 | |
| THIS WEEK | |
Happy Fourth of July! In the day’s honor, how about we contemplate the question that begins this year’s best new book on the generation of 1776 “What, exactly, did Jefferson and his colleagues mean by ‘created equal’?” ask the three veteran historians who have edited Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation. “Was a shoemaker's son, at birth, really created equal to the son of a wealthy merchant?” The answer? No, these historians explain, most signers of the Declaration of Independence did not consider shoemakers’ sons the equals of their wealthy “betters.” But many other early Americans did, and these early Americans did their best, against great odds, “to strike at the heart of existing inequalities.” This week, in Too Much, we take a closer look at one of these remarkable — and hardly ever remembered — egalitarian founders. A publishing note: We begin our annual Too Much summer break with this issue. We'll be back later this month. Until then, we'll be updating on Twitter. | |
| GREED AT A GLANCE | |
The Rockefellers, ever since the days of old John D., have enjoyed the great outdoors. They also seem to have figured out how to make that great outdoors pay. Over the past decade, new Environmental Working Group data show, Manhattan mega millionaire and John D. great-grandson Mark Rockefeller has pocketed nearly $330,000 in federal subsidies for not farming an Idaho property billed as “one of the world’s premier fly-fishing retreats.” That’s much more than half the $500,000 in federal funding that food banks in North Idaho may shortly lose to federal budget cuts. Why aren’t taxpayer groups that claim to worry about waste, Idaho social worker leader Delmar Stone wondered last week, “investigating the obscene loopholes and taxpayer giveaways to the super-rich?”  Has Polo Ralph Lauren, the pretentiously casual clothing company, suddenly seen the light on CEO pay? That may seem the case — at first glance. The firm has slashed its perks outlay for CEO Ralph Lauren by a hefty $344,000. From now on, the company disclosed last month, chief exec Lauren will get no more than $200,000 a year in free personal travel on the firm’s private jet. But Lauren may not notice the cutback. The company has actually increased his overall pay, by over $2 million, to $29.7 million. Also in line for hefty fiscal 2011 paychecks: Ralph’s brother Jerome, the firm's exec vp for menswear design, at $2.6 million and Ralph’s son David, the firm’s exec vp for global advertising, at $1.6 million. Why be so generous to Jerome and David? The Polo Ralph Lauren board probably wants to make sure the pair don’t jump at some rival's better offer . . .  The luxury Swiss watchmaker Tag Heuer has just introduced, tech toys analyst Mike Wehner quipped last week, the first smartphone ever strong enough to withstand “catastrophic disintegration if you happen to drop it from your private jet.” The phone’s secret: an unbreakable “gorilla glass” screen, supported by a frame that comes in a choice of gold or titanium, each with diamond accents. Also available for this hardy smartphone: a customized alligator-skin covering. Total price for the new Tag Heuser Link model: $6,700. | |
| INEQUALITY BY THE NUMBERS | |
| |
| IN FOCUS | |
What Democracy, Economically, Looks Like The spotlight may be gone, but Egypt's revolutionaries are still making history, with a spirited campaign for a 'maximum wage.' The global press corps is no longer hanging out on Cairo’s Tahrir Square. The media have moved on. But Egypt’s revolutionaries, insurgents who range from doctors to tax collectors, are still making news of significance, even if few outside Egypt seem to be paying much attention. These Egyptians merit our attention. At a time of global austerity — and ever louder demands for “sacrifice” from low- and moderate-income people — the Egyptian revolution is blazing a new path. Egypt’s revolutionaries are demanding sacrifice from the top — via a “maximum wage” — and they’ve shoved this notion of income limits onto their nation’s political center stage. Indeed, almost every major demonstration in Tahrir Square, ever since earlier this year, has sounded the call for compensation limits. “How can we talk about social justice,” as former activist parliamentarian Ashraf Badr Eddin asked last month, “without mentioning a maximum wage?” Egypt’s maximum wage drumbeat actually began well before Tahrir Square emerged as a global inspiration. The local labor protests that set Egypt on the road to Tahrir Square, protests that started back in 2004, gave the “maximum wage” notion its first public airing. “We had a slogan before the revolution,” Kamal Abu Aita, president