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Dear Rich People:

I feel a great need to touch base with you, because I get the feeling that your wealth has put some of you out of touch—just a tad, just a smidgeon, just an ingot out of touch—with the rest of the 99% of America.  At best, you may be confused by our current concerns; at worst, you may not give a damn.

…All the more reason to hash this out, because, quite frankly, being independently wealthy may be preventing you from truly understanding what the rest of us have to deal with on a day-to-day basis.  And if the 99% are to continue to be your clients, your customers, and/or your constituency, I’d imagine it might be a good idea to pay attention.

Let’s start out with some brutal honesty.  If you’ve come into a lot of money, you’ve probably started to forget, if not already forgotten, how the rest of us live.  If you’ve always been rich, you have never truly understood how we live.  Many of you don’t do your own paperwork, be it bills, scheduling, or to-do lists; you get personal assistants for that.  You don’t cook, do laundry, vacuum, or clean dishes yourself.  You get personal chefs and cleaning services for that.  You don’t even raise your own kids anymore; you get nannies for that.  You might refer to all of them as “the help,” who, by the way, are part of the 99% that make your lives ever so more manageable.  “The help” helps free your time to network at extravagant luncheons and dinners that you often charge to your company (to make even more obscene amounts of money with the privileged access you have), to play eighteen holes of golf or plan lavish theme parties, and to shop for shiny new things you really don’t need which won’t follow you when you die.

Some of you may try to absolve yourself of this embarrassment of riches by spending some of your time at dinner parties devoted to the pet charities of your choice.  Meh.  We’d rather you created more worthwhile jobs and paid more taxes for education, research & development, national emergencies, etc.  Or, if you don’t honestly give a damn but are trying to make it look like you do, you tend to find ways of putting your own name up on a building or bridge somewhere for posterity’s sake, for which we really don’t give a damn—buildings and bridges are places of work, not worship.

We 99%, on the other hand, use the world “help” as a verb, not a noun.  An imperative would be more accurate, as in, “Help, I’m a parent with a full-time job (or multiple part-time jobs) and I can’t find affordable daycare!”  An imperative as in, “Help, the education which has hobbled me with crippling student loans has left me little viable job opportunities because of the economy Wall Street has wrecked, which means I may have to join Wall Street rather than become a productive member of society, such as an engineer, scientist, doctor, educator, or even artist!”  An imperative as in “Help, I’m scared that I’m one bad day away from financial ruin due to overwhelming medical bills/predatory lending/rampant unemployment/[fill in domestic disaster of your choice]!”  Speaking of unemployment, I notice the less charitable members of your 1% tend to blame the fecklessness of the 99% in times of an economic downturn.  I fear you’re being too charitable towards yourselves, throwing those slanderous stones from remote glass mansions.

Many of you hold jobs (though the inherent value of those jobs I’ll get to a little later), but you also have the unmistakable boon of passive income (earnings made off of your property holdings and investments).  Meanwhile, the rest of us make the majority of our money through active income, i.e., working, hour by hour, for a living wage that we worry more every day is becoming a less livable wage.  We don’t have time to do much else, and everybody knows that time is money.  It’s why we ask for “help” while you get “the help.”

And further to this accumulating interest you’ve got, for some reason you think that this money that you’ve “earned” by merely sitting around watching interest rates do all the work for you—money for which no palpable service or product was provided—should be taxed less than the average working class person’s annual income, which, by the by, is probably still less than the interest of what you’ve earned in a mere month’s time (for you top 1% of the 1% types).  Really?  How badly do you need that newest model of the Gulfstream jet, anyway?  How many walk-in closets filled with Manolo Blahnik’s and Jimmy Choo’s will make you happy?

Now as to the actual value of the jobs you hold (beyond the personal wealth it affords to yourselves as individuals), you’ll forgive us our skepticism if we’re not feelin’ the fiscal camaraderie.  When we 99% work, we get the sense we’ve accomplished something at day’s end that might have helped our communities in some small way.  We’ve fixed a car, taught a kid, served good food, built a roof, healed the sick, talked the talk and walked the walk, and the deeds go on, day in, day out.

