A SCROOGE
FOR ALL AGES
The Rich Get Rich, The Poor Get Sorer
In Dickens’ classic A Christmas Carol,
the ghost of Jacob Marley
appears in the middle of the night to Ebenezer Scrooge. As
his former colleague rattles his chains and laments the
waste of his life, Scrooge fumbles for a proper response.
“‘But you were always a good man of business, Jacob,’ he
says. ‘Business!’ cried the ghost, wringing its hands.
‘Mankind was my business. The common welfare was my
business: charity, mercy, forbearance and benevolence were
all my business. The dealings of my trade were but a drop
of water in the comprehensive ocean of my business!’”
It’s a remarkable confession. Marley’s ledger book
tinkering was a drop of water; the “common welfare” of
others was the ocean. In his failure to feel the slightest
bit of empathy for his fellow beings, Marley’s spiritual
error was much greater than refusing to toss change at
street urchins or not attending charity balls.
It’s a theme that goes far beyond cheap, seasonal
sentiment. From Christ kicking over the moneychangers’
tables in the New Testament, to King Midas’s golden touch,
to Jimmy Stewart’s struggle with a greedy bank owner in
It’s a Wonderful Life, the message resonates across the
centuries: the desire for wealth and capital, untethered
from communal purpose, is corrosive to the human spirit.
It’s been such a persistent theme in western literature,
art, music and religious parable; who could doubt its
truth? But in the “real world” of tough-minded high
finance, where “money talks and bullshit walks,” we might
as well be talking about greeting card sentiments. As the
gap grows between the rich and the poor – both within
nations and between them – the distribution of wealth and
resources approaches disparities not seen since the “Gilded
Age” of the late nineteenth century.
According to German federal legislator and author Norbert
Blüm, there are almost 899 billionaires in the world; 102
names were added to the list of the billionaires’ club in
2006 alone. Meanwhile, the bottom half of three billion
people manage on less than two dollars a day, with 1.3
billion having less than one dollar a day. The 358 richest
families own one half of the world’s assets. The world’s
500 largest private companies control 52 percent of the
world’s national product. In the US, according to a 2006
report in the New York Times, “The average top executive’s
salary at a big company was more than 170 times the average
worker’s earnings in 2004, up from a multiple of 68 in
1940, according to a study last year by Carola Frydman, a
doctoral candidate at Harvard, and Raven E. Saks, an
economist at the Federal Reserve.”
If Marley’s ghost materialized today in the corporate
boardrooms or legislative halls, there’s little doubt he’d
wail and rattle his chains over the disparities created by
Scrooge’s spiritual descendents. But although the problem
is global, there are still places where there has been
successful resistance. We’ll get to that later.
An instructive case of the current class divide in the US
can be found in the recent indictment of David H. Brooks,
53, former CEO of DHB Industries. The company was the
leading supplier of body armour to the US military and the
“Interceptor Vest” was its flagship product.
Brooks and his former chief operating officer Sandra
Hatfield have been charged with manipulating DHB’s
financial records to increase earnings and profit margins,
thereby inflating the price of DHB’s stock. When an
employee told Hatfield the inventory of vests was
overvalued, she allegedly responded that the company could
not “take a hit” of reducing the valuation to the correct
amount. During this time, the pair sold several million
shares of DHB stock. Brooks made $185 million from this
sale.
According to a report in The Trentonian,
“Brooks also is accused of
using DHB funds to buy or lease luxury vehicles for himself
and family members, and to pay for vacations, jewellery,
cosmetic surgery, country club bills and family
celebrations. He also used DHB funds for his private horse
racing business, prosecutors said.”
In May of 2005, the US Marines recalled more than 5,000 DHB
armoured vests after doubts were raised about their
effectiveness. The suits allegedly couldn’t take a hit from
a nine-mm round. “By that time, Brooks had pocketed over
$250 million in war windfalls, “wrote reporter Anthony
Lappé.
In 2005, in what Lappé called the “… world’s most obscene
coming of age party,” Brooks lavished $10 million dollars
on his daughter’s bat mitzvah. Among the performers flown
in to New York’s Rainbow Room to entertain the girl and
three hundred of her closest friends, were Don Henley,
Stevie Nicks, Kenny G, Aerosmith and rapper 50 Cent. Tom
Petty hosted the celebration.
Could there be any more cogent example of what author Naomi
Klein calls “disaster capitalism” than a war profiteer
organizing a musical Rome-in-decline spectacle for his
little girl? (One of the most obvious examples of disaster
capitalism is the fallout from Katrina, when privatizing
vultures descended on the public purse in New Orleans.)
While Brooks’ indictment made news, the leisure time
excesses of the hyper-rich usually go unreported. The top
one percent has done something of a disappearing act,
secluding themselves in gated mansions, holidaying in
high-end resorts and heading to swank events escorted by
private security. Their absence from the scene, if not from
the society page, creates a social blank screen upon which
the rest of us can project our shadows. (Brooks is a piece
of work, but it doesn’t bode well if the class war
convinces either side that they are up against inhuman
monsters.)
