I know you missed the headline on the front-page of The New York Times and the other major newspapers the other day: “Corporate Profits Hit Record Highs But Workers Get Screwed.” Yes, not subtle, but you get the picture–a story like that never hit the MSM but it’s a fact.

Corporate profits rose 21.3% in the past year and account for the largest share of national income in 40 years. I love the way CBS Marketwatch reported this little factoid:

“Strong productivity gains and subdued wage growth boosted before-tax profits to 11.6% of national income in the fourth quarter of 2005, the biggest share since the summer of 1966.For all of 2005, before-tax profits totaled $1.35 trillion, up from $1.16 trillion in 2004 and just $767 billion in 2001.
Meanwhile, the share of national income going to wage and salary workers has fallen to 56.9%. Except for a brief period in 1997, that’s the lowest share for labor income since 1966.

Uh, huh. “Subdued wage growth?” You mean, because unions have been pushed to the brink of extinction and there is not right to strike and executive pay is obscene beyond belief…workers aren’t getting a fair share? The word “subuded” means to “conquer,” or “tame” but it conveys a softness that belies the harshness of what the attack against workers’ pay means in peoples’ daily lives.

Our friend at the Economic Policy Institute put it this way:

This rise in corporate profits’ share is, by far, the largest that has occurred 19 quarters after a business cycle peak since World War II, and it is about eight times as large as the average shift that has characterized previous recoveries. If these shares had remained constant, labor incomes as an aggregate would be $346 billion higher today.

As I’ve pointed out here many times, workers have been busting their butts for years to keep up and productivity has been strong for the past number of years. Increased productivity is supposed to translate into higher wages (because we work harder or more efficiently and create more stuff in a shorter ammount of time). But, as EPI points out:

While productivity growth has been strong during the current recovery (averaging annual growth of 3.5%), the fruits of this growth have disproportionately flowed to profits instead of wages and benefits. This strong productivity growth provides the potential to generate broad-based increases in American living standards, but, so far corporate profits have been the only clear winner.

Translation: greed marches on and the country becomes more unequal and more unfair.