A Night at the Opera

**edited to include photos of many I saw and sadly many I missed.

In the quest to test my comfort range and do things I normally would not be caught dead doing, I went last night to the Season Opener of the Metropolitan Opera, including attending the Gala Dinner following the opera which was Medea. This is a challenging piece rarely done, largely due to the stress on the Soprano who is to play this titular character and the one that made Maria Callas a STAR. Well a STAR was born last night and the story in the New York Times I feel captures the essence of this amazing woman who took on this role at her own request and with that a demand was met for more and today’s review only confirms this.

So off I went to what is a Black Tie event and often filled with varying celebrity beings and other essential Manhattan characters of wealth and import. I have no idea if any of them were there, as I don’t care one wit about those but the cast of characters that did arrive came in costumes that were worthy of another stage. There were many many men in gowns and the man in front of me sported a corset style coat with a peplum and a hair do that defied explanation. His eyebrows were covered with sequins and it was amazing to watch him walk up and down the aisle with many patrons trying to take discreet photos that he was more than willing to comply and then do the same of those who did not bother to ask permission. It was a pre show to the Opera that was to set the tone and sense of drama for the evening.

There were Men in Gowns with heels to match and with that I say it makes more sense than a Woman in one as it is way easier to pee. I tried to figure out how to navigate that idea of a train and gown in the Ladies room, on the Subway and commuting home and decided that between the undergarments, the shoes and glam required to carry it off, I could not do it; Instead I went with a Black Velvet Tux and Adidas Gucci tennis shoes. A the last minute a pit stop at the Gucci store I picked up a black silk tie to add to the ensemble. I was happy but my outfit was nothing in comparison to the woman nude beneath the crochet gown with just a nipple covering and g-string. Or the Versace clad group down to Kabuki style face masks, that was an ensemble best seen as it was impossible to describe as their feathers of their jackets were flying everywhere as were the pics as they posed for the crowd. Or the couple in full on dominatrix gear with the man’s breasts larger than his female companion. Her nipples were covered by the black leather bra her companion clearly needed. I kept thinking how comfortable could that be to sit for nearly three hours or next too. The man with the amazing hair I prayed did not lean to the right as it was view blocking.

To say an all day affair would be true as it took me two hours just for my make up so when I got there at 5 pm for cocktail hour, I was seriously in need for a drink. The opera began just after 6 and concluded just after 9 where many of us then adjourned to the park next door for dinner, which lasted well into midnight. Sadly none of the more colorful attendees made it to that portion but I was quite happy with my table of 10 and the flow of wine that followed.

My table was a delight, two women, one couple a single woman like myself, a couple from DC and two men, one from Manhattan who was there alone and left with the other woman, no comment as he said he would be leaving early into the dinner so coincidence? A charming man who despite shelling out $2500 for the evening oblivious to the fact that the Met had run a full season last year without missing a beat. Clearly that is support in absentia (or he really is not an opera goer unless he is compelled to, meaning free tickets). Attendance last year was erratic but many Operas had sold out and the season was well received and well publicized so that excuse I knew was bullshit but hey again he was in a Tux and there so he was not unlike all of us who seemed the atypical audience for an event like this.

But it was the Gentleman to my left who I spoke to throughout dinner, he was also from DC and had come up for the day to have a lunch with a former College friend and then came to the Met Gala. He has never lived in Manhattan and seemingly never gone to the Met before so his reasoning for attending I suspect was not for love of opera, but I will get to that later. He had relocated to DC after working for Amherst College, his Alma Mater, as a fundraiser for the last several years. All of his back story was classic aggrieved white male, down to drunken abusive father from a family of import from some small town in Pennsylvania. But apparently that “name” opened the door to a private exclusive all male prep school in Boston and with that onto Amherst. At the time Amherst was also exclusively male and he was clear about how he hated men. He said that his school years were hateful times in his life, but in his Junior year he went on an exchange year to Paris where he met a fantastic (female) Teacher whom changed his life. In other words he got laid. But anyway, he returned to Amherst, graduated, married and then the details seemed lacking or I was already killing a bottle of wine and missed some of them. Seriously this was getting boring and odd. After a while I thought what the fuck is this, an audition? And for what? He divorced wive #1 after 20 years and remarried a woman for the next 17, had no children with her but it was an unhappy time (I guess like Prep School abusive and unkind and no sex? Yes folks I did ask had been hazed and sexually assaulted) He has now five Grandchildren and in fact joined his adult daughter on the flight to NYC. He is now dating a woman, whom he met ironically, or coincidentally at the Opera in DC. As well clearly the Met is not his scene. He continued to remind me how he hated his youth and the boys and men he met or knew growing up, although I guess not the former schoolmate he had lunch with earlier but he LOVED women. Dear God I get it dude I really do. You are like all the aggrieved white males who despite it all it was never enough, not right in some way and that you cannot get over the tragedies in that time in your life. He said he was in therapy and felt he had worked through his problems and was willing to continue to be whole. And he was now doing something new and was quite successful at it and was enjoying it. What “that” was unclear and his knowledge of DC was slight as I had just returned, he had never heard of the hotel I was at which I thought a red flag as again much of his backstory which was missing some details that too mean one of two things, liar or con artist. Now neither can be true, but he is only sightly older than me, but again the whole name dropping but not name dropping was odd. He hated school and yet there are many many famous alumnae of Amherst of acclaim and that could have been his peers. And if you hated the place and the associations why in the fuck would you go back there and work? I would run run far away. And I have so I should know.

As the evening wore on and I was signaling the Waiters for more wine stat! He commented on that I was a good listener and yes, yes I am while swilling free booze and trapped I can be a great sound board. I cannot say the same for him, he forgot his hearing aids! Uh what? Okay then. But there is a point that either you are being hit up for money as I was at the last fund raiser, as you are sort of a given “mark,” or was it for sex? Either P – pussy or pocketbook – is what truly defines my worth at my age and neither are open for business unless there is free booze and glamour and then the AmEx is out of pocket, the pussy still no. It was exhausting and amusing all at the same time and of course this explains why I do not make a habit of this kind of thing. There are better ways to get a tax write off, really there are. I doubt he could tell you one thing about me other than I was a former Teacher and with that I am sure he was sure he had no wealthy widow to flop shack with. And despite loving women, I was not a potential fill in the blank. . And finally after the clock hit 12 my Gucci sneakers turned to dust I left to catch the Subway with believe it or not other Gala attendees. Yes folks we do travel on public transit here all the time at any time. And with that I got home made tea and organized all my stuff, doing laundry and hitting the sack exhausted but satiated with the story and the music in my head.

Today sharing the story with my Concierge I was laughing at the regalia and my own worries about what to wear but that I would not be doing that again regardless. I am sure there are other non profits that may have equally interesting fund raisers in the future that await my attendance, or not. And within that convo I was talking about the financial climate, the odd global strength of the US dollar despite inflation and how a British woman whom I also met at the Gala had commented on the rise of the homeless both here and in London and that it was distressing as she felt uncomfortable. Funny it is always women and when you come into a city of money that this issue stands out more than many. This is nothing compared I think to the West Coast or again I have become immune to it. She works for the company that live films and streams the Operas for theater and comes to this annually and noticed that this year it seems worse. I commented that I would love to go to London given that the Pound is dropping but with that the costs they easily offset the exchange rate, and regardless it is a lose-lose when you hear about families not being able to afford energy and food. It reminded me of my honeymoon in West Indies, also not good. And with that the woman who also works in the building or has a friend here was listening to my monologue, decided to comment that I was wrong about well all of it. She informed me that she follows the foreign market and that the Pound and the Euro are worth more and that costs in London are less than here and went on and on with shit that was so incorrect I knew it was time for a topic shift. I offered her my copy of the Times and WSJ to enable her to read my source and in which to further understand what I believe was happening in the global markets, knowing full well that she was not reading them, as this is not an educated woman. And I know this how? As when she heard me talking about Medea she thought it was a Tyler Perry show made into the Opera. Yes folks we gots some problems here. I am a what? A good listener and former Teacher and I seem to play those roles as well as any seasoned player can. But I am exhausted of it and I would just love to actually have a convo with someone who fucking reads! And with that many of the people I meet here have never set foot in Manhattan, never heard of the Opera, know nothing of that type of art form and frankly it is tragic, grim and pathetic. In fact when explaining that opera is often remade into pop culture I pointed out that Rent was based on La Boheme. The next question, “Did it have a Gay theme too?” Okay. But again some of my table mates who spent some serious cash were not exactly Rhodes Scholar’s either. As the song goes, Money can’t buy you class but it can’t buy you brains despite having an Ivy League credential I guess.