When you guys work, we can’t help but get the sneaking suspicion that you’re really looking out for your own bottom line and not much else.  CEOs maximize corporate profits through cynical cost-benefit analyses, lobbying for subsidies and loopholes they don’t really need (how’s that a free market system?), and relocate to whatever foreign country let’s them dodge the most taxes.  Politicians (‘cause let’s face it, few can afford to run for a seat on Capitol Hill if they’re not already independently wealthy) offer empty promises for the next election cycle while secretly pandering to the 1%.  For those of us who work a day’s wage, we feel that all you really do is play around with percentages, whether in our bank accounts or in our polling numbers.  You create nothing except ways for us to get into more debt, from which you earn interest or rally the frustrated votes of the 99% only to come through for the 1% behind closed door meetings.

When we 99% totally screw up in our jobs, we get fired.  And that’s as it should be.  But when you 1% totally screw up in your jobs, the rest of us still get fired.  And on the off chance you do get fired, you tend to make off with absurdly generous and forgiving severance packages.  So please tell me, CEOs, where under the definition of “capitalism” is the part that says “an institutionalized rewarding of failure”?  Tell me, incumbent legislators, where under the definition of “democracy” is the part that says “ongoing gridlock with an utter lack of a long term energy/education/fiscal/jobs policy due to extremists from either side of the political spectrum that refuse to engage in consensus for the national good”?

Speaking of national good, we have a strong notion that “Trickle Down Theory” is nothing but a big let down.  Ongoing tax cuts for the wealthy?  I repeat again, how many private jets and designer shoes do you need to own; and what does that really do for Main Street?  To us, keeping up with the Joneses is tantamount to playing the fiddle as Rome burns.  Let us save our money now and spend or invest it as we choose rather than hold out on the hope that a US company will one day build factory on US soil for a change (without wrecking the natural or social fabric of the surrounding locale) or that a million-dollar, trust fund socialite (read: aspiring celebrity) will one day deign to order a soda and sandwich from the local corner shop or buy some clothes at the local strip mall on Main Street, America.

And frankly, on top of all the tax breaks, loopholes, and shelters that you finagle for yourselves, we’re also getting a little sick and tired of the nickel and diming that you do to pad your own accounts when ours are already looking sickly thin from the economic mess that you created.  We’ve had to put up with your toll fees, annual fees, monthly fees, service fees, usage fees, transfer fees, and cancellation fees!  Fee, fie, fo, fum, I smell the fleecing of our piddling income!  You wrought this weak economy; we bailed you out.  And yet you still expect us to pay up while enforcing harsh austerity measures on everyone else but yourselves.Do you think we’ve treated you unfairly as scapegoats?  So the preferential treatment you afford yourselves isn’t reason enough?  Sorry, are you actually blaming us for blaming you?  Then let’s also consider some of the all-stars you’ve given us throughout history that have given us a healthy dose of skepticism about your overall commitment to the greater social good.  Let’s take a brief perusal through a gallery of the rich and infamous….

Wealth does have a way of turning some of your folks into profound existential threats to socio-economic stability.  Bernie Madoff, con-man investor (redundant?) of the century, basically swindled America out of hundreds of billions of dollars.  He had single handedly made us wonder why white collar crime gets so much less coverage in the local news than “regular” crime.  A thug just lifts a single wallet, but a thug investor can rip off an entire economy.  The evil “geniuses” running Freddie Mac, Fannie May, Lehman Brothers, Merryl Lynch (and the miserable tally of financial malfeasance goes on) knew this all too well.  Somehow, they managed to sell everyone on the notion that bad mortgage loans would be a great investment, resulting in the rest of the world paying for their rapacious greed and willful lack of foresight.  And to this day, their ilk still resists any regulations that would reign in irresponsible speculation and risk-taking as if the broken mantra “the free market system corrects itself” is a matter of inviolable faith.  I’d like to share my own view: “The free market system is a sociopath who blames the iceberg while having piloted the Titanic the whole time, then takes the last life boat out, steerage class be damned!”  Insanity truly is doing the same thing over and over again but expecting a different result.

