Written before the Occupy Wall Street movement began, Ketcham has since
retracted his statement about current youth being unable to shake a fist
at the brokers. Yet this article does an admirable job of describing the
inequities and cultural demise that led up to the OWS movement, while
using New York City's cultural state as clear example of the nation's
own sad priorities.
More than a deserving nod to Henry George, and also to Stephane Hessel
for his little book, _Cry Out_, and with, I think, few suppositions with
which to take issue, most should find this an interesting read.
An accurate account of impoverishment of the arts in N.Y. City would be
difficult to describe by anyone. Though perhaps a bit harsh and
nostalgic for more dynamic times, Ketcham seems to come close as he
accuses commodities marketing as art's primary expression through
graphics' varicose vein of creativity. He observes live art as having
mostly moved elsewhere, citing little time to be creative while holding
down three jobs to pay the rent.
(The tally of homeless in New York sounds way high, though I'm not sure
how he arrived at that figure, and I disagree with Ketcham that eggs
should be hurled at the bankers/brokers--I think that citizens arrests
should be made of the better-known psychopaths)
Natalia
Below you'll find only part of the entire piece from:
http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/articles/article/6470
The Reign of the One Percenters
Income inequality and the death of culture in New York City
by Christopher Ketcham
Published in the November/December 2011
<http://www.orionmagazine.org/index.php/mag/issue/6469/> issue of
/Orion/ magazine
(snip)
On a smaller scale, I want Léa to understand what New York, my
birthplace and home, once beloved to me, is really about. Because I'm
convinced that the beating heart of the city today is not its art
galleries, its boutiques, its restaurants or bars, its theaters, its
museums, nor its miserable remnants in manufacturing, nor its creative
types---its writers, dancers, artists, sculptors, thinkers, musicians,
or, god forbid, its journalists.
"Here," I tell her, standing in the canyons of world finance, "is what
New York is about. Sociopaths getting really rich while everyone else
just sits on their asses and lets it happen."
(snip)
According to the FPI, the wealth of the One Percenters derives almost
entirely from the operations of the sector known as "financial
services," whose preoccupation is something they call "financial
innovation." The One Percenters draw the top salaries at commercial and
investment banks, hedge funds, credit card companies, insurance
companies, stock brokerages. They are the suit people at Goldman Sachs
and J. P. Morgan and AIG and Deutsche Bank. To get a sense for how their
fortunes have blossomed, consider the fact that the largest twenty
financial institutions in the U.S., almost all of them headquartered in
New York, now control upward of 70 percent of the country's financial
assets, roughly double what they controlled in the 1990s.
And what do the suit people do to earn such heaping returns? At one
time, the financial sector could be relied upon to allocate capital for
the building of things that society needed---projects that also
invariably created jobs. But productivity is no longer its purview. Lord
Adair Turner, a financial watchdog and former banker in the city of
London---the other world capital of finance---recently denounced his
class as practitioners and beneficiaries of a "socially useless
activity." Paul Woolley, who runs a think tank in London called the
Centre for the Study of Capital Market Dysfunctionality, observed that
the "presumption that financial innovation is socially valuable" was a
kind of metaphysics. "It wasn't backed by any empirical evidence,"
Woolley told John Cassidy, a staff writer for /The New Yorker/.
Structured investment vehicles, credit default swaps, futures exchanges,
hedge funds, complex securitization and derivative pools, the tranching
of mortgages---these were shown to have "little or no long-term value,"
according to Cassidy. The purpose was to "merely shift money around"
without designing, building, or selling "a single tangible thing." The
One Percenter seeks only exchange value, as opposed to real value. Thus
foreign exchange currency gambling has skyrocketed to seventy-three
times the actual goods and services of the planet, up from eleven times
in 1980. Thus the "value" of oil futures has risen from 20 percent of
actual physical production in 1980 to 1,000 percent today. Thus interest
rate derivatives have gone from nil in 1980 to $390 trillion in 2009.
The trading schemes float disembodied above the real economy, related to
it only because without the real economy there would be nothing to exploit.
Behold, then, the One Percenter in his Wall Street tower. He creates
"value" by tapping on keyboards and punching in algorithms. He makes
money playing with money, manipulating abstractions. He manufactures and
chases after financial bubbles and then pricks them. He speculates on
mortgages, car loans, credit card debt, the price of gas that keeps the
real economy moving, the price of food that keeps the labor pool alive,
always hedging his bets so that he comes out ahead whether society wins
or loses. A study from the New Economics Foundation in England found
that for every pound made in financial services in the city of London,
roughly seven pounds of social wealth is lost---meaning the wealth of
those in society who do productive work.