Oh well I am off to write an Opera of my own. It is called January 6th and told via the spirit of Ashli Babbit where it is King Lear meats Macbeth and all hell breaks lose and ends in flames much like Medea.

This was the individual sitting just two row ahead.

Missing his partner as she was equally adorned

He was one of several men looking beyond stunning

One of the Versace Crowd

Christine Baranski (who I wished I saw)

This is in the tent and with that she looks way unhappier than was .. bad table?

The Gouging of America

Inflation is running rampant and with this prices from gas, food and of course rent is denting may pocketbooks of those who work in the real world. These are the folks like me who actually go into a place of business, mine a school, and must commute, stay on the property, go home and function as the primary caregiver/provider. This means cooking, buying food for said cooking, doing laundry (and for many that means a laundromat) and of course if they drive or use public transport that both have risks from the rising cost of gas,parking to of course increased violence be it road rage or transit rage that lends to added stress going to and from the workplace. The coddled class have felt NONE OF THIS.

I am amazed at the price of food as I live alone and I have yet to leave a store without the price of two bags hitting just under $100 bucks. I do buy almost exclusively organic and am fussy about food. I rarely order take out and never eat out so I am responsible for my menu and even I look at the endless leftovers and find myself tossing some waste knowing that it was not necessary. I do often give those to my doorman but again that is not always feasible as I have to buy disposable products in which to do so and provide them with the food, so this too adds costs and still more waste frankly. But the joke is even that bag of chips or other non-essential food may not be costing more but the size proportion is less. In some ways that I appreciate. And I have begun on average to make my own juice but I stop at bread as that is not something I can do at all. So much for those sourdough starters that everyone was talking about. And yes I drink and I take turns on costs for wine and some weeks I do go up a shelf and other times not so much. But again, I live alone, solely care only for myself and that does make it easier.

Expect the basic food group – eggs to go up even higher. The bird flu has led to some rather unorthodox attempts at quelling the disease and with that added to the unemployment roster. Remember this is supposedly a employees market, yeah right you bet. I can trade one shitty job for a less shitty one, still shitty but less so. This great resignation myth is up there next to the one of meritocracy. But even the supposed wage gains at said jobs are being blamed for inflation costs. With that too one can go really? Paul Krugman discusses the issues surrounding this subject in his column in the Times, Inflation, Interest and the Housing Paradox

In that he points out the role of the Fed and how banks respond which in turn lead to what we have now with regards to housing costs: Since about 2014, the cost of shelter, as estimated by the Bureau of Labor Statistics, has been rising considerably faster than the overall cost of living. I’m not talking about house prices; I’m talking about rental rates for apartments and “owner’s equivalent rent,” the bureau’s estimate of what houses would rent for. (Notes a graph) What’s going on here? The answer is that after the housing bubble and bust of the 2000s, housing construction plunged and never fully recovered.

And with another column he discusses the long term prediction or fear with regards to inflation and notes this:

But inflation, which used to be mainly confined to a few sectors strongly affected by the pandemic, has broadened. So I find myself in reluctant agreement with economists asserting that the U.S. economy is overheated — that overall demand exceeds productive capacity and that the two need to be brought in line.

The good news is that there’s essentially no evidence that inflation has become entrenched — that we’re in the situation we were in circa 1980, when inflation persisted simply because everyone expected it to persist. Every measure I can find shows that people expect high inflation for the next year but much lower inflation over the medium term, indicating that Americans still view low inflation as the norm.

So we go into the next year as elections begin and a tide will turn the Congress I have to ask what is the messaging here. We have never had a consistent nor actual reliable messenger for the last six years and that is not changing. Let’s just look at Covid and the new Covid team of the White House and the former Team. Well Dr. Fauci who has been here for six years, declaring the pandemic over or not, whatever he says that rolls and roils the left and right into a tizzy. I have again said this before and again the man is a fucking bureaucrat not an actual Doctor, he just plays one for the TV. He has never used his medical license or training for anything but research but he knows how to play one effectively. Shame Dr. Birx did not follow his lead.

That said the growth of the economy pushed by record stimulus packages, the rise of wages in the coddled class (the working class did as well but they reduced debt more than purchased cars, houses and stuff) enabled a rather steep growth in our overall GDP, especially in comparison to similar economies. And this again is going up one hill and down another. So one is expecting the concept if not the perfect storm aka plan if the GOP return to the House and Senate as they will do their best to avoid anything but thinking massive tax cuts is the way to avoid said recession. And with that we have seen some downturns as Covid is still here, the protections of costs and other measures, such as eviction relief and Health care costs rising thanks to less stimulus to the ACA, will undoubtedly affect growth. And with that already the GDP has declined. What this means in the long term is hard to know. But let us see what pans out in the next 10 months.

This is not about Covid although the pandemic, now the rising war in the Ukraine are two reasons for why we have major economic issues still being played out, as despite it all, the reality is that Corporate America is doing just fine. The coddled class is still playing at home and the reality is that many are bending to the will of that group, while the working class are doing their best to learn how to organize and collectively bargain in the same ways that their elders did 50 years ago. And with that brought more equality and economic gains than any expensive overpriced degree ever did as the campus class is now seeing a safe space means a better working place. They are doing more than any Politician ever did as laws are always made, broken and replaced. Remember how Gay Rights seemed sacrosanct? Yeah me neither.

So who is doing well? The Corporations are and they are people my friend. The same men and some women who are demanding then retracting or tracking their workers, and in turn firing the cleaning staff while cleaning up their accounts. Money, money and more money.

Revealed: top US corporations raising prices on Americans even as profits surge

A Guardian analysis uncovers how companies enriched themselves and their investors while boasting about jacking up prices

by Tom Perkins The Guardian

As inflation shot to a new peak in March, cost increases exacted a deep toll on the economy, eating into most Americans’ wages and further imperiling the financially vulnerable. But for many of the US’s largest companies and their shareholders it has been a very different story.

One widely accepted narrative holds that companies and consumers are sharing in inflationary pain, but a Guardian analysis of top corporations’ financials and earnings calls reveals most are enjoying profit increases even as they pass on costs to customers, many of whom are struggling to afford gas, food, clothing, housing and other basics.

The analysis of Securities and Exchange Commission filings for 100 US corporations found net profits up by a median of 49%, and in one case by as much as 111,000%. Those increases came as companies saddled customers with higher prices and all but ten executed massive stock buyback programs or bumped dividends to enrich investors.

In earnings calls, executives detailed how even as demand and profits rose post-vaccine, they passed on most or all inflationary costs to customers via price increases, and some took the opportunity to add more on top. Margins – the share of sales converted into profits – also improved for the majority of the companies analyzed by the Guardian.

Economists who reviewed the data say it’s more evidence of a clear reality: Consumers are taking a financial hit as companies and shareholders profit or are largely shielded.

“It’s obvious that corporations are trying to pass on any form of short-term pain they might be feeling … and that’s serving the top, wealthiest class instead of those in need of fair wages or products that are affordable,” said Krista Brown, a policy analyst with the American Economic Liberties Project

Media framing likely influences public perception. News reports of Hershey’s multiple price hikes over the last year read like so many dire reports on inflation’s pervasive toll. The company, which owns popular brands like Reese’s, KitKat and Skinny Pop, has been cast as the “latest victim of ever-increasing inflation”.