Wealth also has a curious way of pandering to, and thus exacerbating, some of your personal issues, turning you into big-time jerks in the process.  Leona Helmsley, hotel owner, real estate investor, and notorious tax dodge, left $12 million to her pet Maltese dog named “Trouble” (her brother received $10 million and two of her grandkids received $5 million).  We wonder if this unusual provision of the will was worth all that trouble, especially since we probably could have found a worthier cause for the money.  Howard Hughes, aviator and billionaire everyman, near the end of his life, would lie naked in bed in darkened hotel rooms in what he deemed to be germ-free zones because of his fear of germs.  Furthermore, he wore tissue boxes on his feet for “protection” and burned his clothing if anyone near him was ill.  Wealth sure has had a handy way of enabling the rich’s eccentricities!  Small wonder we 99% often look at you with a wary (and weary) eye.  In the words of Notorious B.I.G., “Mo’ money, mo’ problems.”

And for those of you 1% types who seem to be “normal,” we sometimes can’t help but wonder if you’ve each avoided becoming a newspaper headline because you’ve hired better public relations agents and defense lawyers.  Unfortunately, our safety net doesn’t seem to be as expansive as yours.  In addition to whatever “rainy day” private firms you have, you’ve also had the American public (all 99% of us) at your back, bailing you out time and again.  In contrast, we don’t have the money to hire out various private firms when we’re feeling vulnerable.  And it seems at the moment, you don’t have our backs—not with jobs, not with visionary political legislation or corporate leadership, and certainly not with a sense of fairness.  It’s such shabby, appalling, shameful behavior, because frankly, you kind of owe us.  And we’re not just talking about the bailouts.  You really should read the following excerpt from Peter Singer’s New York Times article that touches upon a key insight of Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon.  Here’s to a little bit of enlightenment and basic decency:

The Nobel Prize-winning economist and social scientist Herbert Simon estimated that “social capital” is responsible for at least 90 percent of what people earn in wealthy societies like those of the United States or northwestern Europe. By social capital Simon meant not only natural resources but, more important, the technology and organizational skills in the community, and the presence of good government. These are the foundation on which the rich can begin their work. “On moral grounds,” Simon added, “we could argue for a flat income tax of 90 percent.” Simon was not, of course, advocating so steep a rate of tax, for he was well aware of disincentive effects. But his estimate does undermine the argument that the rich are entitled to keep their wealth because it is all a result of their hard work. If Simon is right, that is true of at most 10 percent of it.

In other words, Mr. Simon’s estimations expose the underlying fallacy behind the concept of “the self-made made.”  You didn’t “create” all that wealth all by yourself.  You really didn’t.

Some of you have complained that this is class warfare, but to be fair (and at the risk of sounding not-so-classy), you started it.  And really, who is the bully with the big burly toadies in this situation?  Remember, you guys have your gang of lawyers, lobbyists, PR agents, Fox News, and God knows who else in your monolithic coterie.  What’ve we got?  We’re stuck with false choices, whether between political parties or between products and services produced by competition-averse monopolies.

I’m not going to deny that some of this attitude is born out of envy, and yes, some of us may actually resent you for the mere fact of being rich.  Who among the 99%, while getting through life on far less, could easily bear seeing others in a jet-setting lifestyle that gets them into exclusive places, dressed in fabulous clothes, eating fabulous foods.

But honestly, you can keep it.  Keep it!  We’ll even begrudge the wealth that some of you have only inherited, not earned.  In the end, all ordinary folks really need to get by is love, security, and a job to be proud of.  It’s a simple trinity of fundamental elements that helps take some of the sting out of life’s inevitable hardships.  But alas, some of your ongoing shenanigans have seriously undermined this basic formula.  And is it really a surprise, since you have so many more resources, all of which are leveraged to have profound and widespread impacts, even on a global scale?