Yet there is little doubt that the comfortable isolation of
money, power and influence creates a kind of hermetically
sealed world, where the elite are rarely exposed to the
experiences and opinions of anyone other than “nice” people
like themselves. And after the first few billion, money has
little to do with the trifling sums required for food,
shelter and leisure. It becomes a kind of numerical peg for
status. It’s a way of keeping score, through buying
everything from conglomerates to the company of rapper 50
Cent.
As for those at the bottom of society, they’re doing their
own disappearing act. “Our poor are like people in
Madagascar,” wrote James Fallows in New York Times Magazine
in 2000. “We feel bad for them, but they live someplace
else.” The poor, comprised of more whites than ever, have
“… become invisible,” according to the reporter – largely
through the professional and leisure-time insulation of
folks like Fallows, who moves in the charmed circle of East
Coast mainstream media.
The class divide in North America has become so wide and so
obvious that mainstream media rarely examines it as an
institutional problem, if they ever did. It just somehow
happened, through the magic of the marketplace. Adam
Smith’s “invisible hand,” moving as mysteriously as
Marley’s ghost, began to reward the few while smacking down
the many.
In October of 2007, New York Times Magazine
revisited the matter of the
class divide in the Big Apple, devoting an issue to “City
Life in the Second Gilded Age.” It could just as well have
called the theme, “Get Used to It.” The cover story was
illustrated with a gold-painted manhole cover.
An essay on the Internet by writer Steve Kangas entitled
The Origins of the Overclass supplies some necessary
historical context. The wealthy in the US have always used
many methods to accumulate wealth, he notes, but it was not
until the mid-1970s that these methods coalesced into a
superbly organized, cohesive and efficient machine.
“After 1975,” Kangas writes, “it became greater than the
sum of its parts, a smooth flowing organization of advocacy
groups, lobbyists, think tanks, conservative foundations
and PR firms that hurtled the richest one percent into the
stratosphere.”
Years of legislative gains for consumer groups,
environmentalists and labour groups had given the powers
that be a bit of a fright. It was time to get busy and
apply some tried and true techniques.
“During the 1970s, these men would take the propaganda and
operational techniques they had learned in the Cold War and
apply them to the Class War. Therefore, it is no surprise
that the American version of the machine bears an uncanny
resemblance to the foreign versions designed to fight
communism,” Kangas notes.
It may have been a war of words, but it was a war
nonetheless, and one with real world casualties. When
Harper’s former editor Lewis Lapham investigated the
history of rightwing think tanks and foundations in the US,
he was surprised to discover what was, by definition, a
conspiracy: a decades-long effort by the very wealthiest,
using millions of dollars and experts-for-hire, to
influence policies on taxation, regulation, consumer and
labour laws, by constructing a pipeline into media,
academia and government. Simply put, the powers that be
needed to get things back on track after America’s
dangerous experiment in representative democracy. (A
similar pattern with think tanks, foundations and public
relations firms occurred here in Canada.)
In every generation, members of the overclass rediscover
that human evolution has peaked, by happy coincidence, with
themselves. From the crib to the country club, they learn
through osmosis that the world is their blue-green bauble.
No further instruction is required; they can always hire
smart people to figure out the details. But it’s not easy
work; there are always difficult, dangerous people out
there on the outskirts of empire, interfering in the
inalienable right of the few to cheap energy, resources and
labour.
It takes a lot of time and money to convince the rubes at
home in the US and Canada that their interests are the same
as those of the overclass. People aren’t that stupid; it
takes years of programming through media and PR firms to
condition them into the right responses. Consider the term
“free trade.” In retrospect, the alphabet soup of trade
agreements – NAFTA, CAFTA, FTA and FTAA – was never really
about trade, per se, or even freedom and agreement. It was
about investment and the global displacement of local
markets by corporate conglomerates. Globally, this 30-year
program has vastly enriched a small percentage of players
at the expense of blue collar workers, who had about as
much democratic input into the decision-making as medieval
peasants on a feudal estate.
Yet globalization is now widely recognized as a botched
experiment, even among the negotiators themselves. In fact,
those who believe that protest accomplishes nothing need
look no further than the famous “Battle of Seattle” in
1999, which led to a collapse of that year’s WTO meeting.
Successive WTO meetings, from Doha to Cancun, ground to a
halt when poorer countries refused to sign on to the status
quo.
Latin Americans, in particular, refuse to play the same old
game. A growing number of nations are rejecting the
IMF/World Bank bromides about economic growth
opportunities, after experiencing the privatization of
public services, resource rape and extortion through debt.