Finance as practiced on Wall Street, says Paul Woolley, is "like a
cancer." There is only maximization of short-term profit in these
"financial services"---they are services only in the sense of the
vampire at a vein. There is no vision for allocating capital for the
building of infrastructure that will serve society in the future; no
vision, say, for a post-carbon civilization; no vision for surviving the
shocks of coming resource scarcity. The finance nihilist doesn't look to
a viable future; he is interested only in the immediate return.
*Rotten Vegetables*
The optimist will say that the wealth disparities in New York have been
far worse in the past, and the optimist would be correct. When in 1869,
for example, a young journalist named Henry George arrived in New York,
already the most opulent city in America, he found that "amid the
greatest accumulations of wealth, men die of starvation, and puny
infants suckle dry breasts." The inequalities got worse. There came the
Panics of 1873 and 1884, which resulted from the speculation and stock
fraud of the city's financial and business elite. Epicentered in lower
Manhattan, the panics---we'd call them crashes today---produced
nationwide shock waves of mass unemployment, homelessness, hunger, years
of depression and dislocation, and, at times, the specter of all-out
chaos. President Grover Cleveland, aghast at the scope of the division
between the few very rich and the many poor, concluded that the "wealth
and luxury of our cities," primarily enjoyed by the industrial
monopolists and the financier and Wall Street class, was "largely built
upon undue exactions from the masses of our people." The exactions in
New York, as with every city where unregulated industrial capital ran
amok, were most felt in the profitable horrors of wage slavery: the
fourteen-hour workdays, the miserable pay, the children forced into
labor, the dangerous conditions on factory floors, the rents extracted
by landlords for the opportunity to live in windowless, rat-infested,
soul-destroying tenements.
In answer, across New York City throughout the 1880s there were strikes,
marches, boycotts, gigantic torch-lit demonstrations. New York's Central
Labor Union (CLU), a branch of the Knights of Labor, whose national
membership approached 700,000, welcomed all the "producing classes,"
skilled and unskilled: the bricklayers, the jewelers, the printers, the
industrialized brewers and machinists, the salesclerks, bakers, cloak
makers, cigar makers, piano makers, musicians, tailors, waiters, Morse
operators, Protestants, Catholics, Jews, whites and blacks, men and
women. The only people they refused to welcome in their ranks, wrote
historians Edwin G. Burrows and Mike Wallace, were "bankers, brokers,
speculators, gamblers, and liquor dealers"---what the Knights and other
radicals of the time called the "fleecing classes," the "parasites," the
"leeches."
The CLU and the Knights organized the first Labor Day parade in the
United States, on September 5, 1882, marching twenty thousand strong
from City Hall to Union Square, unfurling banners that said: LABOR BUILT
THIS REPUBLIC AND LABOR SHALL RULE IT. And: NO MONEY MONOPOLY. And: PAY
NO RENT. The seamstresses along the route waved handkerchiefs from
windows and blew kisses at the marchers. When the ladies at their sills
saw cops and thugs hired by the fleecing classes, they rained down
rocks, eggs, rotten vegetables.
By 1886, the labor coalition was looking for a radical candidate for
mayor, and they found one in Henry George, who by then had become a
famous writer, known on four continents. Seven years earlier, he had
published a book of economics called /Progress and Poverty/ that during
the last decades of the nineteenth century would outsell every book but
the Bible. His chief contribution was to acquaint the lay American with
the problem of "economic rent" in society. This was defined as revenue
with no corresponding labor or productivity; economic rent was unearned
income.
Those who benefited from this income were known as /rentiers/, and the
most egregious /rentier/ in George's day was the landlord, who, sitting
on land as it rose in value, got rich on the backs of his tenants
"without doing one stroke of work, without adding one iota to the wealth
of the community." Political liberty required also economic liberty,
said George, and economic liberty required doing away with the
privileges of the /rentier/. "We are not called upon to guarantee all
men equal conditions...but we are called upon to give to all men an
equal chance," said George. "If we do not, our republicanism is a snare
and a delusion, our chatter about the rights of man the veriest
buncombe." George also proclaimed, "It is not enough that men should
vote; it is not enough that they should be theoretically equal before
the law. They must have liberty to avail themselves of the opportunities
and means of life."