In light of these grievances, all we are asking is: put America’s health and wealth before your own bottom line.  Make this a society where we can pat each other on the back rather than point fingers.  Commit yourselves to the community again (you remember, the tired, the poor, the huddled masses yearning to breathe free) and take a break from high society (the trend-sucking dilettantes, new money trying to marry old money, old money trying to stay old money, and none of them truly free).  Do it because our successes are your successes.  We buy your goods and services and we provide the boundless human capital for all your ambitions, but it’s so much harder to do without a fair and honest handshake codifying that most important of social contracts: life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

But if you’re not convinced and that handshake between us doesn’t seem forthcoming, then we’ll have to part ways and seek the day when we 99% can exercise what collective power we do have—our voices, our votes, and our real choices.  If that’s not concrete enough for you, let’s talk about protesting, denouncing, and satirizing socioeconomic injustice at every step of the way (check); voting out all incumbent legislators and keep doing so until we have term limits for Congress (add to our to-do list); and planning strategic, targeted campaigns and boycotts against peoples and companies that have not been held to account (add to our to-do list).  Is any of this feasible; is any of this prudent?  Who knows?  But what else have we got?  What have you left us to work with?

Such recourse is all so tragically uncivilized, especially since you’re likely to retaliate with further union busting, out-right firings, and paid-for legislation favorable to your woefully self-interested causes.  But for civilization to work, all its civilians require an authentic sense of fair play.  Let’s hope common decency prevails for the greater good.

Sincerely,

E. Pontee

English High School Teacher, USA

Enclosures (2), link to contact information of elected officials and link to contact information of CEOs of the 1%

Cc: the 99%

The America I look forward to living in is a nation where having “Hussein” as part of one’s name, regardless of whether you are the guy living next door or the guy in contention to be the next President of the United States, becomes a non-issue. No, let me rephrase that. “Non-issue” implies a lack of active engagement or understanding with matters that might fall outside our localized experiences, so how about I say instead, “I look forward to the day when we as Americans are able to look at ourselves, in all our cultural pluralism, with a true sense of enlightened context.”

I say this in response to the disappointing and, frankly, offensive tirade that has gotten a lot of press coverage recently by conservative radio talk show host Bill Cunningham (I’m sure to the secret glee of Mr. Cunningham whose bread and butter, so typical of vocally radical media pundits, comes from the manipulation of hyperbole), who had opened for the Republican presidential candidate John McCain at a Cincinnati rally. You can see a clip of his rhetoric in the clip below.

What’s so objectionable to me is not Mr. Cunningham’s political attacks questioning his record (an almost inevitable facet to most heated election campaigns)–I’ll let Senator Obama’s campaign managers and the media sort out the relative mendacity or veracity of his allegations–but the subtext applied to his rhetoric that essentially channels his inner-bigot.

And yes, Senator Obama’s full name is indeed Barack Hussein Obama. But faulting him for his name would be like like faulting by association anybody who happened to share the name “John” with John Wilkes Booth, the man who had assassinated President Abraham Lincoln. And like “John,” “Hussein” is not that uncommon a name, just not in our neck of the woods. We only happen to be familiar with the name due to the unfortunate infamy of an erstwhile Iraqi dictator.

Mr. Cunningham has made a most disingenuous protestation in a subsequent interview on the Fox network’s program “Hannity and Colmes” that he sees no problem in using Senator Obama’s middle name, going so far as to suggest he is honoring him with the gravitas that a full name affords such noted Presidents as Franklin Delano Roosevelt or John Fitzerald Kennedy.

Were it true, it would be quite the magnanimous but perhaps bipolar gesture from an individual–at a Republican rally mind you–who in the same breath called Democratic presidential candidate Senator Obama “a hack Chicago, Daley-style politician who is picturing himself as change.” Honestly, whose intelligence does he think he’s trying to insult?

Mr. Cunningham’s form of incipient racism is the kind that can be the most frustrating to contemplate for any minority. In America, at least a minority knows where he or she can stand in relation to the more overt expressions of racism, such as spray-painted swastikas or hanging nooses. Such clearly manifest forms of ethnic hatred are easy to identify and, being criminal acts, allow minorities to find, along with perfectly righteous indignation, appropriate legal recourse.

