For related articles and more information, please visit OCA’s Politics and Democracy page.
At what point will our world wake up to the fantastically rewarding scam that our hedge fund masters of the universe have been running?

No single individual in the United States had a more lucrative year at the office in 2011 than Raymond Dalio. Working out of his Bridgewater Associates headquarters in Westport, Connecticut, the 63-year-old hedge fund manager pulled down a sweet $3.9 billion.

The typical American worker, by contrast, ended 2011 earning just under $40,000. That typical worker would have had to labor over 97,000 years to equal what Dalio made in just one.

The irony here: By the hedge fund yardstick, the United States actually became a little more equal in 2011. The year before, in 2010, the typical U.S. worker would have had to labor over 120,000 years to make as much in compensation as the year’s top-earning hedge fund manager.

For these stunning hedge fund compensation totals, we can thank the AR financial trade journal. AR has been tallying up hedge fund pay ever since the start of the 21st century, and the magazine’s new figures for 2011 appeared just over a week ago.

Hedge fund managers, AR informs us, experienced a bit of a downshift in 2011. The top 25 hedge fund only collected a combined $14.4 billion for the year. That total does run higher than the $11.6 billion the top 25 collected in 2008. But last year that top 25 amassed nearly $22.1 billion.

By any rational benchmark, of course, hedge fund manager rewards remain positively stratospheric. Back in 2002, a hedge fund manager needed to earn $30 million to enter the hedge fund industry’s top 25. In 2011, a downer of a year for hedge fund managers, that entry level stood at $100 million.