But a closer look at the company’s financials suggests a vastly different reality. Hershey’s net profits spiked 62% between the fourth quarters in 2019 and 2021, its operating margin widened, and it recently rewarded shareholders with $200m in stock buybacks

Still, customers will pay even more for candy bars in 2022 as Hershey aims for even higher profits: “Pricing will be an important lever for us this year and is expected to drive most of our growth,” CEO Michele Buck told investors.

Similarly, a Kroger executive told investors in June, “a little bit of inflation is always good for our business”, while Hostess’s CEO in March said rising prices across the economy “helps” it profit.

The pandemic, war, supply chain bottlenecks and pricing decisions made in corporate suites have created a “smokescreen”, said Lindsay Owens, executive director of the Groundwork Collaborative, which tracks companies’ profits. That obscures questionable price increases, she added, and allows businesses to be portrayed as “victims”.

“That gray, nebulous area is fertile ground for companies right now, and you hear about it in their earnings calls,” Owens said. “Inflation itself is the opportunity.”

Profits or profiteering?

The Guardian’s findings are in line with recent US commerce department data that shows corporate profit margins rose 35% during the last year and are at their highest level since 1950. Inflation, meanwhile, rose to 8.5% year over year in March.

The Guardian’s analysis is the first to take a granular look at a cross-section of companies across a range of industries. It compared the most recent quarter’s profits to the same quarter two years prior, pre-pandemic. Price increases were obtained by checking earnings reports, though those often lacked specifics.

The data is not intended to be definitive, but does show how a wide sample of companies have raised prices even as profits jumped. In earnings call after earnings call, executives made no secret of their strategies.

• As gas prices soared, Chevron’s 240% profit spike was part of “the best two quarters the company has ever seen”, prompting a dividend increase and assurances it would keep production low to maintain high prices.
• Steel Dynamics profits increased 809%. The company was “not materially affected by inflation” as higher prices “exceeded” increased supply chain costs.
• Fertilizer giant Nutrien’s profits shot up by about $1.2bn on “higher selling prices [that] more than offset higher raw material costs and lower sales volume”.
• Nike’s 53% profit increase driven by higher prices was only “partially offset” by supply chain and inflationary cost increases.
• Keurig-Dr Pepper’s “significant pricing actions” and productivity outpaced inflationary costs, leading to an 83% profit jump.

The analysis found commodity companies trading in oil, timber, rubber, meat, wheat, steel and mining recorded the highest profit increases, while restaurants and retailers saw comparatively lower improvements, or losses. Commodity price spikes reverberate down the supply chain, eventually hitting consumers, noted Martin Schmalz, an Oxford University economist.

The Guardian’s data, he added, objectively shows a massive “transfer of wealth” from consumers, who pay higher prices, to shareholders and investment firms that reap the benefits.

The potential consequences are enormous and global. Inflation may already have sealed Democrats’ midterm fate, and in France, Marie Le Pen, a far-right candidate from a Holocaust-denying party, gained on her liberal opponent as she positioned herself as the “pricing power” candidate taking on the “oligarchy” and “elitism”.

But even as profits skyrocket, many have dismissed the idea they play a meaningful role in inflation, including Larry Summers, a former Obama adviser with clout in the Biden White House. He previously called profiteering claims “business bashing” that are “terrible economics”.

A Hershey spokesperson stressed that its growth was driven in part by volume, and it would be re-investing much of its profits to meet growing demand: “These investments are where we are making the biggest use of cash,” he said.

Financial observers have varying takes on whether companies are “profiteering” or “price gouging”, or simply profiting. George Pearkes, an analyst at Bespoke Investment, pointed to Caterpillar, which recorded a 958% profit increase driven by volume growth and price realization between 2019 and 2021’s fourth quarters. Eliminating price increases may have dropped the company’s 2021 quarter four operating profits slightly below the $1.3bn it made in 2020.

“This isn’t price gouging … and it shows pretty concretely that there’s a lot of nuance here,” Pearkes said, adding profiteering is “not the primary driver of inflation, nor the primary driver of corporate profits”. However, he added that it’s reasonable to question whether Caterpillar should have passed on its cost increases.

The company also spent $5bn on buybacks last year, and $1.3bn for a quarter of profits is still high, Brown noted, especially in the context of inflation eating into workers’ wage gains.

“Companies have access to massive capital,” she said. “They could have one or two years that are more painful – not even more painful, just less profitable for their investors, and they’re choosing not to.”

‘It’s a fix’

One industry that neatly illustrates how corporations have used the current imbalance of supply and demand to increase their profits is housing.

In recent months, the white-hot market for newly built houses shut out many Americans as average sale prices shot above $500,000. The popular explanation: inflation, supply chain squeezes and building material costs.

But another less publicized factor contributed. Two of the nation’s largest builders, PulteGroup and Lennar, intentionally kept home starts low and took other steps seemingly designed to maintain high prices by restricting supply.

“​​We could sell another 1,000 homes in the quarter if we wanted to without too much effort. It just doesn’t make sense to do that,” Lennar co-CEO Jon Jaffe told investors in an earnings call. Lennar’s profits are up 78%, while PulteGroup’s jumped 97%. Lennar didn’t respond to a request for comment.

A step up the supply chain, wood producer Boise Cascade saw profits spike more than 1,100%, which it largely attributed to “unprecedented” pricing in 2021. Executives boasted that improved margins were only “offset partially” by inflationary and supply chain costs.

And at Home Depot and Lowe’s, where profits are up 38% and by about $2bn, respectively, volume and pricing drove sales as customers paid four times more for lumber.

Observers note a common thread along the supply chain: consolidation. By some estimates, Home Depot and Lowe’s control about one-third of the home improvement market, and hold even more of consumer lumber. Lennar and PulteGroup control about 11% of the home building market, though that figure is probably much higher in many metro regions, and Boise Cascade controls about one-third of the plywood market, according to a Forest Economic Advisors analysis.

“Those who have market power can raise prices above what’s considered fair market value,” Brown said. “We’re at a point in our market concentrations that we haven’t seen ever before.”

The influence of consolidation is pervasive. A Procter & Gamble executive noted to investors it and Kimberly Clark benefit from controlling 70% of the diaper market. It’s what Owens called a “concentration of necessities”. Reports say customers have “shrugged off” diaper cost increases, but antitrust advocates note very limited alternatives exist for many consumers. After multiple price increases, Procter & Gamble’s profits are up and Kimberly Clark’s are down, though the latter expects to “cover the majority of inflation with pricing” in 2022.

Similarly, Hershey’s 30 companies control at least 46% of the candy market. Prices on some of its products are probably up by double digits while the CPI index shows candy is up 7.6%.

Concentration is particularly pronounced among commodity companies, a problem highlighted in the grain market. CPI data shows bread and cereal prices increased by 30% and 7% between 2019 and 2021’s fourth quarters, while wheat skyrocketed to an all-time high in March as war largely eliminated Ukrainian and Russian crops.

Meanwhile, four large grain producers control about 90% of the market. Among them are Archer Daniels Midland, whose profits jumped 55%, and Bunge, whose profits swung by about $280m. Three companies control 73% of the cereal market.

That level of concentration breeds higher prices, said Alex Turnbull, a commodities analyst.

“When you go from 15 to 10 companies, not much changes,” he said. “When you go from 10 to six, a lot changes. But when you go from six to four – it’s a fix.”

Depending on the material or good, some commodity prices are set by exchanges, which Pearkes noted largely eliminates some companies’ pricing power. But commodity consolidation can open the door to another form of pricing power: boosting prices by keeping supply low.

“Price is set by supply and demand at some metals exchange, but what is the supply? That is what the companies determine, no?” Schmalz asked.

Just as PulteGroup kept housing starts down, oil companies have kept production low while gas topped $7 a gallon in some regions. In earnings calls across the industry, oil executives like Diamondback Energy CEO Travis Stice have promised to keep production flat in the years ahead, “putting returns and, therefore, shareholders first”.

