Class Warfare, Wall Street, Nickel and Dimed and the 99%
I know, that's quite a subject line. But they're all related.
The first one, class warfare, stems from the phrase being used by Republican politicians complaining about taxation on the richest 1% of the population being "class warfare", as though that is even possible. If you are in the class (the top 1% of income, for instance) with the power and money, raising taxes on you is not "class warfare". Is there anything that could constitute class warfare for such people? Sure. The French Revolution sent a lot of the wealthy to the guillotine. The Russian Revolution also put a lot of the wealthy up against the wall, not to mention the tsar and his family.
For the wealthy, that is true class warfare. Paying a little bit more (a small percentage, that is) in taxes because you can, because it doesn't impact on your ability to keep a roof over your head or food on the table or clothes on your children's backs, does not make you a victim of class warfare. And complaining about this, or talking about what percentage of people don't pay taxes at all (because they make too little and taxes would actually be a huge burden on them, when they can barely eke out a living as is)? Or trying to take away senior citizens' Social Security payments (which are a pittance)? Or begrudging people healthcare and suggesting that they should go off and die? That does make you an enormous jerk. (As does complaining about taxes on behalf of the 1% and the lack of taxes being paid by the poorest people in the country.)
The top 1% of earners in this country, many of whom are the bosses of the bottom earners, could alleviate their own tax burden and see to it that more of their employees pay taxes simply by lowering their own income and raising the salaries of their workers. But that's too simple, and sounds to some people too much like communism. (Oh, noes!) Yet most of these folks think nothing of the fact that many CEOs make hundreds of times the compensation earned by their lowest-level employees. Not merely dozens of times, HUNDREDS. And in some cases THOUSANDS of times more.
Consider this: an executive who earns a "modest" $5 million a year, including all types of compensation (bonuses, stock options, company car, etc. ) earns about 227 times the salary of an employee who earns $22,000 a year, which is the threshold of the poverty level if that employee is supporting three other family members on this amount. That sounds bad enough, but an executive earning that amount would actually be laughed out of many country clubs and Aspen ski resorts for being "poor". (The average compensation package for a CEO of a company on the S & P 500 is over $11 million.) On the other hand, a top-level executive making $22 million* makes exactly 1000 times the salary of an employee making $22,000. A THOUSAND TIMES. And that employee is probably not getting stock options, or particularly affordable health insurance, or education benefits, or bonuses, or a company car, let alone subsidized day care or other benefits that would make it easier to do his or her job. Instead that executive is probably looking to find ways to outsource that employee's job to the Pacific rim so that the position will now pay a lot less than $22,000 (including benefits) and result in the board of directors giving the executive yet another bonus for saving the company money.
That's the true class warfare being waged in this country, by those who have the most against those who have the least, those who, as we see on the I am the 99% website, are having to choose between food or rent, between paying student loans or buying a car to get to a decent-paying job (if they have a job offer). The class warfare we're seeing is being waged against those who are protesting on Wall Street, who are taking their grievances to the very people who have screwed over the country, who were "too big to fail" and sent the economy spiraling downward, causing many companies to cut jobs by the dozens or hundreds--or tens of hundreds. While continuing to pay their CEOs and other top executives enormous salaries that are growing ever more distant from the salaries of their lowest-paid employees, who are, more and more often, not residents of this country or even this continent.
Then, in addition to all of this economic turmoil, I see that the book Nickel and Dimed is being challenged often enough to be in the list of top ten challenged books being highlighted by the ALA during Banned Books Week. Not a book about a boy going to wizarding school or a teenaged soap opera bout a Mary Sue choosing between a vampire and a werewolf; a non-fiction account of a woman's attempt to make ends meet working at minimum wage. The truth about how hard it is to be poor is something that is too dangerous to be read, in part because it is judged to be promoting communism? Evidently.
But what really made me start grinding my teeth together was when I went to the book's Wikipedia page and learning that the "response and criticism" includes a white male American citizen with a college education and no apparent physical challenges who checked into a homeless shelter with $25 and had, ten months later, about $5000 in savings, a home, a job and a truck. Now, arguments could be made against the validity of Barbara Ehrenreich's "social experiment", given that she is also probably over-qualified for the menial jobs she was holding, but Adam Shepherd's experiment is probably even more flawed, given his complete lack of many of the challenges faced by a lot of the lowest-paid workers in our society. It matters not that Shepherd says he never told anyone about his college education--he still had that education, he was still someone capable of getting through college, and someone who didn't have literacy problems, mental illness or other physical challenges. He is fluent in English. He can prove he is a citizen. He is able to drive a car. He doesn't have other people he is supporting, or who need daycare (whether child daycare or eldercare). And, again, he is a white male.
Now, there are white males who are out of work. That alone doesn't guarantee you a job these days. But that combined with being articulate, bright (even if you don't reveal your college degree), healthy and able-bodied, willing to uproot yourself for work because you don't own a house you can't sell and don't have a spouse who would also need a job in a new location, or kids who need a good school or daycare... Yeah. He had some challenges, but not nearly enough, not compared to people attempting to do what he did who have a criminal record or are struggling to stay off whatever addiction plagues them or who have less education or who are twenty or thirty years older than he is, any or all of which would be considered an excuse for tossing someone's job application into the trash in an employment environment where it's a buyer's market for employers and those looking for work after 6, 12, 18 or more months would be willing to take any bones thrown to them.
Class warfare? Yeah, we got it. But it's been going on for a long time now and those living under siege are the 99%, not the 1%.
* According to the NY Times, the top ten compensation packages for CEOs of companies earning at least $7 billion are more than this. The top five earn between $32.6 and 84.5 million. There is no information given about what other executives at the same companies earn.
