Nina Easton, Mayor of Wrongville

It’s scheduling week here at the hospital; the twice-yearly week long exercise of figuring out which classes go where on the master schedule of my wing. We were fortunate in that the planning itself only took a day, but now we have the rest of the week to finish paperwork, write new course descriptions, and so forth. For me, this doesn’t take too long, and so I was left enough time at lunch today to check out what was going on around the internet. And that is when I found this op-ed.

First of all, let’s ignore the fact that the author, Nina Easton, is a conservative. I’m not a big fan of the “They disagree with me, so they must be wrong” mindset that has infected my country in years past, and so I try to combat it whenever possible. For instance- if she’s worked for Fortune, the LA Times and the Boston Globe, she’s probably at least fairly on top of her game. So don’t brush her off just because she happens to be a conservative talking about the virtues of “The 1%”.

Nope, we’re going to assume for the sake of this post that Ms. Easton is a purely non-biased reporter, speaking her mind without a political agenda behind her.

And we’re going to assume that  she’s unbiased because if we don’t, and we believe that she’s just a conservative mouthpiece, then her writing is immediately as invalid as Glenn Beck’s or Keith Olberman’s.

And we’re going to assume that she’s unbiased, because even if we do, she is still completely wrong.

Ms. Easton’s article is based on the same tired assumption that a lot of conservatives have been making, and that is that the furor surrounding the One Percent is based on jealousy. She bases her fifth paragraph on the notion that people who’re mad at the mega-rich want their money stripped from them and moved into their own community, like they want President Obama to swing in like some governmental Robin Hood to give the poor their due.

But I don’t think that’s what this anger Easton complains of is about. People want larger salaries of their own, but I don’t think they want someone else’s money. This isn’t about being angry at someone because they’re successful, it’s about being mad at someone because they became successful at the expense of their workers. CEOs that continue to take enormous bonuses immediately after laying off some percentage of their labor force. Finance moguls who profit by cheating their clients and then escape any significant punishment. These seem to be what the “99%ers” are really upset about.

“But there are communists at the Occupy rallies that want all the rich to hand over all their money!” Yes, and there are Secessionists at NRA rallies that still talk about preparing for the inevitable war between the government and their local “militia”. Spare me your generalizations about the Occupy Communists and I’ll spare you my vitriol for your Rambo Wannabes. There are crazies at every rally.

But I digress. I’ll counterpoint my own argument: CEOs taking huge salaries and bonuses.

Global finance is fucking complicated. I’m personally of the opinion that monetary sums in the neighborhood of the trillions-of-dollars-mark is actually imaginary, but some people are smart enough to actually finagle this possibly-imaginary system to produce real-world results. People that can do that do deserve big salaries, because if they don’t get paid, yeah, they’re gonna go find someone who’ll shell out the cheddar to please them.

But. Just because John Q. Employee doesn’t understand how the price of grain in India affects the rubber trade in South America, that doesn’t mean that he deserves to get the axe so his boss-of-bosses can get another couple thousand on their bonus check. When this happens to one person, or in one company, its unfortunate… but the now-jobless employees could just go get jobs elsewhere. When this happens on a national scale and becomes the status quo, however, people become embittered on a national scale, and that bitterness becomes the status quo. Don’t act so goddamn surprised that people are up in arms over the super-rich when it seems like every CEO is doing this.

Earlier on than this, she states in her third paragraph that “The 1% club stands accused, accurately, of more than doubling its share of the nation's income since 1980. By 2007 it controlled nearly 24% of total income, the second highest in history, after 1929. (In 2009 its share dropped to 17%, suggesting that recessions aren't necessarily kind to the rich.)”

This is not an argument I would make if I were trying to draw support to my point of view. The richest 1%’s collective bargaining power dropped from ONE QUARTER OF ALL AMERICAN WEALTH to just a paltry SEVENTEEN PERCENT? Boo fucking hoo. If I were her editor I would have deleted this paragraph from her entry so hard the computer would have exploded. I would have then taken the ashes and thrown them into the goddamn sea, just so nobody would ever read what Nina Easton almost perpetrated on my point of view.

Easton states in her fourth paragraph that “Railing about the 1% club has become shorthand for expressing outrage not only over growing income disparity but also about the state of the nation's working class.” I would agree with that as a one-off statement, but since it isn’t a one-off statement, it can only be viewed as the most accurate thing Nina Easton has accidentally said all day.

She notes in her sixth paragraph that Wall Street bonuses have dropped “18,000, or 13%, to $121,150. It is the second lowest average in the last eight years, topping only the $100,850 of 2008. This estimate tracks cash payments and doesn't include stock options or other forms of deferred compensation that haven't been realized.” Again, this is not something I would say out loud if I were trying to assuage the malice directed at the One Percent. A bonus of $100,000 is still nearly four times what I make as a salary, after taxes, and I sure as shit don’t get stock options.
Again, my job is different than a Wall Street suit’s, but as long as we’re comparing, I’d like to see him swing by my unit and handle some of our boys. Just sayin’.

She does make some good points; she states that there are some legitimate reasons why the One Percent are making so much freaking money these days, such as technological advances that allow companies to globalize in ways that simply were not possible even twenty years ago. (Her comparison is to a performer in the 1600s. I'm not sure why.)
She also cites the fact that womens’ salaries are rising, and she states that if you take a random well-paid One Percenter male, odds are he has an equally educated female counterpart in house as well. With her salary on the up and up, she claims that it’s only natural for the rich to become richer without any devious dealings going on- and on the face value of that factor, at least, she could be right.

But unfortunately, while she’s right in isolated pockets, she’s wrong on the foundation of her article. Like so many others, she falls into the trap of thinking that this “populist rage” is based on jealousy, and not out of our observation of how warped the system is in favor of the rich. She touts the belief that the rich are faulted for their success, and fails to even acknowledge -no, outright denies- that the rich have become as successful as they are in large part by exploiting their workers and clients. That’s where this “populist rage” is coming from (which, I’ll add, wasn’t generating a peep of protest from conservatives when the Tea Party was the new thing, but that’s another rant). I’m not trying to defend Occupy as a movement, as it is largely a worthless endeavor these days, but the underlying sentiment?
That isn't going anywhere.