One Measure of the Gap between the 1% and the 99%

Last night Bernard Condon and Christina Rexrode of Associated Press ran a story on the current state of CEO income. For those who got a bit tired of a parade of symbols beginning with “$” and ending with “M,” the authors came up with one sentence that vividly expresses just how different the 1% are from the rest of us:

The typical American worker would have to labor for 244 years to make what the typical boss of a big public company makes in one.

All those “$-symbols” may amount to little more than a “fiction of convenience;” but, for those for whom work is the only path to providing food, clothing, and shelter, that one sentence is a painful description of how, through that “fiction of convenience,” the 1% will always have the power to keep the 99% in their place.