“No one wants to see that shareholder return program put at risk with volume growth,” Stice said.

Some companies are enacting price increases in a less direct manner: by eliminating lower-cost products. The CEO of Kohl’s said in a previous interview the store was shifting its merchandise toward higher-end brands like PVH-owned Tommy Hilfiger, where profits are up 183%, because they’re more profitable for Kohl’s.

Similarly, General Motors profits jumped 49% between the full years in 2019 and 2021 despite selling about a million fewer vehicles. The company said it focused on moving more expensive trucks and SUVs than in previous years, but it also raised prices – a Silverado can now cost over $5,000 more than it did in 2019. That includes two rounds of March price increases just weeks after GM announced record profits and margins.

Such strategies further squeeze lower income consumers, said University of Massachusetts Amherst economist Isabella Weber.

“That’s a general trend that can enhance price increases quite dramatically, especially with cars and groceries,” she said.

‘Sick and tired of being ripped off’

Not everyone is raising prices. Arizona Iced Tea owner Don Vultaggio became a populist hero in April when he declared he’d rather take a hit than push prices above 99 cents: “I don’t want to do what the bread guys and the gas guys and everybody else is doing,” Vultaggio told the Los Angeles Times.

But Arizona is a privately owned company that doesn’t face shareholders’ wrath. When Target and Walmart declined to pass all inflationary costs on to customers ahead of the holiday season, an investor revolt ensued, and their shares temporarily plummeted.

“Shareholders are not interested in seeing anyone be cautious with price increases, and in some cases they’re saying ‘let’s throttle supply, let’s see how far we can take this’,” Owens said.

The surge in pandemic profits has not gone unnoticed. A spate of Senate and House bills aim to rein in excessive profits, while Biden proposals and executive actions target stock buybacks and consolidation. Meanwhile, many consumer advocates and economists argue that enforcing antitrust laws already on the book, or strengthening them, could help reduce companies’ pricing power. Others have argued for the implementation of very targeted price controls on essential items, like bread.

In March, Senator Bernie Sanders began a push to bring back a windfall profit tax last used after the second world war, while Senator Elizabeth Warren introduced similar legislation that focused on oil companies’ profits.

“The American people are sick and tired of the unprecedented corporate greed that exists all over this country. They are sick and tired of being ripped off by corporations making record-breaking profits while working families are forced to pay outrageously high prices for gas, rent, food, and prescription drugs,” said Sanders.

Sanders may well be right, but if “sick and tired” Americans vote against the Biden administration in November, his chances of pushing for change will fall.

Divided We Fall

The Virus does not know class, race, gender, age, ethnicity or any extraneous factors that make you special.  It does however give a clear distinction when access and availability to escape from quarantine, curfew, large mass populations and potential zones of infection.   Living in a small apartment with multiple family members makes it tight in the best of circumstances in the worst, impossible. There is where the rich have the distinction to live in larger spaces, have second even third homes to escape to and of course private planes and other modes of transportation that lessen potential infected contacts.  But that is a small circle in which to travel and we have seen some famous and others who run in that crowd survive and others not as again the virus takes no prisoners.

This is one example of how the rich are distinctly different and this is another how the poor try to stay alive when all the rugs, nets and floors beneath them have fallen and the roof over their head is next.   And of course the shops and stores where the elite greet and meet and the aspirant class desire to own have literally shuttered their stores in fear of the great unrest which will occur but I am not sure we are storming the gates of Versailles and taking the Vuitton.

When I read this story I understood it in ways that few do.  I live alone, however, have no extended family and am currently without health insurance due to the move.  I could have purchased insurance without the marketplace but right at the same time the outbreak began and I felt given my age I would likely be refused and at this point I thought if I survived something this serious what then?  Throw myself under the bus as I would be broke and have no job or even prospects given my age and with the 4 plus million unemployed who is hiring me?. When you have nothing and no one you simply live in the moment.  And perhaps that is why I am vested in being the biggest bitch ever and taking that vow of silence as a means of coping and moving forward until I can come to terms with what this was and how to rationalize this.  I cannot change others behaviors but I can change my response and behavior and so I shall.  In the interim I will still take long walks just stay well away now or even later on. Thanks

No Longer Just a Walk in the Park

The New York Times
By Jodi Kantor
March 27, 2020

I’m 77 years old and I want/need to walk. The two buildings in my complex have a basketball court between them. I have previously taken the freight elevator down 36 stories at 5:30 a.m., meeting no one but armed anyway with mask, gloves, wipes and hand sanitizer. I walked for 35 minutes and went back upstairs, again meeting nobody. Should I force myself to continue? I am simply afraid to go outside.

Ms. Motola’s world has mostly shrunk to one room. She lives by herself in a studio apartment high above Manhattan, with a piano, books and a narrowing set of routines. Her longtime habit of swimming laps is on pause. So are her dates with her children and grandchildren.

“The walking was truly helping me keep it together,” she said on the telephone. But she stopped a week ago and hasn’t left her building since. “As this ramped up, I kept weighing anything and everything I was thinking about doing outside, and saying: ‘Is it worth getting sick for? Is it worth dying for?’”

She’s not the only one asking. The outdoors is now contested ground. Parks and trails from Los Angeles to the Great Smokies are being closed. (Too many people were socially distancing in the same places, and therefore not at all.) Authorities are patrolling others, warning people to disperse. This week, India’s prime minister told 1.3 billion people not to set foot outside their homes. “Stay Home Save Lives” has become a rallying cry and a pressure point on social media.

“If you’re still not sure about an activity, skip it,” said Kate Brown, the governor of Oregon, one of 22 states and counting where residents have been told to keep to their residences.

While some continue to congregate, many others are now worried about venturing outside at all. “Can we sit on an open lawn with a family member?” a reader from India wrote to ask.

The unpleasant truth, especially for city dwellers, is that every time you step outdoors, your risk of infection rises. Last week, scientists established that coronavirus droplets could linger in the air for a half-hour, raising new concerns about what is safe. Then there’s every surface you encounter on your way outside and back: doorknobs, keys, elevator buttons, gates, the carton of eggs you pick up at the deli that’s still open.

“The safest way to prevent the spread of this virus is for you to stay at home,” said Dr. Craig Spencer, a global emergency medicine specialist at Columbia. “This virus won’t infect you if it never meets you.”

But when we posed Ms. Motola’s dilemma to Dr. Spencer and other public health experts, along with scientists who study the virus’s behavior in air, each one recommended that she resume her dawn walks.

“We’re all struggling with a greater degree of ambient risk than we’re used to,” said Dr. Tim Lahey, an infectious disease specialist and ethicist at the University of Vermont. Each day is an exercise in trying to lower risk: avoid this, scrub that.

Public health practice is as much about reducing risk, as eliminating it — which is often impossible. The AIDS crisis was not stemmed by persuading people to quit sex, Dr. Lahey said. Instead, people adopted tolerable rules like choosing partners carefully and wearing condoms. The term “safer sex” worked because it seemed doable, he added.

The safer-sex equivalent of an outdoor walk, most medical authorities say, is one that involves six feet of distance from others. (Linsey Marr, an engineering professor at Virginia Tech who studies how particles move through air, says she gives it 10 feet just to be cautious.) Governments are beginning to put in place rules to encourage people to spread out. This week, Gov. Andrew M. Cuomo announced a pilot program in New York to close some streets to traffic in order to give pedestrians more space. As of Tuesday, the French must follow new restrictions on outdoor exercise: It can be done alone, for up to an hour a day, within a one-kilometer radius of home. Walkers and runners must carry permission slips that can be checked by authorities.

If the distancing rules are too strict, prohibiting excursions entirely, people could give up, said Dr. Carlos Del Rio, a public health and AIDS specialist at Emory University. “I want to be sure that people don’t get frustrated and say, ‘We won’t be able to defeat this,’ because we can,” he said.

“Our mental health is going to be so important,” added Dr. Spencer, who was treated for Ebola in 2014 and endured 19 days of near-total isolation. “This is only going to get worse.”

