Quote:
Hands off our recession
America's wealthiest need to be told: this is a people's tragedy - don't try to muscle in on it
The global economic meltdown has reached the stage where even the planet's wealthiest people are beginning to feel it. According to the New York Times, executives who once broke bread at the finest bistros in Gotham are holding meetings in diners. High-powered attorneys have been spotted eating in restaurants that take coupons. Socialites occasionally wear previously worn dresses to formal events.
Noting, soberly, that this "is a tough time for the very wealthy", the Wall Street Journal reports that a growing number of cash-strapped plutocrats are reduced to ferrying themselves around in used Bentleys. Indeed, in its annual survey of the world's richest people, Forbes says the number of billionaires around the world shrank from 1,125 to 793 last year, their total net worth plummeting to $2.4tn from $4.4tn.
The signs that the rich are taking it on the chin are everywhere. Paris Hilton's TV reality show has been forced to slash its budget by 10%. Free events at the public library are attracting scions and scionesses. And the wealthy are having no luck in persuading Congress to slash the dreaded estate tax that kicks in when rich people kick the bucket.
The avalanche of stories about the plight of the wealthy is not surprising. Journalists get tired of writing about starving children, downsized auto workers and destitute teachers; after a while these sob stories start to take on a generic feel. The rich make better copy; they are more colourful, have a better turn of phrase than the other classes, and supply excellent anecdotes about how the recession is impacting on their fortunes: "We had to cancel the anniversary party in the temple of Luxor and fire both sommeliers! Can you imagine?"
In normal recessions, these pity-the-rich stories go down reasonably well. It is an oft repeated verity that Americans are not afflicted by congenital hatred of the wealthy. This is because America is an aspirational society. As the saying goes, the American sees a man in a Cadillac and dreams of the day he can drive a big car, while the Frenchman sees a man in a Cadillac and dreams of the day he can drag him out and make him walk like everybody else.
One reason this compact has worked well for so long is that in truly trying times the rich have had the good sense to keep a low profile. An unwritten law among the well-heeled stipulates that once unemployment hits 8%, it's time to mothball the yacht, cancel the chukka and wear hand-me-down jodhpurs. It's also time to keep your yap shut.
I am not one of those seething populists who despises the rich. I understand that the wealthy pay more than their fair share of taxes, generously fund museums and opera houses, and maintain dainty public gardens everywhere. But they need to understand this is a recession that belongs to ordinary people, and that they cannot be a part of it.
This is no ordinary recession. It's not a fleeting, don't-blink or-you'll-miss-it economic slump like the one in 2001-02. It will be the worst recession in most people's lives. These sorts of recessions do not lend themselves well to anecdote. The rich have to understand that we are not all in this together. People's retirement plans have been smashed. They have lost their houses. Future generations will be laden with debt for decades. Some people will be out of work for years. Some will never work again.
Most of us can deal with this. We can tough it out. What we cannot tolerate are any more stories about Saudi billionaires getting taken to the cleaners in the stock market, or socialites wearing pre-worn gowns to galas, or high-powered executives eating at McDonald's. This is a people's tragedy; don't try to muscle in on it. Make yourself useful and go polish the used Bentley. Or hire one of us to do it. We could use the spare cash.
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Joe Queenan: Hands off our recession | Comment is free | The Guardian
i put this queenan edito up not because i think it particularly interesting in itself, but mostly because it reflects an obvious but interesting shift that seems to have been unfolding in the states. you see it playing out already here in the tea party thread--all of a sudden, after 35 years of trying to convince us that the wealthy are weathy because they embody all Capitalist Virtues, the right is trying to become populist. a central theme of this populism is---as it always is--questions of class and equitability of distribution of wealth.
for many years, when folk on the left would talk about class war in the united states--which has been continuous, which neo-liberalism was a cover for, an expression of---these same conservatives would talk about memes like "class envy" or, funnier still, blame the people who mentioned class stratification for class stratification, as if the problem lay not in reality but in the words used to describe it.
but now, things have changed, and changed very quickly.
what seems to have come apart is a centerpiece of neoliberalism as it was marketed in the united states, this perverse equation of (a) opposition to the redistribution of wealth, which you'd think would be understood as making socio-economic relations more equal, but which instead came to be seen as some kind of affliction visited upon the Volk by the State, which is entirely outside of society, which is where the Volk live--you know, on a good day when they're not talking about themselves and so aren't pretending they in fact live in some lockean state of nature----this has separated from (b) a fictional moral economy in which economic situation reflects inward virtue and socio-economic hierarchies are natural and capitalism is somehow the system that best enables these natural hierarchies to be expressed.
that was a pretty big deal in the states, remember?
and the thing that is astonishing to me is that the ideology was in fact as stupid as the summary makes it sound.
so now economic crisis has unwound the basis for (b).
the logic of (a) such as it is remains in force out there somewhere.
it's expression is everywhere in conservative populism. it seems to me that (a) IS conservative populism.
the right was playing with these folk for a long time, making itself into a catch-all space for the jurassic right--you saw this happening during the clinton period if you were paying attention---and now the right is having to pay the piper. they're stuck with these people.
meanwhile, at the level of public discourse, a kind of one-dimensional discourse of class war has been surfacing.
there is more to this than the collapse of the american right...but it hardly represents a sudden collective lurch into the marxian tradition of class analysis.
what do you make of the surfacing in the press, in political language, of the question of class?
how do you see it as being framed?
what is it doing? what is it not doing?
i find the queenan piece to be a good example of the superficiality of this language--but have you seen other examples?
post them and talk about what you make of them.
if i'm right, there should be examples from across the political spectrum, so it'd be interesting to see how different positions are trying to frame class as a problem for their own purposes....