Lark fiasco highlights growing wage inequality by public sector elites

Peter Lark at Special Meeting

One of the hardest things about watching the special session of the Lansing City Council meeting Monday night was witnessing the painful disparity between the people suffering the consequences of Lansing BWL GM J. Peter Lark’s decisions and Lark’s apparent indifference to their plight.

At the time, we did not know that Lark had left Lansing in the aftermath of what even he called a “catastrophic” power outage following the ice storm the Sunday before Christmas, for an undoubtedly upscale vacation with his family in New York City (thanks to the Lansing State Journal team for digging out the truth that Lark has been hiding from us). But as Lark sat there texting at the public meeting while people poured out stories of desperation, the disconnect between the elites who run the clown show and the folks who do not have the money to escape their tender mercies could not have been clearer.

Today we learn from Steve Harry’s Public Policy website that Lark’s total compensation package from BWL (see below) is $335,000 a year, with a golden parachute that could total as much as a cool half-million on top if he’s forced to leave early.

In contrast was the woman who lives on $12,000 a year. She brought a bag full of empty packages for all the batteries she has had to buy for flashlights since she had been without power for more than a week. She had no option to fly to NYC and visit Rockefeller Center to avoid the storm’s brutal aftermath.

There was the grandmother who couldn’t sleep at night from worry because her daughter and four granddaughters risked carbon monoxide poisoning running the gas stove to keep from freezing. So she took money she didn’t have to buy them a generator she couldn’t afford - yet she still couldn’t sleep worrying the generator would be stolen, as happened frequently in her neighborhood. She did not have the option of whisking her family away to Manhattan hotel for a fun-filled holiday vacation as Lark did.

Yet the larger picture is that we are now seeing the public and non-profit sector follow the dangerous path forged in the private sector where compensation packages for those at the top escalate, while those who toil at the bottom are forced to work harder for less.

A Rockefeller Institute report issued last September shows that Michigan was third in suffering the deepest cuts in public-sector employment at the state and local levels, down 7.3 percent between 2008 and 2012. Meanwhile, in November, the Detroit Free Press* unearthed the astounding 80% to 90% pay raises that Governor Rick Snyder awarded to his cronies at the top of the state’s Treasury Department. As Eclectablog confirms, Chief Investment Officer Braeutigam will now receive $333,000 a year. Steve Harry’s site shows how dramatically Lark’s salary grew from the $120,000 a year he was paid when he was hired in 2007.

Are you seeing a pattern here?

Among the many reasons for growing inequality in our country (tax cuts for the rich, for starters) is the dramatic escalation in compensation for those at the top in the private sector.

The escalation of CEO compensation in inflation-adjusted dollars

Now we see it in the public/non-profit sector as well. Elites of both parties and their complaint boards of directors award lavish salaries to their friends and supporters - often in the apparent hope that they will be in line for similar largess should they ever need it.

While many folks were happy to see the Lansing Red Cross efforts in providing warming shelters, the fact that the head of the American Red Cross made $590,000 (with an additional $37,000 in other compensation) in 2012 makes my blood boil.

This is not a GOP/DEM issue. The real divide is the growing gap between the First World elites and the growing number of Third World workers in our society. As I watched residents of Lansing stream to the podium on Monday night, I felt as though I had landed in a frozen-banana republic. The seemingly endless line of supplicants, many of whom were exhausted, were still almost unfailingly polite, often asking for little more than recognition of their problems.

What arrogance for Mayor Bernero to disappear for a major portion of their testimony, while Lark texted.

The speakers were suffering Third World problems - no heat, no lights, no money to replace spoiled food - while Bernero and Lark were simply being asked to sit there and take it. Yet they were not even willing to do that.

Watching Todd Heywood’s video of Lark at the podium at his utility’s posh new headquarters, BWL’s GM seemed to expect sympathy for his First World problem that, as a family man, he had to cut short his Christmas with the wife and kids to fly back to Lansing to do his job.

There’s a growing cold, cold chasm between the top and bottom of today’s society that will take a lot more than a few days of warmer temperatures to thaw. Many of us watched as the elites moved well-paying auto industry jobs elsewhere. Now we are seeing the dismantling of what is left of the union movement that served as a bulwark for all of our wages. And now the elites seem unrestrained in their eagerness to loot our dwindling public sector resources to enrich their cronies at our expense.

As they say, the scandal isn’t what’s illegal, but what’s legal.

Unless we find a way to wrest back power to the people, the class warfare of the have’s against the have-not’s will corrupt our system beyond repair. If the BWL board fails to eject Lark, no matter the cost, it’s game over, not just for this situation in Lansing but potentially for our democracy’s ability to hold people accountable.

*The Free Press direct link no longer works, so we are taking you to the Michigan Radio link that is one of many that referenced the Freep article.