of the independent Property Tax Collectors Union, explained in an interview this past March, “A maximum wage for those who live in palaces, a minimum wage for those who live in the graveyards.” This past January, Aita’s union joined with other labor groupings to launch a new Egyptian Federation of Independent Unions. Their founding declaration called for“a new fair minimum wage that guarantees decent living for all workers” and a “maximum wage” set at no more than ten times the minimum. All Egyptians, the new federation's declaration added, have the right to “to a democratic society for all, offering every single citizen a share in its wealth,” a society “that does not allow the few to buy private jets while the rest of the population cannot even afford public transportation.” Workers around the country would pick up that call. In February, employees at Telecom Egypt blocked streets and sat in at telephone exchange centers. Theydemanded “an adequate minimum wage” for workers and a “maximum wage” for bosses. These workers, news reports indicated, were making 600 Egyptian pounds a month, the equivalent of about $100. Their top bosses at Telecom Egypt were pulling in 250,000 pounds, about $42,000, or over 400 times worker pay. Egypt’s revolutionary students would also pick up the maximum wage demand and keep sounding the call for it after President Mubarak fell. In April, the Coalition of the Youth of the Revolution demanded a higher minimum wage and a maximum set at 15 times the minimum. More broadly based Egyptian protest groupings, the Popular Committees for the Defense of the Revolution, would keep up the pressure. In May, this insurgent structure leveled demands that included a minimum wage “no less than 1,500 Egyptian pounds” and a maximum no higher than 15 times the minimum. On May's last Friday Egyptian protestors would once again jam Tahrir Square, this time with a call for a “second revolution.” They sounded five economic demands. First on the list: putting in place “a minimum and maximum limit.” A few days later, Egypt’s interim government would finally respond — with a series of economic moves that labor leaders would quickly dismiss as a “joke.” The government’s response did raise the public sector minimum wage, but only to 700 pounds, or less than $120 per month. And government ministers did set a public sector compensation ratio between top and bottom, at 36 to 1. But they left the compensation to be included in that ratio vague and refused to even discuss a maximum for the private sector, “saying the government should not tell businessmen how to spend their money.” “The ministers won’t do a maximum wage limit because they know they can’t give up their inflated pay checks,” responded Saber Barakat, a union leader at Egypt’s Delta Steel. “Only then will they recognize that we are living like animals.” So what’s next for the Egyptian maximum wage campaign? Activists like Mohamed Shafiq, a Cairo medical doctor involved in physician strikes earlier this spring, are vowing no let-up. They’re organizing, Shafiq noted in an interview last month, hospital by hospital. For the first time, Shafiq enthuses, doctors, nurses, and aides are talking together about how to deal with everything from supply shortages to “corrupt old managers” who’ve been “taking thousands of Egyptian pounds while we are taking pennies.” These hospital workers are organizing, in effect, to gain control over their economic future, and they consider the introduction of a meaningful income floor — and ceiling — as crucial to creating a just one. And these activists, adds Dr. Shafiq, want this “wage structure not only for doctors and nurses and health care providers but for all the workers of Egypt.” If these activists get what they seek, or even come close, all the workers of the world — not to mention their employers — will surely take notice. | |
| IN REVIEW | |
An Egalitarian Patriot Who Stirred Men's Souls Alfred Young, Ray Raphael, and Gary Nash, editors, Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation. New York: Knopf, 2011. George Washington. John Adams. Thomas Jefferson. Robert Coram. Who? You've no doubt never heard of Robert Coram, but Hollywood could make one mighty fine flag-waving epic about this real-life Revolutionary War hero. His adventures simply shout out for a multiplex. Imagine Leonardo DiCaprio in the lead: In 1778, just 17 years old and brimming with revolutionary ardor, the young Robert Coram signs up with a patriot mission to go buy warships in France. Once in Paris, Coram tracks down Benjamin Franklin and finagles a letter of recommendation to the great Revolutionary War naval commander John Paul Jones.
