The Plutocratic States of America

It may be that I’m thinking about money, lately, because I’m about to buy an apartment. Or it may be because I’m generally broke. Or it may be simply because that’s one of the two things—won’t specify the other—that guys think about.

At any rate, if you have half an hour or so, you might want to look at the three videos below. In the first, you’ll see how drastically unfairly the wealth is distributed in our country. In a nutshell, most people have no clue how radically rich the 1% is. But consider this lead from an article in the Christian Science Monitor:

4 out of 5 US adults struggle with joblessness, near-poverty, or reliance on welfare for at least parts of their lives, a sign of deteriorating economic security and an elusive American dream.

4 out of 5? 80%? Ummm, I hate to write incendiary words in an age of surveillance—but shouldn’t we have insurrection in the streets? Looting, riots, marches on Greenwich, Connecticut?

We have CEOs making hundreds of millions annually—and 80% of us are poor? Say whaaaa?

OK—consider the following facts, gleaned from a blog in the Washington Post:

·      Average pay for the CEOs of the top 350 firms, including the stock options they exercised, was $14.1 million in 2012–up 37.4 percent from 2009. 

·      That’s a bit higher than it would be if you just measured stock options granted. “Firms apparently pared back the value of new options granted because CEOs fared so well by cashing in options as stock prices grew,” the report’s authors write.

·      The ratio of CEO pay to average worker pay is 273-1, down from a high of 383-1 in 2000, but up from 20-1 in 1965.

·      CEO pay has increased faster than wages to high-skilled workers, suggesting that the salary market isn’t very efficient. “Consequently, if CEOs earned less or were taxed more, there would be no adverse impact on output or employment,” the report concludes.

·      CEO pay is now also closely tracking the S&P 500 index, which didn’t used to be the case.

OK—the first ingredient in the stew: we seriously screwed up who gets the cookies and who hopes for the crumbs in this society.

Now then, the second video. Caveat at the start: this was produced by the AFL CIO, which understandably has a hatchet or two to grind. But here’s the gist: what happens—even in a game, even when you know the game is rigged—when you get rich? Well, the video will tell you. You become entitled, you think you deserved it, you have no empathy for somebody who didn’t do it the way you did—by hard work and the sweat of your brow. Sure, your name is Rockefeller, but that didn’t mean you had it easy, that just meant you had to work harder to prove yourself! So fuck the poor!

I met twice the wife of Oscar Mayer—yes, of the bacon and hotdog fame. She was a nice lady, she adored my father, and she also completely stunned me by ordering Gunnar Johansen, a famed concert pianist, to sit down and play. After a bit, she told him to stop. Johansen was a gracious man, but was it just charm that made him get on and off the piano bench? Or did the fact that Mrs. Mayer had given him the piano (a rare double keyboard) enter into the equation?

Right—now we get to the last video. In which we hear, at about 9:30, that “capitalism at its most ruthless rewards psychopathy.” And then, 10 seconds later, that capitalism at its most ruthless is a manifestation of psychopathy. And guess what? I’ve worked for one of the biggest SOBs in the business; from the reports I got from the upper levels, it’s true.

And consider—what is the rate of psychopathy in the general population? 1%. That should ring a bell—remember that the 1% of the richest people own over thirty percent of the wealth. And guess what those guys are? You got it—psychopaths.

Oh, and they own us, because they bought Congress, and the media as well, and-I-hate-to-sound-like-Edward-Snowden but the only people who are speaking out are nobodies like me.

When I lost my job—yes, I’m part of the 80%—I went down to get my unemployment insurance with Moisés, my brother-in-law. We got up at 4:30; we were making the line at 5AM. Nor were we the first—we were number thirty or so. There were perhaps a hundred people at 7AM, all mulishly lined up against plate glass windows in the Puerto Rican sun; we were waiting for the 150 bucks a week that we could get for a year. The office was on a street that has the water company, the housing department, the labor department—in short, every social service department in the government. Three blocks away, men in three-piece suits were strolling into the corporate offices of the largest banks on the island.

Why weren’t we storming them?