“Telling people to stay inside works right now, but in two or three weeks, it’s going to be a tough message to hold up,” he said.

Walks and runs are signs of life to which even doctors and scientists on the front lines are clinging. Amandine Gamble, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of California, Los Angeles, is a co-author of that study that raised alarm last week about how the virus lingers in the air. She walks near her home in Santa Monica every day. She finds complete adherence to the six-foot rule challenging, she said, and if someone crosses her path, she does not panic.

Dr. Spencer spends his days treating Covid-19 patients at Columbia. When he comes home, he laces up his sneakers and goes jogging, sometimes late at night.

“It’s one of the only ways I can decompress and disconnect completely from coronavirus,” he said.

We called Ms. Motola to share what the experts had advised. She wasn’t convinced.

“I do have to sit and calculate the risk,” she said. “As soon as I contemplate putting on my sneakers, my anxiety goes right up.”

“One of these mornings I will be brave enough,” she said. “I have to be brave.”

Poor Me

The state of America is that of a decline not an incline when it comes to the wages and state of the working man.

Another article or ten with regards to those who are working for wages that are clearly not enough and those who are not working enough.

There are many “excuses” “explanations” “justifications” and of course blame making, finger pointing and other gestures that somehow explain that the poor are deserving of that status.

But whoops on that note, comes this little revelatory article on a study that income distribution among the wealthy is disparate as well.

Well there are only so many Bentley’s that a dealer can sell to 1% of the population. Steve Cohen might be in the market to rid himself of a few.

This article discusses the issues surrounding the very rich and their own distribution issues.  Keeping up with the Joneses’ isn’t what it used to be.

And on the heels of that comes another shocking bit of info!  That the top institutions of learning are turning away more applicants that accepting.  What better way to ensure that the rich and their progeny stay as such.  Can’t have interlopers trying to climb up this very narrow ladder.

Of course much of this is vested in that bullshit metric measure put out by U.S. World News reports that some colleges are better than others, causing many to go into debt and desperation to get access to ostensibly reading the same materials that you could read down the road from your home.  But somehow having an adjunct Professor who is hustling between gigs doing the heavy lifting while the “research” Professor sits in his tenured office secure in his job means that a one name school is better than one with that “university” before it.

Well that might have also been true as it appears that most Universities spend more on Athletics than education.  Priorities the lower tier rich need some perk too.

At least you can go a great game while not getting the education you deserve or need!  And maybe network and get a job – cleaning the Bentley.

Led by Stanford’s 5%, Top Colleges’ Acceptance Rates Hit New Low

 RICHARD PÉREZ-PEÑA
APRIL 8, 2014

 Enrollment at American colleges is sliding, but competition for spots at top universities is more cutthroat and anxiety-inducing than ever. In the just-completed admissions season, Stanford University accepted only 5 percent of applicants, a new low among the most prestigious schools, with the odds nearly as bad at its elite rivals.

Deluged by more applications than ever, the most selective colleges are, inevitably, rejecting a vast majority, including legions of students they once would have accepted. Admissions directors at these institutions say that most of the students they turn down are such strong candidates that many are indistinguishable from those who get in.

Isaac Madrid applied to 11 colleges, a scattershot approach that he said is fairly typical at his private high school, Bellarmine College Preparatory in San Jose, Calif. Students there are all too aware of the long odds against getting into any particular elite university. “It was a crazy amount of work and stress doing all those essays by the deadline and keeping up my schoolwork, and waiting on the responses, and we had more than $800 in application fees,” he said.

Mr. Madrid, 18, got a taste of how random the results can seem. He was among the 95 percent turned away by Stanford, but he got into Yale, which he plans to attend, and he admitted having no real insight into the reasons for either decision.

Bruce Poch, a former admissions dean at Pomona College in Claremont, Calif., said he saw “the opposite of a virtuous cycle at work” in admissions. “Kids see that the admit rates are brutal and dropping, and it looks more like a crapshoot,” he said. “So they send more apps, which forces the colleges to lower their admit rates, which spurs the kids next year to send even more apps.”

For most of the past six decades, overall enrollment boomed, while the number of seats at elite colleges and universities grew much more slowly, making them steadily more selective. Enrollment peaked in 2011, and it has dropped a bit each year since then, prompting speculation that entry to competitive colleges would become marginally easier. Instead, counselors and admissions officers say, the pool of high-achieving applicants continues to grow, fed partly by a rising number from overseas.

At the same time, students send more applications than they once did, abetted by the electronic forms that have become nearly universal, and uniform applications that can make adding one more college to the list just a matter of a mouse click. Seven years ago, 315 colleges and universities accepted the most widely used form, the Common Application; this year, 517 did.

Students applying to seven or more colleges made up just 9 percent of the applicant pool in 1990, but accounted for 29 percent in 2011, according to surveys by the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and counselors and admissions officers say they think the figure has gone higher still. While people have lavished attention on a Long Island teenager who was accepted by all eight Ivy League colleges, admissions professionals say it is remarkable that anyone would apply to all eight.

Stanford received 42,167 applications for the class of 2018 and sent 2,138 acceptance notices, for a first-year class that, ultimately, will number about 1,700.

The University of California, Los Angeles, the national leader in applications, had more than 86,000 requests — twice as many as in 2005 — for space in a first-year class of about 6,000, and it also received 19,000 applications to transfer from other colleges and universities. This year, for the first time, the admission rate for first-year applicants at U.C.L.A. and the University of California, Berkeley, could drop below 20 percent.

“For most kids, this really used to be a regional process, but they have access to so much information online now, so every school seems local,” said Richard H. Shaw, the dean of undergraduate admission at Stanford. Admissions directors at several top Eastern colleges agreed, saying that they now received more applications from California than any other state, which would have been unthinkable a few years ago.

Some of them also pointed to colleges’ increasingly aggressive outreach to prospective students, with mailings, emails and advertising — some of it well intentioned, and some of it more cynical.

“One of the ways that colleges are measured is by the number of applicants and their admit rate, and some colleges do things simply to increase their applicant pool and manipulate those numbers,” said Christoph Guttentag, the dean of undergraduate admission at Duke.

A generation ago, it was rare for even highly competitive colleges to offer places to fewer than 20 percent of their applicants. In 2003, Harvard and Princeton drew exclamations of dismay (from prospective applicants), envy (from other colleges) and satisfaction (from those they accepted) when they became the first top universities to have their admission rates dip below 10 percent. Since then, at least a dozen have gone below that threshold.

This was the second year in a row that Stanford had the worst odds of admission among top colleges, a title that in previous years was usually claimed by Harvard. This year, by the April 1 deadline for most colleges to send admission notices, Harvard and Yale had accepted about 6 percent of applicants, Columbia and Princeton about 7 percent, and the Massachusetts Institute of Technology and the University of Chicago about 8 percent. (Some rates will increase by a few tenths of a percentage point as colleges accept small numbers of applicants from waiting lists.)

Several universities, including Stanford, Duke, Northwestern, Cornell and the University of Pennsylvania, had admission rates this year that were less than half of those from a decade ago. The University of Chicago’s rate plummeted to a little over 8 percent, from more than 40 percent.

The most competitive small colleges draw comparably accomplished applicants, but far fewer of them relative to their size, so their admission rates are higher. Even so, the acceptance rates at Pomona, Amherst, Harvey Mudd, Bowdoin, Claremont McKenna, Swarthmore, Middlebury, Williams and others were between 10 and 20 percent this year.

Mr. Shaw, the Stanford dean, said he could not predict where the rates would bottom out — in fact, he never expected them to go as low as they have.

“Honestly,” he said, “I’m sort of in shoc

Noted by Absence

It is the time of the year when the rich/famous/powerful (really no separation needed they are one in the same and emphasis on the number one) have their annual meet/greet in Davos. I cannot decide if this 21st Century Bohemian Grove is an orgy, which the Mayor London seems to imply, or just a circle jerk, which may be the same thing.