More adventures follow, then, late in 1782, the British seize Coram off the New Jersey coast and throw him in a foul prison ship that few patriots ever escape alive. But Coram does survive and finally gets his freedom in the 1783 armistice that recognizes his nation’s independence. That’s the Robert Coram, Revolutionary War hero, who ought to have Hollywood drooling. But the rest of us, suggests historian Seth Cotlar in this year’s best new book on the American Revolution, might want to take a broader view. Robert Coram, Cotlar goes on to explain, actually made his greatest patriotic contribution after the Revolution. Coram, in a sense, never stopped fighting — for the equality he saw as absolutely essential to democracy. And Americans needed to keep fighting, Seth Cotlar and his historian colleagues contend in their new Revolutionary Founders: Rebels, Radicals, and Reformers in the Making of the Nation, because the men of property who led their new nation did not, “with few exceptions,” believe that “all men” truly rated as equal. Robert Coram, like so many of his fellow war veterans, did believe in equality, in every dimension, political, social, and economic. Coram, historian Cotlar relates, “wanted to live in a prosperous society, but he considered prosperity useless, even immoral, if it was not widely shared.” Coram knew, better than most, just how unequally shared the world’s bounty could be. He had seen the palaces and poorhouses of the Old World. He had witnessed slaves in the New World “beaten and hand hanged” while masters “poured their ill-gotten fortunes into lavish new theaters.” A world where “a few were becoming splendidly wealthy and comfortable while the majority lived perpetually on the edge of economic ruin” seemed to Coram, notes Revolutionary Founders, a direct “repudiation of the Revolution.” In 1791, Coram would lift up, against this inequality, his most potent weapon: his pen. Still only 30 years old and working as a schoolteacher in Delaware, Coram published an amazing 107-page pamphlet “to plead the cause of humanity,” a humanity he saw everywhere starving “in the midst of universal plenty.” In the new America, Coram related, “wealthy and dignified mortals roll along the streets in all the parade and trappings of royalty, while the lower class are not half so well fed as the horses of the former.” The comfortable, Coram would note, consider this inequality perfectly “natural.” But how could inequality be “natural,” the war hero turned teacher asked, when some societies in the United States — Native American societies — had long operated successfully on a much more egalitarian basis? Coram’s pamphlet would cite as evidence the reportage from his era’s most thoughtful observers of Native American life. The Indians, noted one, live as “strangers to all distinction of property.” Their “equality of condition, manners, and privileges” animates a “patriotic spirit” that encourages the “general good.” These Indians traced the “mischiefs” they saw among European settlers, the treachery and plunder, to wealth and its skewed distribution: “They esteem it irrational that one man should be possessed of a greater quantity than another and are amazed that any honor should be annexed to the possession of it.” “In the comparative view of the civilized man and the savage,” as Coram put it, “the most striking contrast is the division of property. To the one, it is the source of all his happiness; to the other, the fountain of all his misery.” America’s unequal “division of property,” Coram argued, had nothing “natural” about it, and he drew upon nature to drive that point home. “There may be a difference between the child of a nobleman and that of a peasant,” Coram noted, “but will there not also be an inequality between the produce of seeds collected from the same plant and sown in different soils?” Coram considered free, universal public education — financed through a tax on property wealth — the first step toward providing one “soil” for all Americans, and he did battle for public schools as an elected delegate to Delaware’s constitutional convention and later as an editor whose work would be reprinted up and down the Eastern seaboard. Coram did other noble battle, too. He became one of America’s earliest abolitionists in the struggle against slavery. But his struggles for justice would end tragically early. He took sick and died in 1796, just halfway through his 30s. The complete text of Coram’s masterwork, his 1791 Political Inquiries, nowappears online. His words still have the capacity to inspire, and even delight, in part because the apologists for inequality he so vigorously challenged haven’t changed their tune all that much over the past two centuries plus. Ever get frustrated, for instance, when you hear someone argue that rich people make the best elected leaders because rich people can’t be bought? Robert Coram, in 1791, had the perfect egalitarian, share-the-wealth retort. “It is said that men of property are the fittest persons to represent their country because they have least reason to betray it,” observed Coram. “If the observation is just, every man should have property, that none be left to betray their country.” | |
Quote of the Week
“For 90 percent of American workers, incomes have stagnated or fallen for the past three decades, while they've ballooned at the top, and exploded at the very tippy-top: By 2008, the wealthiest 0.1 percent were making 6.4 times as much as they did in 1980 (adjusted for inflation) . . . In other words, all that extra work you've taken on — the late nights, the skipped lunch hours, the missed soccer games — paid off. For them.”
Monika Bauerlein and Clara Jeffery, All Work and No Pay: The Great Speedup, Mother Jones, July/August 2011
Stat of the Week
About 24,000 U.S. taxpayers making over $532,613 — a sum grand enough to place them in the nation's highest-income 1 percent — will pay no federal income taxes in 2011, estimates the Tax Policy Center.
New Wisdom
on Wealth
Robert Borosage, A Debt-Ceiling Deal: $1 In Tax Hikes For Wealthy For Every $1 In Cuts, Campaign for America's Future, June 28, 2011. America's top 400 “pay a lower effective tax rate than the chauffeurs who drive them to work.” Shouldn't they be sacrificing, too?
Harold Meyerson, The L.A. Dodgers fall prey to CEO capitalism run amok,Washington Post, June 29, 2011. How the chase after grand personal fortune has gutted two of L.A.'s most important civic institutions.
Joe Mont, 10 CEOs Who Became 'Job Killers,' The Street, June 30, 2011. A look at the corporate chiefs who've made themselves phenomenally wealthy by paring their payrolls.
No comments:
Post a Comment