 2011, according to a recent filing with the Internal Revenue Service.

While that figure is about the same as last year’s, Harvard’s chief investment manager, who is paid far more than most administrators, saw a 52 percent increase in her earnings.

Faust’s compensation package includes $729,106 in reportable compensation, and the rest refers to benefits including her residence at 33 Elmwood, the Cambridge mansion that Harvard presidents have occupied since the early 1970’s.

In 2010, Faust’s total compensation equaled $875,331. Faust’s earnings are still significantly lower than those of many other University presidents, some of whom make well over a million dollars per year. The highest-paid University president in 2010 was J. Robert Kerrey of the New School, who made $3 million that year, according to the Chronicle of Higher Education. Its review of executive compensation found that 36 presidents of private colleges made more than a million dollars in 2010.

But Faust’s pay is much lower than that of other top Harvard employees. The compensations of officials at the Harvard Management Company, which oversees the University’s $30 billion endowment as well as its other investments, as usual far outpaced those of any administrators involved directly in the University.

HMC President and CEO Jane L. Mendillo took home $5,323,753 in 2011, according to a press release Wednesday, while the company’s Head of Alternative Assets Andrew G. Wiltshire received $6,608,581 in total compensation, making him the top earner at HMC that year. HMC’s Head of Public Markets Stephen Blyth, who is also a statistics professor, made $6,161,489.

Those figures are significantly higher than their compensation in 2010, when Mendillo received $3.5 million and Wilshire, $5.5 million.

This interview with Karl Marx first appeared on January 5, 1879, in the Chicago Tribune—one of the most conservative newspapers of the time, which regularly attacked socialism and trade unions.

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LONDON, DECEMBER 18 [1878]—In a little villa at Haverstock Hill, the northwest portion of London, lives Karl Marx, the cornerstone of modern socialism. He was exiled from his native country—Germany—in 1844, for propagating revolutionary theories. In 1848, he returned, but in a few months was again exiled. He then took up his abode in Paris, but his political theories procured his expulsion from that city in 1849, and since that year his headquarters have been in London. His convictions have caused him trouble from the beginning. Judging from the appearance of his home, they certainly have not brought him affluence. Persistently during all these years he has advocated his views with an earnestness which undoubtedly springs from a firm belief in them, and, however much we may deprecate their propagation, we cannot but respect to a certain extent the self-denial of the now venerable exile.

Our correspondent has called upon him twice or thrice, and each time the Doctor was found in his library, with a book in one hand and a cigarette in the other. He must be over seventy years of age. His physique is well knit, massive, erect. He has the head of a man of intellect, and the features of a cultivated Jew. His hair and beard are long, and iron-gray in color. His eyes are glittering black, shaded by a pair of bushy eyebrows. To a stranger he shows extreme caution. A foreigner can generally gain admission; but the ancient-looking German woman [Helene Demuth] who waits upon visitors has instructions to admit none who hail from the Fatherland, unless they bring letters of introduction. Once into his library, however, and having fixed his one eyeglass in the corner of his eye, in order to take your intellectual breadth and depth, so to speak, he loses that self-restraint, and unfolds to you a knowledge of men and things throughout the world apt to interest one. And his conversation does not run in one groove, but is as varied as are the volumes upon his library shelves. A man can generally be judged by the books he reads, and you can form your own conclusions when I tell you a casual glance revealed Shakespeare, Dickens, Thackeray, Moliere, Racine, Montaigne, Bacon, Goethe, Voltaire, Paine; English, American, French blue books; works political and philosophical in Russian, German, Spanish, Italian, etc., etc.

During my conversation I was struck with his intimacy with American questions which have been uppermost during the past twenty years. His knowledge of them, and the surprising accuracy with which he criticized our national and state legislation, impressed upon my mind the fact that he must have derived his information from inside sources. But, indeed, this knowledge is not confined to America, but is spread over the face of Europe. When speaking of his hobby—socialism—he does not indulge in those melodramatic flights generally attributed to him, but dwells upon his utopian plans for “the emancipation of the human race” with a gravity and an earnestness indicating a firm conviction in the realization of his theories, if not in this century, at least in the next.

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Latest Gallup Poll:

The federal poverty threshold [as set by the government] for a family of four is just under $24,000; however, Americans believe such a family unit living in their community needs more than double that — $58,000, on average — just to “get by.”

Or, how most Americans understand the reality of poverty far better than the federal government and its various bureaucrats.

Stocks and profits are up, but wages aren’t growing.

Stock markets and corporate profits are breaking records. The economy suddenly looks brighter after the government’s surprising report Friday that employers added 635,000 jobs the past three months.

But instead of celebrating, many working Americans are borrowing a line from the 1996 movie Jerry Maguire: “Show me the money.”