In declaring his candidacy, George decried the "principle of competition
upon which society is now based." He announced to an ecstatic public
that his intention was "to raise hell!" He saw only corruption in
government as it was then comprised, and suggested that "a revolutionary
uprising might be necessary to turn out the praetorians who were doing
the corporations' bidding in government office." But George was defeated
in the 1886 campaign, and new and more advanced /rentiers, / typified by
J. P. Morgan, with his offices at 23 Wall Street, rose to dominate the
American political economy. By the turn of the twentieth century, Morgan
had directed a massive consolidation of banking and, through the
leverage of credit and debt, industry. This superconsolidation, which
came to be known as monopoly finance capitalism, extended the influence
of New York bankers nationwide to the point that, as Woodrow Wilson
observed in 1911, "all our activities are in the hands of a few men" who
"chill and check and destroy genuine economic freedom.
(snip)
*Sterility*
And what of the city as engine of culture? The art critic Robert Hughes
pronounced New York a fading star as early as 1990---just ten years into
our new Gilded Age---"when the sheer inequality of New York became
overpowering," he wrote. "Could a city with such extremes of
Sardanapalian wealth and Calcutta-like misery foster a sane culture?"
Hughes declared it could not. Between 1980 and 1990, the One Percenters
in New York roughly doubled their take of income, from 12 percent to 20
percent, and this conspicuous concentration of money inflated the art
market, which was soon "run almost entirely by finance manipulators,
fashion victims and rich ignoramuses." The "impulses of art appreciation
and collecting," lamented Hughes, were now "nakedly harnessed to
gratuitous, philistine social display." At the same time, rents
skyrocketed, driven by speculative real estate development. By the
1980s, wrote Hughes, "the supply of affordable workspace for artists in
Manhattan finally ran out." In a somber observation, Hughes noted, "It
was always the work of living artists, made in the belief that their
work could grow best there and nowhere else, that fueled New York. The
critical mass of talent emits the energies that proclaim the center; its
gravitational field keeps drawing more talent in, as in the combustion
of a star, to sustain the reaction. The process is now dying."
Thirty years on, with rents at historic highs, this has been a long
death march, swallowing in its pall not only the artist, but the writer,
the poet, the musician, the unaffiliated intellectual. The creative
types sense that they are no longer wanted in New York, that money is
what is wanted, and creative pursuits that fail to produce big money are
not to be bothered with. But it is rent, more than anything else, that
seals their fate. High rent lays low the creator, as there is no longer
time to create. Working three jobs sixty hours a week at steadily
declining wages, as a sizable number of Americans know, is a recipe for
spiritual suicide. For the creative individual the challenge is
existential: finding a psychological space where money---the need for
it, the lack of it---won't be heard howling hysterically day and night.
/Crain's New York Business, / not known as a friend of the arts, reports
the endgame of the trend identified by Hughes, namely that the young
painter and sculptor are now sidestepping New York altogether, heading
instead to cities like Pittsburgh, Philadelphia, Cleveland, and overseas
to Berlin---wherever the rents are low and the air doesn't stink of
cash. The /Times/ reports that freelance musicians in New York are
killed off in a marketplace that no longer has need for them. The
once-great Philharmonics, mainstay of a New York tradition, are crippled
from lack of listeners, lack of funding; Broadway replaces the live
musician in the well with the artifice of sounds sampled out of
computers. New York loses its "standing as a creative center," reports
/Crain's. / It becomes "sterile." It is "an institutionalized sort of
Disney Land" where "art is presented but not made." Henceforth it will
no longer be "known as a birthplace for new cultural ideas and trends."
In Brooklyn, I bump into a newspaper editor I once worked with who tells
me he is abandoning the city. He talks of Costa Rica, the dark side of
the moon, even Los Angeles. Anywhere but New York. "It's just too
depressing to watch what's happened," he tells me. "The place is
creatively bankrupt." He had freelanced at the paltry rates that
freelancers are expected to survive on---the wages dropping always
lower, the marketplace for journalism devalued by "content mills" and
"information aggregators" staffed by content serfs producing blog
entries. Then he attempted to start a small newspaper in Brooklyn. The
investors weren't interested. "They want digital projects that promise
an all-or-nothing billion dollars," he tells me. "I just don't get that
buzzy creative vibe from New York anymore. I see mercenarianism. Cynical
ambition. Monied dullness. People trying to get rich and cash out. It's
always a CEO and CTO and CFO launching a new web property. Not writers
and editors getting together because they have common visions."
