Wise Words From 1913: Nothing Changes

Image via Wikipedia

“Oh, we’ve only just begun. We’re waking up to a sense of our responsibilities, out here, and we ain’t afraid, neither. You fellows back there must be a tame lot. If you had any nerve you’d get together and march down to Wall St. and blow it up. Dynamite it, I mean.”

“That would be a waste of powder. The same business would go on in another street. The street doesn’t matter.”

I just read these prophetic words; hint, it’s a classic novel many Americans read in their schoolwork but I just read for the first time.

Who wrote them, and in which book?

The View From One PercentLand

The Upper East Side of Manhattan. Image via Wikipedia

On the Upper East Side of Manhattan — an enclave of almost unimaginable wealth — it’s One Percent Central. The streets are clean, swept, silent, the wrought-iron-covered apartment doors — owned, not rented — always guarded by wary, watchful doormen.

Elegant townhouses with silk balloon shades, Met-worthy art and exterior security cameras sell at the price of some small nations’ GDP — this one is offered at $23 million — often in  all-cash deals.

Local hotels include the Carlyle, The Plaza Athenee and the Mark; room rates start about $700 a night. (New York State’s highest unemployment benefit, taxable of course, is $405 a week.)

Discreet private art galleries dot the side streets, $50,000 drawings locked behind elegant double doors. Shoppers, if they carry any bags, tote those marked Chanel, Ferragamo, Prada. They sleep on monogrammed linens from Leron, Frette and Pratesi.

Gleaming, spotless black Escalades, chauffeurs at the wheel, glide through the streets. Thin blond women skitter by in Louboutins. Private school boys, shouting, run down Fifth Avenue, their ties flying.

One building even has its own book, 740 Park Avenue, home to some of the world’s wealthiest people. One of its residents, a journalist married to a billionaire, allows peeks into her gilded world from time to time. But many One Percenters only appear in print on the Forbes or Fortune lists of the world’s wealthiest — or Bill Cunningham’s weekly round-up of society parties in The New York Times.

Summer and winter are verbs to this set — summer in the Hamptons, Nantucket, Maine, Newport, Martha’s Vineyard, winter in Aspen, Vail or St. Bart’s.

To the people inhabiting this world, the rest of us are barely a blip on the radar.

They are all privately educated from infancy, as are their parents, grand-parents, husbands and wives, their children prepped by SAT tutors costing thousands a month beyond the $35,000+ a year it costs to educate each child.

Their world is cocooned by nannies — likely three, one for each eight hour shift — au pairs, staff, multiple homes, private jets.

This divide is perhaps more obvious when you live in a major city split neatly by zip code by race, class and wealth: New York, London, Paris, Sao Paulo, Mexico City. Living in New York, all you have to do is exchange one subway line for another to visit a wholly different world, from one filled with the exhausted working class traveling home to Queens or Brooklyn, to another snuggled deeply in triple-ply cashmere, oblivious to mundane worries like finding or keeping a job, educating one’s children or even paying the rent or mortgage.

Mortgage?

I know something of this world. My first husband was a physician, who, with his second wife, earns a combined income of $500,000. Even with a few kids to support, that’s pocket change to the real One PerCenters — if an impossible fortune to most of us.

Some of my mother’s family were also members of it.

Unless you’ve been exposed to the people living in this charming snow-globe, and their ferocious determination to acquire their fifth home or the 20th Birkin handbag or the Monet coming up at Sotheby’s, it’s a reassuring fantasy to think they care about the rest of us. They’re too busy out-ranking one another to even notice people whose annual income barely covers their shoe budget.

Don’t ever underestimate their determination to retain their privileges and the sources of their economic and political power.

The mayor, a billionaire, lives in the nabe, in two townhouses (only a few of his residences), on East 79th. Street. His long-time live-in partner, Diana Taylor, sits on the board of Zuccotti Park, the privately-owned Manhattan park where the Occupy Wall Street crowd has pitched its tents.

Meanwhile, reports Bloomberg BusinessWeek, median household income in the U.S. has fallen to $49,445, the lowest in more than a decade, while poverty has jumped to 15. 1 percent, a 17-year high.

Read this  smart column by Times’ writer David Brooks on how the media, much of it [guilty!] based in Manhattan is still over-focusing on this obviously uber-wealthy one percent — rather than the deeply growing divide between those who are well-educated and those who are not, more visible in rural areas and smaller cities nationwide.

And yet…here’s a glimmer of hope — Resource Generation, an organization of younger Americans who have inherited or earned wealth dedicated to re-distributing it more equitably.

Do you see an economic divide where you live?

How’s it playing out?

The Third Rail Of American Discourse

My new book about working for 27 months as a retail sales associate has been out for two months, and the 40+ amazon reviews are insane — love it, hate it, love it, loathe it.

I’ve been called a princess, racist, slummer, bitter, pretentious, “lazy, lazy, lazy”, elitist and accused, falsely, of despising the very people — my retail co-workers — I say clearly how much I admired.

It’s been an exhausting rollercoaster, with a pendulum of opinion swinging so widely, and wildly, it’s hard to believe.

It took a fellow writer to calm me down, pointing out that “Nickeled and Dimed“, a best-seller from 2001 by Barbara Ehrenreich (to which my book has been compared) is equally provocative and divisive.

Both books are similar in one key respect: middle-class, educated white women — with economic freedom to leave the jobs we described — worked for minimum wage in thankless, difficult, demanding low-status jobs.

Our crime in so doing? Poverty tourism. Slumming it for a book deal, as one WNYC listener commented. We weren’t destitute.

Why did we need to be?

Would this have altered our observations or the accuracy of what we saw and heard?

We’re writers and our goals were the same: find and tell powerful stories that had not been told. The people living these lives, working these jobs, do not have the time, skill or freedom from the shackles of their jobs to tell it as it really is.

I’ve also received extraordinarily personal and heartfelt emails almost every single day since” Malled” appeared:

“Have you been sitting on my shoulder for 23 years?”

“I feel bolstered by your book!”

“I got a raise last year….of 10 cents an hour.”

The filthy secret of American life is economic disparity, the great myth that we are all equal and racing one another along a smooth and level playing field to the equally-accessible goodies of income/home/education/raises/promotions/career success.

Go to college! Work hard! Suck up to your boss! That’ll do it.

Nope.

The reality is that there is no level playing field. It looks more like a greasy pole, the rich at the top, the poor at the bottom and many of us now, four years into a recession filled with record corporate profits and sluggish hiring, scrambling desperately in between.

Here’s a sobering piece in Mother Jones on how much dough corporations are raking in, and how workers aren’t getting the benefit of their labor.

I think speaking truth to power, despite its putative appeal, makes Americans deeply queasy. What if I somehow wrecked your chances, or your kids’, by being rude to the Guys With The Money?

Bowing and scraping to anyone with a payroll is the new black.

I worked for The North Face, owned by the VF Corporation; in January 2009, our hours were cut because the company could not afford them…then sitting on $382 million in cash. (They just spent it to buy Timberland.)

Look at the WalMart class action lawsuit, thrown out this week, screwing thousands of hardworking women employees out of the hope of justice. Of working a full-time job and not needing food stamps to supplement their wages.

Which is worse — ignoring these behaviors and letting business reporters keep fawning over eight-figure-earning CEOs?

Or have people like me or Ehrenreich try our best to open the door to the creepy, greedy, nasty behaviors that drive so much of this economy?

Either way, millions of workers are being screwed.