It's "hammer a freeper" time! Some help, please...

Chief executives at U.S. defense contractors have seen a 200-percent pay raise since the Sep. 11, 2001 terrorist attacks, widening the chasm between compensation in the corner office and wages on the factory floor, a new report said Tuesday.

Average CEO pay--$11.8 million in salary, stock options, bonuses, and incentives--rose last year to 431 times what the average worker earned, $27,460, according to the report from the Washington, D.C.-based Institute for Policy Studies and Boston-based United for a Fair Economy. In 2003, CEOs had made 301 times their average employees' pay.

The ratio had peaked at 525-to-1 in 2001.

''If the minimum wage had risen as fast as CEO pay since 1990, the lowest paid workers in the U.S. would be earning $23.03 an hour today, not $5.15 an hour,'' the research and advocacy groups said.

The report charged that individual CEOs have profited from the Iraq War, with huge average raises at the biggest defense contractors. To arrive at this conclusion, it looked at 34 of the top 100 defense contractors of 2004. While most firms in the larger group were privately held, the 34 included in the report were publicly traded, meaning that their financial results were easier to research.

War Millionaires: Defense Contractor CEO Pay Up 200 Percent Since 9/11
by Willliam Baue

The ratio between CEO and worker pay across the market climbs to 431 : 1, up from 301 : 1 last year, according to a new CEO pay study from United for a Fair Economy and the Institute for Policy Studies.

SocialFunds.com -- "I don't want to see a single war millionaire created in the United States as a result of this world disaster." So said President Franklin Delano Roosevelt about World War II, and President Harry Truman first made a name for himself as a Senator by crusading against war profiteering. The same cannot be said about the current wartime situation, as war profiteering seems to be the trend of the day according to the twelfth annual CEO compensation survey conducted by United for a Fair Economy (UFE) and the Institute for Policy Studies (IPS).

The report, which surveys 367 leading US corporations, focuses particularly on 34 of the top 100 defense contractors in 2004 with 10 percent or more of their revenues from defense contracts. It finds "a trend towards individual war profiteering by CEOs," with CEO pay at these companies rising 200 percent from 2001 to 2004.

"As the death toll mounts among Americans and Iraqis, it seems particularly unjust to see executives profiting personally from the horrors of war," states the report, written by UFE's Scott Klinger and Liz Stanton and IPS's Sarah Anderson and John Cavanagh.