The old games of overt and covert oppression don’t work
anymore. The election of brown-skinned born peasants to
high office, such as Evo Morales in Bolivia and Hugo Chávez
in Venezuela, are the most obvious signs of this
transformation. From Buenos Aires to Caracas to Managua,
the poor are starting to define their own destinies, after
decades of exile from positions of influence.
We began with the tale of former CEO David Brooks, the
battle vest manufacturer. We’ll end with the story of
another man of influence, from the other side of the
equator.
It was chilly summer morning in Buenos Aires. After a light
breakfast, Dr. René Favaloro walked to his bathroom, put a
gun to his chest and pulled the trigger. The shot to his
own heart, resounding through Argentina in late July of
2000, made for a tragically ironic end for the 77-year old
Favaloro, a word-famous cardiac specialist who was the
first doctor in the world to map out and perform heart
bypass surgery 33 years earlier in the US.
Favaloro’s suicide resulted in an outpouring of national
grief and a flood of visitors with floral wreaths to the
front of his clinic. Argentineans put the blame for his
suicide squarely on free market economics. Favaloro’s own
writings allude to his despair at the increasing
privatization of health in Argentina and the fiscal crisis
in his own clinic.
The patrician, silver-haired doctor refused to turn away
uninsured patients from his clinic, insisting “… the right
to live” was a given for all Argentineans. Instituted in
1992, Favaloro’s clinic was Latin America’s most advanced
heart institute, training over four hundred doctors, who
are now spread across the world. Favaloro hoped his
foundation would become a model for public health care
globally.
At the insistence of Washington and the IMF, Argentina and
much of the rest of Latin America instituted free-market
reforms in the early 1990s. Government subsidies to
Favaloro’s foundation were slashed while US-style health
care practices were introduced. At the same time, millions
of Argentineans, pushed out of work by public and private
downsizing, lost health care coverage altogether.
Favaloro himself was precise in localizing the blame for
the escalating health crisis, in which the treatment of
uninsured patients became increasingly untenable. Two weeks
before his death, in a memo to his staff, he excoriated
economic globalization, stating that free-market reforms
are “… better referred to as a neo-feudalism that is
bringing this world toward a social disaster where the rich
are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer.”
Favaloro wrote to a friend expressing the personal
dimensions of this struggle: “I am living one of the worst
moments of my life, just as the rest of this nation. I have
become a servant knocking on doors looking for money to
keep the foundation alive.” His appeals to private donors
failed to make up the losses brought on by free-market
reforms.
“René had fought hard to give his patients equal
treatment,” said Mariano Favaloro, the foundation’s chief
of surgery and cousin to the doctor, in a story in the
Washington Post. “He felt this new world we live in could
no longer permit it, and he ended his life.”
The Post story tells how Ismael Garcia, a 57-year-old
farmer from Patagonia, was accepted by René Favaloro as a
patient, even though Garcia could not pay. He wept when
told about Favaloro’s death.
“I wanted to meet the man who allowed my life to be saved,
I wanted to at least shake his hand,” cried Garcia while
his daughter held his bandaged neck. “But I never got a
chance to do it. Favaloro was too good for this world.”
René Favaloro’s trade as a doctor was small compared to his
comprehensive business in making medicine available to
those who needed it most. His story had a major influence
on Argentineans, giving a human face to the impersonal
pressures of finance and foreign capital that wracked their
country in the first few years of the millennium. In 2003,
the pro-US candidate Carlos Menem failed to win Argentina’s
presidential race, signalling the nation’s move toward
greater political and economic autonomy. Still, the most
dramatic rejection of “The Washington Consensus” has been
elsewhere, in Bolivia and Venezuela.
It’s ironic that Latin Americans are learning the lesson
that we have yet to fully understand in North America: a
lesson about the spiritually and socially destructive
aspects of greed, foreshadowed in the work of Dickens. In A
Christmas Carol, Marley’s ghost tells Scrooge he has been
seven years dead, and swiftly travelling all the time “… in
an incessant torment of remorse.” Scrooge helpfully offers
that he must have covered a lot of ground in that time.
Enraged, Marley’s ghost flings a length of chain heavily to
the ground.
“‘Oh! captive, bound, and double-ironed,’ cried the
phantom, ‘not to know, that ages of incessant labour, by
immortal creatures, for this earth must pass into eternity
before the good of which it is susceptible is all
developed.
“‘At this time of the rolling year,’ the spectre said, ‘I
suffer most. Why did I walk through crowds of fellow-beings
with my eyes turned down, and never raise them to that
blessed Star which led the Wise Men to a poor abode! Were
there no poor homes to which its light would have conducted
me!’”
By the end of Dickens’ classic tale, Scrooge has been
terrified into an epiphany. His future is not written in
stone, and it’s not too late to undo his bad prospects.
Against all odds, a bitter, anal-retentive pencil pusher
learns to feel compassion for the suffering of others.
Though it’s too late for his former colleague, Scrooge has
learned a few things about wealth, workers and chains.
Geoff Olson
