Bell, California and the Sneering Plutocracy

Ned's readers may be familiar with the scandal over salaries city officials of the small town of Bell, CA paid to themselves, as exposed in a series of articles in the LA Times and Long Beach Examiner this past July. Here's one snippet: "The residents of Bell, CA almost rioted today when they discovered that city officials were bilking them of hundreds of thousands on trumped up salaries. City manager Robert Rizzo was getting almost $800,000 per year while other officials also took huge sums." Two other city officials had salaries of nearly $500k and nearly $400k a year, and the council was paying itself $100k for part time work. The city has about 38k people, mostly Hispanic and predominantly functionally illiterate. Their average pay is maybe $25k a year.
At first, the officials became indignant and professed to be astonished that ANYONE would even dare claim that they weren't worth 'every penny' that they made, even though their salaries were far higher than comparable officials in Los Angeles and Long Beach.
Since then, those officials have resigned, and in some cases faced legal charges, but following their resignation was a flap over the pensions they were "entitled to" as a result of their membership in CALPERS, the giant state pension plan amounting to several hundreds of thousands of dollars a year.
Now the point of this it twofold:
first, state pension plans in many cases are out of control. States can simply no longer afford to allow state and city workers to retire at nearly full pay after only twenty years "work."
Or can they?
Ned's readers will recall his tirades against the sneering plutocracy, consisting largely of the upper echelons of corporate officials and members of Boards of Directors, who engage in the same sort of legalized theft every day that the pathetic plutocrat wannabes of Bell tried to pull off. The difference is, the plutocrats get way with it, and in fact the Republicans and some Democrats defend their rights to rape and pillage corporate coffers, much of it taken from the backs of their own workers, to pay themselves obscene salaries, arguing that it is only "just compensation" because, after all, "look what CEO Smith over there is making."
Ned hopes indeed that these thieving Bell city officials get what is coming to them, but how much more does he wish that we lived in a just, sane world where the members of the Sneering Plutocracy got what was coming to them as well.