But in a way, the most difficult form of racism to deal with is the kind that is dealt by subterfuge and suggestion. A victim of these more subtle forms of racism can make accusations, but a perpetrator can hide behind false intentions to the point of making the victim appear to be overreacting, or even worse, to appear to be race-baiting.

This is precisely the form of insidious racism that Mr. Cunningham is using. He has made the argument that people who take issue with use of the name “Hussein” are the ones that are actually the bigots. The sad truth of the matter is, there is some validity to his statement…but I’ll speak to that later on. The matter at hand is Mr. Cunningham’s particular brand of racism.

Regardless of the reasoning behind why some object to hearing Senator Obama’s middle name used, it still doesn’t make him any less complicit in his own unacknowledged bigotry. A closet bigot’s classic technique is borrowed straight from the magician’s handbook regarding the art of misdirection, i.e. drawing the audience’s attention to one action while the real action is going on elsewhere.

Let’s look at how Mr. Cunningham accomplishes this:

1. He, being a media person, would be savvy to the marketing power of names in the public arena; and knowing that names do not occur in a vacuum, he would know how appeal to the xenophobia of the less enlightened members of his audience regarding Senator Obama’s full name.
2. He would know that the name “Hussein,” besides having a negative association with the former Iraqi dictator Sadam Hussein, is of Arabic origin and thus also carries unfortunate negative connotations across America due to the myopic coverage by mainstream media of radical Islam.
3. He would know there are certain political realities, for better or for worse, needed to become an elected official in the United States, e.g., U.S. politicians have predominantly Christian affiliations; so the more he can ramp up apocryphal allegations of Muslim ties to Senator Obama’s campaign, the better to galvanize Obama’s opponents. For the record, Senator Obama is Christian.
4. He would know that emphasizing his middle name (even going so far as to engage in further hyperbole by having called him “Barack Mohammed Hussein Obama” on his own radio show, even though Mohammed is not part of his name) and coyly placing such references as “the great prophet” to falsely create a Muslim subtext.
5. He would also know that since “Hussein” is Senator Obama’s legal middle name, he would gain an inoculation against most accusations of bigotry. Thus he would be free to conduct a campaign of what amounts to guerrilla racism.

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For the most part, the United States of America is in a good place…geographically speaking. We’re fortunate to have neighbors to the north and south in the way of Canada and Mexico respectively with whom we have modern peacetime borders.

Despite the derision that may lurk in the hearts of some of our less enlightened fellow American citizens regarding the cultural relevance of Canada, our northern neighbor has been our number one trading partner, totaling 561.55 billion dollars in imports/exports for the year 2007, according to the U.S. Census Bureau list of U.S. top ten trading partners. (That dismissive jingoism, by the by, seems especially misplaced these days when the American dollar, historically valued higher than the Canadian dollar, is now at virtual parity in recent currency exchange rates.)

And despite our current grumblings about illegal immigration regarding our neighbors to the south, Mexico was our number three trading partner totaling 347.34 billion dollars in imports/exports for the year 2007. (China falls into the two spot at 386.75 billion dollars, in case you were wondering, although that may be already changing this year with China passing Canada.)

Despite these significant numbers, it’s still sometimes too easy to take our modern peacetime borders with these two sovereign countries for granted. With the addition of the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans buffering our coasts, we’re a relatively snug country from a national security stand point.

The sobering reality of the world is that not every country is so lucky. Take for example the disputed region of Kashmir that is the source of constant diplomatic and military tension between the countries of Pakistan and India–not a comforting prospect for two nuclear powers. Or take Israel, where the country has normalized relations with only two out of the four surrounding Arab states and ongoing military tensions with the other two (not to mention the Palestinian conflict occurring within its own disputed borders). Or consider the DMZ, arguably the most militarized border in the world, that divides South Korea and North Korea, extant since the cease-fire of the Korean War in 1953.

Even the U.S.A. is not without its own history of border troubles by way of the War of 1812 and the Mexican-American War (both wars due at least in some part to America‘s aggressive policies in territorial expansion). But I digress.