Each year there are very “symposiums” centered around some vaguely pretentious theme that is of the moment. This year it is income inequality, how so 4 years ago. Not that any Occupy Wall Streeters will be invited or even there protesting, as the locale makes that whole WTO Battle in Seattle seem distant if not actually foreign.

The toady to the rich and famous, Andrew Ross Sorkin, who might rival Chrystia Freeland, as the most obsequious of the ass kissers is actually saying it is not the RSVP’s that are of note but those who choose not to attend, not now or in fact ever. And sure enough it is quite the cognoscenti of the rich and infamous who don’t need nor want to go. Well why when there are so many other pretentious and closer meetings, Sun Valley, Aspen or for the faux boho crowd there is always a TED talk or two to gleefully prove how you can get down with the poors as they entertain you.. whoops I mean inform you.

I am relieved that in fact the curtain is being pulled back on this OZ, the need to pretend this anything more than a networking game with skiing is well like saying that there is a lot of business at the varying lobbying events that our US Congress attends in between doing absolutely nothing for the betterment of the country. This article yesterday describes the hard life of having to ski domestic but it sounds good as it is free and who turns down free lift tickets or a lunch? Certainly not these Senators. Highly amusing.

I plan on running for the local seat of Adam Kline of my district and my campaign promise is that I will absolutely do nothing but go on a free trip and then quit after so as to not interfere with the business of catering to lobbyists and alienating my colleagues while writing useless but pretentious legislation that is underfunded and over enforced. That is a step up from Mr. Kline clearly.

Nice work if you can get it. Wait there is work involved?

DealBook Column January 20, 2014,
Notable in Their Absence From Davos
By ANDREW ROSS SORKIN

The annual parade of boldface names at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, is always striking. This year’s attendees at the meeting, which begins Wednesday, will include Japan’s prime minister, Shinzo Abe; the billionaire Bill Gates; JPMorgan Chase’s chief executive, Jamie Dimon; and the movie star-philanthropist Matt Damon.

But just as notable are the luminaries who consistently avoid Davos, despite repeated invitations.

The billionaire Warren E. Buffett has never attended. Neither has Timothy D. Cook, chief executive of Apple, the world’s largest company by market value. (His predecessor, Steve Jobs, never went, either.) The founders of Google, Larry Page and Sergey Brin, stopped going a couple of years ago, as did Mark Zuckerberg, Facebook’s chairman. Both companies do send other executives, though.

The leaders of General Electric and IBM, Jeffrey R. Immelt and Virginia M. Rometty, are not attendees either. “I don’t go to Davos and places like that,” Mr. Immelt once said dismissively.

The World Economic Forum, for which the cost of membership and a ticket to the annual meeting is more than $70,000, is both admired and derided as a velvet-rope club for the 1 percent of the 1 percent. The mayor of London, Boris Johnson, once attended Davos only to dismiss it as “a constellation of egos involved in massive mutual orgies of adulation.”

Whatever their reasons for staying away, the leaders of some of the largest and most transformative companies are demonstrating, with their absence, the difficulty of convening a global conversation with all the main stakeholders. Given that one of the themes this year is how to address economic inequality, it would be helpful to have the world’s largest employers participate in that discussion, not to mention a sampling of rank-and-file workers, who never receive an invitation.

Over the last few weeks, I called more than a dozen A-list names (or their handlers) who either regularly go to Davos or who make a point of staying away. I was intrigued by the reasons some people turn down an invitation coveted by so many others.

Those who attend said most frequently that they did so less for the high-minded panel discussions and more for the sheer efficiency of meeting with so many peers, clients, regulators and politicians at one time. “It would take me an entire year, and I don’t know how many flights, to see the number of people I can in three days at Davos,” one top bank chief executive told me, speaking on the condition of anonymity because Davos attendance can be a polarizing issue.

In the avoider camp is Mohamed A. El-Erian, the chief of Pimco, one of the largest bond investors in the world, and someone who given his background would seem like the perfect Davos man — an Egyptian-raised, Oxford-educated global investor. He has rejected repeated invitations to Davos, skeptical of the value of speed-dating with so many clients in the Alps.

“For me, it has been and remains an issue of efficient time management,” he told me in an email. “Our general preference is for more focused and less rushed meetings.” Mr. El-Erian is so anti-Davos he once wrote an article for a magazine distributed at the forum called “Why I Won’t Go to Davos.”

“Over the years, and in the context of an increasingly unsettled and uncertain world,” Mr. El-Erian wrote, “Davos has not had much impact.”

Mr. El-Erian’s rival, Laurence D. Fink, the chairman of BlackRock, which manages more than $4 trillion, had been a skeptic, too — until this year. With such a large global business, he has become almost a head of state himself or, more precisely, as important as the head of a central bank, judging by the panel he is speaking on. Mr. Fink is the only business executive on an economic panel that includes Mario Draghi, president of the European Central Bank; Mark Carney, governor of the Bank of England; Haruhiko Kuroda, governor of the Bank of Japan; Wolfgang Schäuble, the German finance minister; and Christine Lagarde, managing director of the International Monetary Fund.

Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, senior associate dean of the Yale School of Management, who counts many Davos attendees as former students of his executive management program, said that many C.E.O.’s attended every couple of years to “meet new heads of state.” But he said many executives “complain that significant decision-makers are too diluted in number by the tidal waves of aspiring consultants and other wannabes.” (Mr. Sonnenfeld does not attend.)

Others don’t go simply for practical reasons. “It’s inconvenient to get to. There’s a lot of friction. It’s cold. There are a lot of people there. The logistics of just going down the street can be very daunting,” John Kao, chairman of the Institute for Large Scale Innovation and a longtime attendee, told Bloomberg News last year.

To be sure, this year’s event will not lack for big names. Prime Minister David Cameron of Britain will be there, as will President Enrique Peña Nieto of Mexico. So will Jacob J. Lew, the United States Treasury secretary.

The progress they make — or try to make — may be praiseworthy. But at a time when globalization has so transformed business and economics, and at an event that bills itself as drawing the top stakeholders, it easy to understand why it is so difficult to make progress on the big issues when so many key people are not in the room.

The New Serrata

No its not a new car by Ferrari, its a term describing the Italian 1% of the 14th Century. As I wrote in Ring Around the Collar, the United States has no elected individuals who actually speak for the 99%, the 47%, pick a percentage you identify with and realize that unless you are a 1%’er you are not represented in Congress.

I was shocked and frankly still am that a Senator from my State would even deign to involve herself with my issues of late. I still am suspect if they actually care about the outcome, the reasoning or even who I am, which again supports the idea that I am pretty comfortable as a 0%er. But I have also been a 1% and that fall from the curb to the gutter is steep, 127 hours chasm steep.

As I sit here in my gutter still in the finery and the last vestiges of what it once meant to live among the 1%, I have also never forgotten the tree roots from which I came and they run steep into the ground where this tree fell and it is still alive and still able to grow.

I suspect that is what drives the fear, the insecurity of all people whatever their pecent. The idea that they have no foundation anymore on which to be secure so they transplant from one political party, one ideology, one job, one city, one marriage and so on. Our transient society has somehow given notion to the idea that from fluidity comes growth. It has worked and mostly it shows that if you keep moving they can’t shoot you. Its a paranoid, suspicious culture in which we live. It fills the idea of “stranger danger” yet fuels the Internet and Social Media. We can’t talk to you so will talk at you. That is the Cable news cycle of the faux dinner club table talk where the lather/rinse/repeat cycle permeates and the preach to the choir messaging begins. As long as you “hear” what you need then you know someone out there gives a damn and you are not alone.

But as we ignore history we are doomed to repeat it. We have with this current cycle of economic instability that reflects a utter disconnect from the man on the street. We have so confused Main Street with Wall Street we are sure our interests are co-aligned; they are not.

America has always been a place of contradiction. We love to espouse the words of the founding Fathers, white men of property and place who designed the Constitution with the words “we are equal” while Thomas Jefferson, the most literate of said founders, built his wealth and preserved it on the backs of slaves. Saying one thing and doing another usually defines hypocrisy, in America it defines the Unicorn mythology of contradiction.

