Meirionnydd
Active Member
For a delivery worker, perched on a bicycle with plastic bags of food dangling from each handlebar, Manhattan's East Side offers many opportunities for a trip to the emergency room. I learn this one May afternoon as I trail 26-year-old Apolinar Perez, a chubby-faced Mexican immigrant who skillfully steers his black mountain bike through the chaos. A taxi switches lanes without warning, nearly clipping my front wheel. Suit-clad men and women stride purposefully into the street, too wrapped up in their phone conversations to notice they're crossing against the light. A black Suburban with tinted windows screeches to a halt in front of us, directly in the path of the bike lane.
Perez arrived in New York City five years ago, after crossing the Texas border in the back of a truck while hidden beneath a pile of children's toys. Since then, he's delivered food for the same Italian restaurant, working eleven hours a day, six days a week. Pay couldn't be simpler: before heading home each night, one of the managers hands him a $20 bill. That's an hourly wage of $1.82--well below the state's $4.85 minimum wage for delivery workers. The rest of his earnings come through tips, which average $60 a shift. There's no overtime or healthcare, no sick days or workers' comp. I inquire about any benefits I might be forgetting. "For Christmas they give me $50," he says. "Sometimes."
I first encounter Perez as he is locking up his bike in front of 500 Park Avenue, a large, glassy building that serves as the headquarters for the hedge fund Caxton Associates, which manages more than $11 billion. Caxton was founded in 1983 by Bruce Kovner, a broad-shouldered 63-year-old with bushy eyebrows and a ruddy face who was among the top-ten highest-paid hedge-fund managers in 2006, with an income of $715 million. Though he has never shied away from public involvement--Kovner is chair of the American Enterprise Institute (AEI)--he does shy away from the press (an assistant told me he never speaks to the media). Perez wraps a chain around his bike's frame and attaches it to a post, then grabs two orders of pasta and heads through the revolving doors. Every lunch hour in Manhattan, the very poor meet the very rich. Today, wealth will be distributed downward, slightly: Perez emerges with a $2 tip. "I usually don't get very good tips from the fancy buildings," he will later tell me.
Four blocks away from the offices of Caxton Associates is 590 Madison Avenue, a forty-three-story building made of steel and granite, boasting a backup generator that can service its corporate tenants for four days without refueling. Behind a desk on the first floor stands security guard Timothy Williams. Williams, who has been an employee of TNM Protection for a year, is a 24-year-old African-American who, like Perez, lives in the Bronx, the borough with the lowest rents in New York City. After graduating from high school in 2002 he joined the Army, partly in the hope that it would help pay for college. He served in Iraq from August 2004 to July 2005, fighting the war that Kovner's AEI so aggressively pushed. AEI "Freedom Scholar" Michael Ledeen hoped the United States would turn the Middle East "into a caldron," and AEI fellow Richard Perle promised that Iraq's oil would pay for the reconstruction. "Maybe it won't work perfectly," admitted AEI vice president Danielle Pletka on the eve of the invasion, "but does that mean we shouldn't try?"
Williams, though, is disillusioned. "I was for going into Afghanistan, but I'm against Iraq," he tells me at the beginning of a noon-to-midnight shift. Wearing a dark suit with an American flag pin affixed to his lapel, he says that his time in Iraq convinced him that the mission wasn't working, which is one of the reasons he cast his primary vote for Obama.
Now back home, he's earning $12.50 an hour, with no union and no healthcare. "This is just a job I'll have for a little bit," he explains. He's able to get by with the help of the $1,300 monthly checks he receives from the GI Bill, which also covers his tuition at Monroe College, a private school in the Bronx geared toward working students, where he's pursuing an associate's degree. He plans to join the NYPD and hopes one day to become a lawyer. In the meantime, he has joined the National Guard--"I see the military as a place where I can actually have a career"--and recently learned he'll be sent back to Iraq next year.