This is old news. Technologic advances in the digital world order now
mandate that the journalist vies in the editorial room with technocrats
advising on the method for tweaking headlines and articles to the rhythm
of Google. The model is from advertising: find what people want to hear,
then echo it in the news so that they will be attracted to hear more of
it. "If you want to know what's really going on in a society or
ideology, follow the money," writes author Jaron Lanier. "If money is
flowing to advertising instead of musicians, journalists, and artists,
then a society is more concerned with manipulation than truth or beauty.
If content is worthless, then people will start to become empty-headed
and contentless... Culture is to become precisely nothing but
advertising." No surprise then that the most lucrative "creative" jobs
in New York for the "aggregating" of "content" are not in journalism but
in corporate media, advertising, and marketing---the machines of
manipulation and deceit.
*Affluenza*
"Everyone was broke and no one cared," said a friend of mine recently,
describing Brooklyn in the 1970s. The people he knew back then, before
New York degenerated into a city run by and for the rich, "lived it up.
They were freer and they were happier, because they weren't so uptight
about the money thing." I think what my friend was saying was this: it
was easier not to care about appearing to have money, easier on mind and
spirit not to have to worry about the appurtenances of affluence.
His observation happens to be supported by a good deal of scholarship in
the social sciences. Among developed nations, the evidence shows that
healthier and happier societies---societies that are more sane, less
uptight, whose members for the most part are enjoying life---are usually
those with more equal distribution of wealth and income. The opposite
correlation holds true: regardless of total wealth as measured by GDP,
unequal societies appear to be less healthy and less happy---suffering,
for instance, lower life expectancy, lower educational achievement,
higher rates of obesity, more infant mortality and more mental illness
and more substance abuse.
Richard Wilkinson, an emeritus professor of social epidemiology at the
University of Nottingham in England, offers a sweeping hypothesis to
explain the causality in the correlations. Economic inequality, he and
coauthor Kate Pickett write in /The Spirit Level: Why Greater Equality
Makes Societies Stronger,/ "seems to heighten people's social evaluation
anxieties by increasing the importance of social status. . . . If
inequalities are bigger, so that some people seem to count for almost
everything and others for practically nothing, where each one of us is
placed becomes more important." The result is "increased status
competition and increased status anxiety," whose effect on well-being is
not to be underestimated. Scientists measuring stress-induced hormones
in human beings have found that subjects were most stressed when faced
with a task that included the opportunity for others to judge their
performance---a "social-evaluative threat" to self-esteem and status,
where the fear is that others might judge you negatively. A stressed
person typically has higher cortisol, a steroid hormone that prepares
body and mind to fend off danger and manage in an emergency. But if
cortisol is high much of the time, it can act as a slow poison: the
immune system is weakened, blood pressure rises, learning is impaired,
bone strength is reduced, and, in some instances, the appetite is
grossly stimulated. Wilkinson argues that, in a more unequal society,
people become more stressed and insecure, vying in the hierarchy of
status---more prone to feeling inadequate, defective, incompetent,
foolish. And more sick both in body and mind.
The literature of the psychosocial effects of status competition and
anxiety, to which Wilkinson's work is only the latest addition, points
to a broad-stroke portrait of the neurotic personality type that appears
to be common in consumer capitalist societies marked by inequality. I
see it all around me in New York, most acutely among young
professionals. The type, /in extremis,/ is that of the narcissist:
Stressed, to be sure, because he seeks approval from others higher up in
the hierarchy, though distrustful of others because he is competing with
them for status, and resentful too because of his dependence on
approval. He views society as unfair; he sees the great wealth paraded
before him as an affront, proof of his failure, his inability, his lack.
The spectacle of unfairness teaches him, among other lessons, the ways
of the master-servant relationship, the rituals of dominance, a kind of
feudal remnant: "The captain kicks the cabin boy and the cabin boy kicks
the cat." Mostly he is envious, and enraged that he is envious. This
envy is endorsed and exploited, made purposeful by what appear to be the
measures of civilization itself, in the mass conditioning methods of
corporatist media: the marketeers and the advertisers chide and tease
him; the messengers of high fashion arbitrate the meaning of his
appearance. He is threatened at every remove in the status scrum. His
psychological compensation, a derangement of sense and spirit, is
affluenza: the seeking of money and possessions as markers of ascent up
the competitive ladder; the worship of celebrities as heroes of
affluence; the haunted desire for fame and recognition; the embrace of
materialistic excess that, alas, has no future except in the assured
destruction of Planet Earth and of every means of a sane survival.
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