The article below discusses the history behind the Serrata of the 14th Century. And if history is like my Ipod set to repeat this change is coming. But I wonder if Americans would know what to do with it when the opportunity arises. That history was brief but an amazingly prosperous time and oddly it was not that long ago. Re-Build America means re-thinking how it will be done. Anyone knows in the trades we can build anything and we have new building techniques that reflect change so let’s see if we can use them here. Thinking is all part of doing.

The Self-Destruction of the 1 Percent

By CHRYSTIA FREELAND
Published: October 13, 2012

IN the early 14th century, Venice was one of the richest cities in Europe. At the heart of its economy was the colleganza, a basic form of joint-stock company created to finance a single trade expedition. The brilliance of the colleganza was that it opened the economy to new entrants, allowing risk-taking entrepreneurs to share in the financial upside with the established businessmen who financed their merchant voyages.

Venice’s elites were the chief beneficiaries. Like all open economies, theirs was turbulent. Today, we think of social mobility as a good thing. But if you are on top, mobility also means competition. In 1315, when the Venetian city-state was at the height of its economic powers, the upper class acted to lock in its privileges, putting a formal stop to social mobility with the publication of the Libro d’Oro, or Book of Gold, an official register of the nobility. If you weren’t on it, you couldn’t join the ruling oligarchy.

The political shift, which had begun nearly two decades earlier, was so striking a change that the Venetians gave it a name: La Serrata, or the closure. It wasn’t long before the political Serrata became an economic one, too. Under the control of the oligarchs, Venice gradually cut off commercial opportunities for new entrants. Eventually, the colleganza was banned. The reigning elites were acting in their immediate self-interest, but in the longer term, La Serrata was the beginning of the end for them, and for Venetian prosperity more generally. By 1500, Venice’s population was smaller than it had been in 1330. In the 17th and 18th centuries, as the rest of Europe grew, the city continued to shrink.

The story of Venice’s rise and fall is told by the scholars Daron Acemoglu and James A. Robinson, in their book “Why Nations Fail: The Origins of Power, Prosperity, and Poverty,” as an illustration of their thesis that what separates successful states from failed ones is whether their governing institutions are inclusive or extractive. Extractive states are controlled by ruling elites whose objective is to extract as much wealth as they can from the rest of society. Inclusive states give everyone access to economic opportunity; often, greater inclusiveness creates more prosperity, which creates an incentive for ever greater inclusiveness.

The history of the United States can be read as one such virtuous circle. But as the story of Venice shows, virtuous circles can be broken. Elites that have prospered from inclusive systems can be tempted to pull up the ladder they climbed to the top. Eventually, their societies become extractive and their economies languish.

That was the future predicted by Karl Marx, who wrote that capitalism contained the seeds of its own destruction. And it is the danger America faces today, as the 1 percent pulls away from everyone else and pursues an economic, political and social agenda that will increase that gap even further — ultimately destroying the open system that made America rich and allowed its 1 percent to thrive in the first place.

You can see America’s creeping Serrata in the growing social and, especially, educational chasm between those at the top and everyone else. At the bottom and in the middle, American society is fraying, and the children of these struggling families are lagging the rest of the world at school.

Economists point out that the woes of the middle class are in large part a consequence of globalization and technological change. Culture may also play a role. In his recent book on the white working class, the libertarian writer Charles Murray blames the hollowed-out middle for straying from the traditional family values and old-fashioned work ethic that he says prevail among the rich (whom he castigates, but only for allowing cultural relativism to prevail).

There is some truth in both arguments. But the 1 percent cannot evade its share of responsibility for the growing gulf in American society. Economic forces may be behind the rising inequality, but as Peter R. Orszag, President Obama’s former budget chief, told me, public policy has exacerbated rather than mitigated these trends.

Even as the winner-take-all economy has enriched those at the very top, their tax burden has lightened. Tolerance for high executive compensation has increased, even as the legal powers of unions have been weakened and an intellectual case against them has been relentlessly advanced by plutocrat-financed think tanks. In the 1950s, the marginal income tax rate for those at the top of the distribution soared above 90 percent, a figure that today makes even Democrats flinch. Meanwhile, of the 400 richest taxpayers in 2009, 6 paid no federal income tax at all, and 27 paid 10 percent or less. None paid more than 35 percent.

Historically, the United States has enjoyed higher social mobility than Europe, and both left and right have identified this economic openness as an essential source of the nation’s economic vigor. But several recent studies have shown that in America today it is harder to escape the social class of your birth than it is in Europe. The Canadian economist Miles Corak has found that as income inequality increases, social mobility falls — a phenomenon Alan B. Krueger, the chairman of the White House Council of Economic Advisers, has called the Great Gatsby Curve.

Educational attainment, which created the American middle class, is no longer rising. The super-elite lavishes unlimited resources on its children, while public schools are starved of funding. This is the new Serrata. An elite education is increasingly available only to those already at the top. Bill Clinton and Barack Obama enrolled their daughters in an exclusive private school; I’ve done the same with mine.

At the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, earlier this year, I interviewed Ruth Simmons, then the president of Brown. She was the first African-American to lead an Ivy League university and has served on the board of Goldman Sachs. Dr. Simmons, a Harvard-trained literature scholar, worked hard to make Brown more accessible to poor students, but when I asked whether it was time to abolish legacy admissions, the Ivy League’s own Book of Gold, she shrugged me off with a laugh: “No, I have a granddaughter. It’s not time yet.”

America’s Serrata also takes a more explicit form: the tilting of the economic rules in favor of those at the top. The crony capitalism of today’s oligarchs is far subtler than Venice’s. It works in two main ways.

The first is to channel the state’s scarce resources in their own direction. This is the absurdity of Mitt Romney’s comment about the “47 percent” who are “dependent upon government.” The reality is that it is those at the top, particularly the tippy-top, of the economic pyramid who have been most effective at capturing government support — and at getting others to pay for it.

Exhibit A is the bipartisan, $700 billion rescue of Wall Street in 2008. Exhibit B is the crony recovery. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty found that 93 percent of the income gains from the 2009-10 recovery went to the top 1 percent of taxpayers. The top 0.01 percent captured 37 percent of these additional earnings, gaining an average of $4.2 million per household.

The second manifestation of crony capitalism is more direct: the tax perks, trade protections and government subsidies that companies and sectors secure for themselves. Corporate pork is a truly bipartisan dish: green energy companies and the health insurers have been winners in this administration, as oil and steel companies were under George W. Bush’s.

The impulse of the powerful to make themselves even more so should come as no surprise. Competition and a level playing field are good for us collectively, but they are a hardship for individual businesses. Warren E. Buffett knows this. “A truly great business must have an enduring ‘moat’ that protects excellent returns on invested capital,” he explained in his 2007 annual letter to investors. “Though capitalism’s ‘creative destruction’ is highly beneficial for society, it precludes investment certainty.” Microsoft attempted to dig its own moat by simply shutting out its competitors, until it was stopped by the courts. Even Apple, a huge beneficiary of the open-platform economy, couldn’t resist trying to impose its own inferior map app on buyers of the iPhone 5.

Businessmen like to style themselves as the defenders of the free market economy, but as Luigi Zingales, an economist at the University of Chicago Booth School of Business, argued, “Most lobbying is pro-business, in the sense that it promotes the interests of existing businesses, not pro-market in the sense of fostering truly free and open competition.”

IN the early 19th century, the United States was one of the most egalitarian societies on the planet. “We have no paupers,” Thomas Jefferson boasted in an 1814 letter. “The great mass of our population is of laborers; our rich, who can live without labor, either manual or professional, being few, and of moderate wealth. Most of the laboring class possess property, cultivate their own lands, have families, and from the demand for their labor are enabled to exact from the rich and the competent such prices as enable them to be fed abundantly, clothed above mere decency, to labor moderately and raise their families.”

For Jefferson, this equality was at the heart of American exceptionalism: “Can any condition of society be more desirable than this?”