 … The roaring market is making the richest Americans richer, and giving them more money to spend. But in 2010, only 31% of U.S. households had stock holdings of $10,000 or more, according to the Economic Policy Institute (EPI). During the first two years of the recovery, average net worth rose for the top 7% of households but fell for the other 93%, the Pew Research Center says…..Productivity, or output per labor hour, has risen an average 1.5% a year since the recovery began. Companies are squeezing more out of each worker even as inflation-adjusted wages have stagnated.

What about it peeps!? Any of you out there Canadian and have a social justice blog?

The only people who really have completely free speech in an unequal, capitalist society are the rich. Everyone else has to self-censor what they say or write in public (for instance, at work, to the media, posts on facebook, twitter, etc.), lest it prevent them from obtaining and/or holding a job, i.e., being able to live. This is even more so the case in the U.S. where the power of employers to hire and fire at will is virtually unrestricted.

After 300 years of land theft and genocide, the US government is still trying to exploit what few resources remain in the hands of Native Americans.

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A Senate Indian Affairs Committee hearing quickly turned into a referendum on energy development on Indian lands on Wednesday. As Republicans on the panel pressed Interior Secretary Sally Jewell to encourage Indian tribes to develop more oil and natural gas resources, the department chief reiterated the administration’s commitment to developing renewable energy alongside fossil fuels.

In her prepared testimony, Jewell said “the Department is committed to assisting tribes in expanding on Indian lands renewable, low cost, reliable and secure energy supplies as well as safe and responsible oil and gas development in accordance with tribal objectives.

Capitalism =\= meritocracy. Capitalism = institutional nepotism (along racial, gender, national, and class lines).

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… Favoritism is almost universal in today’s job market. In interviews with hundreds of people on this topic, I found that all but a handful used the help of family and friends to find 70 percent of the jobs they held over their lifetimes; they all used personal networks and insider information if it was available to them.

In this context of widespread networking, the idea that there is a job “market” based solely on skills, qualifications and merit is false. Whenever possible, Americans seeking jobs try to avoid market competition: they look for unequal rather than equal opportunity. In fact, the last thing job seekers want to face is equal opportunity; they want an advantage. They want to find ways to cut in line and get ahead.

BREAST CANCER is no laughing matter—certainly not for the roughly 232,340 U.S. women who will be diagnosed with it this year, or the 39,620 women expected to die from it.

Yet the editors over at the CounterPunch website were apparently guffawing over Angelina Jolie’s recent decision to undergo a preventative double mastectomy. Their e-mail promo for an article posted on the site on May 14 reads: “Ruth Fowler unsnaps Angelina Jolie’s bra and exposes privilege, health care and tits.” Presto! A double mastectomy morphs into locker room fodder.

 … Like so many Hollywood actresses, the sexual objectification of Jolie’s own face and body has been a key component of her fame. Jolie should certainly be commended for her courage in choosing to make her double mastectomy public—in order to help reassure other women confronting the possibility or reality of mastectomy to understand that losing one or both of their breasts does not mean losing their sexuality. In her May 14 op-ed piece in the New York Times, she wrote, “On a personal note, I do not feel any less of a woman. I feel empowered that I made a strong choice that in no way diminishes my femininity.”

In a society as sexist as ours, in which women are so often judged in relation to the perceived desirability of their individual body parts—as if in suspended animation from the rest of their personhood—this message could not be more timely.

The essence of this message is entirely lost on the CounterPunch gang. They seem blissfully unconcerned that their own use of the degrading term “tits” is yet more evidence of the damaging impact of the sexual objectification of women. The fact that they do so under the guise of left-wing commentary only compounds this damage.

 … Hollywood actors neither created nor can resolve the health care crisis. That responsibility lies squarely with the medical-industrial complex, including its government lackeys, who sustain the class disparities of the for-profit health care system. The conditions are ripe for a movement that demands health care for all, but it must take aim at the appropriate targets to be effective.

It should not be difficult to understand why millions of women who, facing an epidemic of breast cancer, breathed a sigh of relief on May 14 upon reading Jolie’s honest and eloquent account of removing her breasts to save her life.

And I strongly suggest that those who find her struggle amusing lift their snouts out of the trough long enough to discover why so many women are not laughing. An ounce of empathy for women’s health and dignity would go a long way.

 … Surely cops don’t sit around the station house talking about how their true purpose is to suppress the rebellious underclass. But apparently, they do. Here’s how one Brooklyn police supervisor puts it on one of the secretly recorded tapes played at the Floyd trial:

If you get too big of a crowd there, you know, they’re going to get out of control, and they’re going to think that they own the block. We own the block. They don’t own the block, alright? They might live there, but we own the block, alright? We own the streets here.