Even though at present we benefit from the circumstance of our geography, there is a downside to our good fortune. Our “snugness” can too easily transform into a parochial “smugness.” We gain a certain degree of comfort at the cost of blunting our awareness of pan-cultural matters. Our geography translates into a mental isolation: out of sight is out of mind. It seems we need more than a little work to overcome our lack of awareness in global affairs.

Last week, an article by Ms. Patricia Cohen in The New York Times entitled “Dumb and Dumber: Are Americans Hostile to Knowledge?” addressed this particular problem of the mainstream American consciousness.

The article references a global knowledge gaff made by American Idol’s Kellie Pickler during a celebrity edition of the game show called “Are You Smarter Than a 5th Grader?” The title is more than self-explanatory in outlining the show’s basic premise. You can view the relevant segment yourself in the video clip below and then indulge in a moment of schadenfreude.

Now in fairness to the geographically challenged Ms. Pickler (and let’s not even mention the show’s host Jeff Foxworthy dropping an entire syllable when pronouncing “Hungary”), I wonder how many Americans who enjoined in a collective jeering of smug superiority could have effectively answered the same question themselves? To gauge your own geographic literacy, try out this brief geography quiz, derived from the 2006 National Geographic-Roper survey. Click on the “Start Quiz” button once your on the appropriate page.

Just for the record, I managed to make it through all seven questions with a perfect score, but must admit to a bit of sweating when trying to properly locate Afghanistan on the map.

In relation to the Budapest question that Ms. Pickler failed to answer (and thus provide some transient fodder for the viral video community), I did happen to know that Budapest was in Hungary (not to mention that Europe was a continent, not a country). I also happen to know that Hungary‘s linguistic lineage falls into the same hypothetical language group of Ural-Altaic languages, which includes in its family tree such seemingly diverse languages as Finnish, Korean, and Turkish.

But cultural acumen is relative. In case I should give the appearance of touting my own innate superiority in all matters Hungarian, in all honesty, if someone were to start pressing me for the country’s historical background regarding the Austro-Hungarian Empire, I’d sadly have to confess my knowledge grossly wanting.

But what I do know about topics beyond these United States I must attribute to an accumulation of learned experiences through reading, traveling, and getting to know people of varied cultural dispositions and disciplines. Without those experiences, I doubt I would have made it through those seven questions with my dignity intact. And even then, I will always have more to learn. It’s a wide, wide world out there with a deep, deep history.

Hence we’re back to the problem of the isolation of Americans, both literally and figuratively, relative to the rest of the rest of the globe. So what’s the solution to end our American navel-gazing? If you can travel to a foreign country, do it. Travel provides an immediacy of experience that confronts your sense and sensibility with customs and perspectives at rich variance from our own. Unfortunately, travel to other countries isn’t always an economically feasible option.

Even without an airplane ticket to overseas destinations, there are plenty of means to bring the world into your local experience. Explore various ethnic cuisines, whether cooking at home or eating out; learn how to salsa or raks sharki (belly dance); listen to some Portuguese fado or Buddhist Theravada chanting; take up a foreign language; socialize with people of various ethnicities or nationalities; and the list goes on.

Of course, there is only so much personally lived experience an individual can cultivate, only so much access to realms beyond the local life he or she lives. That’s where enriching one’s reading repertoire becomes vital. It’s obviously not the immediate experience of traveling abroad or even eating at your local ethnic restaurant, but most of our knowledge necessarily comes through second-hand experiences, and often reading can provide a level of analytical understanding not always possible with direct experiences. Words are access to the world at large. Keep tabs on international news. Read books about other cultures written by authors hailing from different countries. Look at a map for reasons other than directions to meet your friends at the local bar.

Really, what does navel-gazing get us except cramped necks? The poet William Wordsworth famously exhorted that the “world is too much with us,” to which I might counter, “we are too much without the world.” The better state of mind for we Americans to approach the 21st century–in the arts, in business, or in diplomacy–is to nurture our understanding of our fellow global citizens. And if for no other reason, we should do so in the interest of avoiding getting caught out on a nationally televised game show not knowing that Budapest is the capital of Hungary (not “Hungry”).