Journey twenty-nine floors up from where Williams stands guard and the growing disparities of wealth again come into stark contrast. Here you will find the headquarters of Paulson & Company, a $32 billion hedge fund, this one run by John Paulson, the highest-paid individual in 2007. By short-selling the subprime market, he earned $3.7 billion last year. (In January, after a year in which 2.2 million households filed for foreclosure, Paulson told the Wall Street Journal, "I've never been involved in a trade with such unlimited upside.")
For Williams, who would likely shepherd Paulson to safety in the event of a building emergency, that upside is hard to discern: he would have to work more than twenty years as a security guard to earn what Paulson made last year in one hour.
On the East Side of Manhattan two very distinct classes of New Yorkers cross paths every day: the working poor (undocumented immigrants and citizens alike), who cook, deliver, secure and protect--for little money and no benefits--and the titans of finance, hedge-fund executives and heads of private-equity firms, who stare at numbers on screens while moving other people's money in and out of stocks and commodities or buying and selling companies, and whose wealth is expanding so quickly they have difficulty figuring out what to do with it.
While workers in the first group struggle to survive on wages that don't get much higher than $10 an hour, the financial elite continue to break income records. The just-released 2007 earnings figures find the top five hedge-fund managers all clearing $1.5 billion. As Alpha magazine notes, "The top 25 on the list earned an average $892 million, up from $532 million in 2006"--in a year when the economy began to stall, the group needing no help ended up nearly doubling its income. The top ten earners alone made a combined $16.1 billion, more than the GDP of Nicaragua.
Some hedge funds took a hit with the downturn: Kovner of Caxton Associates saw his annual earnings drop to a measly $100 million. But even in a down year, an executive like Kovner has plenty of money to spend--and he isn't shy about protecting his interests. Along with being the chair of AEI, he's also a trustee of the conservative Manhattan Institute and a supporter of the conservative New York Sun. Called "George Soros's Right-Wing Twin" by New York magazine, Kovner has a commitment to neoconservatism that is unsurpassed. His fund is reported to manage much of AEI's investments, and he has been a major donor to the Republican National Committee; in recent years he has sent checks to candidates Rudy Giuliani, John McCain and Joe Lieberman. In 2004 he donated $110,000 to Softer Voices, a conservative group supporting Senator Rick Santorum in what would prove to be a failed 2006 re-election bid, and he sent a quarter of a million dollars last year to All Children Matter, a 527 group that advocates school choice. The group was recently fined a record $5.2 million by the Ohio Elections Committee for illegally transferring money to Republican candidates.
Although Kovner donates to candidates and causes, his real desire is to transform the world through sweeping ideas--the sort of ideas that set the stage for the invasion and occupation of Iraq and that now urge confrontation with Iran. Along with its nation-conquering agenda, AEI is also a voice for an unfettered free market that abhors any sacrifice from the wealthiest among us. Articles in AEI's American magazine have titles that seem to be taken from the pages of the Onion, such as The Upside of Income Inequality and Why Do We Underpay Our Best CEOs? One AEI scholar, on the op-ed pages of the Wall Street Journal, bemoans "the left's 'inequality' obsession."
The "upside" of income inequality is best considered from above: for example, with a view from the fifth floor of Kovner's mansion overlooking Central Park, which he purchased in 1999 from the International Center of Photography for $17.5 million. With the infusion of another $10 million in renovations, the structure--which had contained two floors of gallery space, the museum school and offices--was transformed into his private fortress. In the basement is a rare-book vault, where Kovner presumably keeps copies of an edition of the King James Bible that he financed, with a price tag in excess of $20,000 per volume. Other vantage points from which to assess the benefits of growing income inequality in a clear-eyed fashion might include Kovner's 200-acre estate in Millbrook, New York, or his twelve acres of linked oceanfront properties in Carpinteria, California, which he purchased last year for $70 million in what the Wall Street Journal called "among the largest U.S. residential real-estate deals."
For the fortunate like Kovner, being on the winning end of inequality isn't just about flipping through expensive Bibles in a personal book vault or owning a large chunk of the West Coast; it's about the vast political power conferred by wealth, which can be deployed to support institutions pushing policies that, in turn, magnify the wealth divide.
Whole article at: (There is quite a bit more)
http://www.thenation.com/doc/20080630/thompson