The first one, class warfare, stems from the phrase being used by Republican politicians complaining about taxation on the richest 1% of the population being "class warfare", as though that is even possible. If you are in the class (the top 1% of income, for instance) with the power and money, raising taxes on you is not "class warfare". Is there anything that could constitute class warfare for such people? Sure. The French Revolution sent a lot of the wealthy to the guillotine. The Russian Revolution also put a lot of the wealthy up against the wall, not to mention the tsar and his family.
For the wealthy, that is true class warfare. Paying a little bit more (a small percentage, that is) in taxes because you can, because it doesn't impact on your ability to keep a roof over your head or food on the table or clothes on your children's backs, does not make you a victim of class warfare. And complaining about this, or talking about what percentage of people don't pay taxes at all (because they make too little and taxes would actually be a huge burden on them, when they can barely eke out a living as is)? Or trying to take away senior citizens' Social Security payments (which are a pittance)? Or begrudging people healthcare and suggesting that they should go off and die? That does make you an enormous jerk. (As does complaining about taxes on behalf of the 1% and the lack of taxes being paid by the poorest people in the country.)
The top 1% of earners in this country, many of whom are the bosses of the bottom earners, could alleviate their own tax burden and see to it that more of their employees pay taxes simply by lowering their own income and raising the salaries of their workers. But that's too simple, and sounds to some people too much like communism. (Oh, noes!) Yet most of these folks think nothing of the fact that many CEOs make hundreds of times the compensation earned by their lowest-level employees. Not merely dozens of times, HUNDREDS. And in some cases THOUSANDS of times more.
Consider this: an executive who earns a "modest" $5 million a year, including all types of compensation (bonuses, stock options, company car, etc. ) earns about 227 times the salary of an employee who earns $22,000 a year, which is the threshold of the poverty level if that employee is supporting three other family members on this amount. That sounds bad enough, but an executive earning that amount would actually be laughed out of many country clubs and Aspen ski resorts for being "poor". (The average compensation package for a CEO of a company on the S & P 500 is over $11 million.) On the other hand, a top-level executive making $22 million* makes exactly 1000 times the salary of an employee making $22,000. A THOUSAND TIMES. And that employee is probably not getting stock options, or particularly affordable health insurance, or education benefits, or bonuses, or a company car, let alone subsidized day care or other benefits that would make it easier to do his or her job. Instead that executive is probably looking to find ways to outsource that employee's job to the Pacific rim so that the position will now pay a lot less than $22,000 (including benefits) and result in the board of directors giving the executive yet another bonus for saving the company money.
That's the true class warfare being waged in this country, by those who have the most against those who have the least, those who, as we see on the I am the 99% website, are having to choose between food or rent, between paying student loans or buying a car to get to a decent-paying job (if they have a job offer). The class warfare we're seeing is being waged against those who are protesting on Wall Street, who are taking their grievances to the very people who have screwed over the country, who were "too big to fail" and sent the economy spiraling downward, causing many companies to cut jobs by the dozens or hundreds--or tens of hundreds. While continuing to pay their CEOs and other top executives enormous salaries that are growing ever more distant from the salaries of their lowest-paid employees, who are, more and more often, not residents of this country or even this continent.
Then, in addition to all of this economic turmoil, I see that the book Nickel and Dimed is being challenged often enough to be in the list of top ten challenged books being highlighted by the ALA during Banned Books Week. Not a book about a boy going to wizarding school or a teenaged soap opera bout a Mary Sue choosing between a vampire and a werewolf; a non-fiction account of a woman's attempt to make ends meet working at minimum wage. The truth about how hard it is to be poor is something that is too dangerous to be read, in part because it is judged to be promoting communism? Evidently.
But what really made me start grinding my teeth together was when I went to the book's Wikipedia page and learning that the "response and criticism" includes a white male American citizen with a college education and no apparent physical challenges who checked into a homeless shelter with $25 and had, ten months later, about $5000 in savings, a home, a job and a truck. Now, arguments could be made against the validity of Barbara Ehrenreich's "social experiment", given that she is also probably over-qualified for the menial jobs she was holding, but Adam Shepherd's experiment is probably even more flawed, given his complete lack of many of the challenges faced by a lot of the lowest-paid workers in our society. It matters not that Shepherd says he never told anyone about his college education--he still had that education, he was still someone capable of getting through college, and someone who didn't have literacy problems, mental illness or other physical challenges. He is fluent in English. He can prove he is a citizen. He is able to drive a car. He doesn't have other people he is supporting, or who need daycare (whether child daycare or eldercare). And, again, he is a white male.
Now, there are white males who are out of work. That alone doesn't guarantee you a job these days. But that combined with being articulate, bright (even if you don't reveal your college degree), healthy and able-bodied, willing to uproot yourself for work because you don't own a house you can't sell and don't have a spouse who would also need a job in a new location, or kids who need a good school or daycare... Yeah. He had some challenges, but not nearly enough, not compared to people attempting to do what he did who have a criminal record or are struggling to stay off whatever addiction plagues them or who have less education or who are twenty or thirty years older than he is, any or all of which would be considered an excuse for tossing someone's job application into the trash in an employment environment where it's a buyer's market for employers and those looking for work after 6, 12, 18 or more months would be willing to take any bones thrown to them.
Class warfare? Yeah, we got it. But it's been going on for a long time now and those living under siege are the 99%, not the 1%.
* According to the NY Times, the top ten compensation packages for CEOs of companies earning at least $7 billion are more than this. The top five earn between $32.6 and 84.5 million. There is no information given about what other executives at the same companies earn.