That all changed with industrialization. As Franklin D. Roosevelt argued in a 1932 address to the Commonwealth Club, the industrial revolution was accomplished thanks to “a group of financial titans, whose methods were not scrutinized with too much care, and who were honored in proportion as they produced the results, irrespective of the means they used.” America may have needed its robber barons; Roosevelt said the United States was right to accept “the bitter with the sweet.”

But as these titans amassed wealth and power, and as America ran out of free land on its frontier, the country faced the threat of a Serrata. As Roosevelt put it, “equality of opportunity as we have known it no longer exists.” Instead, “we are steering a steady course toward economic oligarchy, if we are not there already.”

It is no accident that in America today the gap between the very rich and everyone else is wider than at any time since the Gilded Age. Now, as then, the titans are seeking an even greater political voice to match their economic power. Now, as then, the inevitable danger is that they will confuse their own self-interest with the common good. The irony of the political rise of the plutocrats is that, like Venice’s oligarchs, they threaten the system that created them.

Duke it Out

And by Duke I mean the bestowed position the Queen gives one of her royal subjects for service to the crown.

I just read two very different takes on the same subject – the behavior and beliefs of the elite in the US – or the Meritocracy. Yes the rich are different. How different? Well they pay less in taxes and have a better lifestyle. Can’t get more different. If the protestors in the Hampton’s could have deducted their protests as the attendees did at the recent Romney fundraiser there would have been a lot more of them there. Imagine having a nice vacation while also protesting! Wow sign me up!

I reprint the fantastic Paul Krugman below and then below that David Brooks – give him hell Muffy support of the rich below. The men really need to have a pay per view to determine which man is actually a voice deserved to be on the Op-Ed pages of the great gray lady.

Who’s Very Important?
By PAUL KRUGMAN
Published: July 12, 2012

“Is there a V.I.P. entrance? We are V.I.P.” That remark, by a donor waiting to get in to one of Mitt Romney’s recent fund-raisers in the Hamptons, pretty much sums up the attitude of America’s wealthy elite. Mr. Romney’s base — never mind the top 1 percent, we’re talking about the top 0.01 percent or higher — is composed of very self-important people.

Specifically, these are people who believe that they are, as another Romney donor put it, “the engine of the economy”; they should be cherished, and the taxes they pay, which are already at an 80-year low, should be cut even further. Unfortunately, said yet another donor, the “common person” — for example, the “nails ladies” — just doesn’t get it.

O.K., it’s easy to mock these people, but the joke’s really on us. For the “we are V.I.P.” crowd has fully captured the modern Republican Party, to such an extent that leading Republicans consider Mr. Romney’s apparent use of multimillion-dollar offshore accounts to dodge federal taxes not just acceptable but praiseworthy: “It’s really American to avoid paying taxes, legally,” declared Senator Lindsey Graham, Republican of South Carolina. And there is, of course, a good chance that Republicans will control both Congress and the White House next year.

If that happens, we’ll see a sharp turn toward economic policies based on the proposition that we need to be especially solicitous toward the superrich — I’m sorry, I mean the “job creators.” So it’s important to understand why that’s wrong.

The first thing you need to know is that America wasn’t always like this. When John F. Kennedy was elected president, the top 0.01 percent was only about a quarter as rich compared with the typical family as it is now — and members of that class paid much higher taxes than they do today. Yet somehow we managed to have a dynamic, innovative economy that was the envy of the world. The superrich may imagine that their wealth makes the world go round, but history says otherwise.

To this historical observation we should add another note: quite a few of today’s superrich, Mr. Romney included, make or made their money in the financial sector, buying and selling assets rather than building businesses in the old-fashioned sense. Indeed, the soaring share of the wealthy in national income went hand in hand with the explosive growth of Wall Street.

Not long ago, we were told that all this wheeling and dealing was good for everyone, that it was making the economy both more efficient and more stable. Instead, it turned out that modern finance was laying the foundation for a severe economic crisis whose fallout continues to afflict millions of Americans, and that taxpayers had to bail out many of those supposedly brilliant bankers to prevent an even worse crisis. So at least some members of the top 0.01 percent are best viewed as job destroyers rather than job creators.

Did I mention that those bailed-out bankers are now overwhelmingly backing Mr. Romney, who promises to reverse the mild financial reforms introduced after the crisis?

To be sure, many and probably most of the rich do, in fact, contribute positively to the economy. However, they also receive large monetary rewards. Yet somehow $20 million-plus in annual income isn’t enough. They want to be revered, too, and given special treatment in the form of low taxes. And that is more than they deserve. After all, the “common person” also makes a positive contribution to the economy. Why single out the rich for extra praise and perks?

What about the argument that we must keep taxes on the rich low lest we remove their incentive to create wealth? The answer is that we have a lot of historical evidence, going all the way back to the 1920s, on the effects of tax increases on the rich, and none of it supports the view that the kinds of tax-rate changes for the rich currently on the table — President Obama’s proposal for a modest rise, Mr. Romney’s call for further cuts — would have any major effect on incentives. Remember when all the usual suspects claimed that the economy would crash when Bill Clinton raised taxes in 1993?

Furthermore, if you’re really concerned about the incentive effects of public policy, you should be focused not on the rich but on workers making $20,000 to $30,000 a year, who are often penalized for any gain in income because they end up losing means-tested benefits like Medicaid and food stamps. I’ll have more to say about that in another column. By the way, in 2010, the average annual wage of manicurists — “nails ladies,” in Romney-donor speak — was $21,760.

So, are the very rich V.I.P.? No, they aren’t — at least no more so than other working Americans. And the “common person” will be hurt, not helped, if we end up with government of the 0.01 percent, by the 0.01 percent, for the 0.01 percent.

Why Our Elites Stink
By DAVID BROOKS
Published: July 12, 2012

Through most of the 19th and 20th centuries, the Protestant Establishment sat atop the American power structure. A relatively small network of white Protestant men dominated the universities, the world of finance, the local country clubs and even high government service.

Over the past half–century, a more diverse and meritocratic elite has replaced the Protestant Establishment. People are more likely to rise on the basis of grades, test scores, effort and performance.

Yet, as this meritocratic elite has taken over institutions, trust in them has plummeted. It’s not even clear that the brainy elite is doing a better job of running them than the old boys’ network. Would we say that Wall Street is working better now than it did 60 years ago? Or government? The system is more just, but the outcomes are mixed. The meritocracy has not fulfilled its promise.

Christopher Hayes of MSNBC and The Nation believes that the problem is inherent in the nature of meritocracies. In his book, “Twilight of the Elites,” he argues that meritocratic elites may rise on the basis of grades, effort and merit, but, to preserve their status, they become corrupt. They create wildly unequal societies, and then they rig things so that few can climb the ladders behind them. Meritocracy leads to oligarchy.

Hayes points to his own elite training ground, Hunter College High School in New York City. You have to ace an entrance exam to get in, but affluent parents send their kids to rigorous test prep centers and now few poor black and Latino students can get in.

Baseball players get to the major leagues through merit, but then some take enhancement drugs to preserve their status. Financiers work hard to get jobs at the big banks, but then some rig the game for their own mutual benefit.

Far from being the fairest of all systems, he concludes, the meritocracy promotes gigantic inequality and is fundamentally dysfunctional. No wonder institutional failure has been the leitmotif of our age.

It’s a challenging argument but wrong. I’d say today’s meritocratic elites achieve and preserve their status not mainly by being corrupt but mainly by being ambitious and disciplined. They raise their kids in organized families. They spend enormous amounts of money and time on enrichment. They work much longer hours than people down the income scale, driving their kids to piano lessons and then taking part in conference calls from the waiting room.

Phenomena like the test-prep industry are just the icing on the cake, giving some upper-middle-class applicants a slight edge over other upper-middle-class applicants. The real advantages are much deeper and more honest.

The corruption that has now crept into the world of finance and the other professions is not endemic to meritocracy but to the specific culture of our meritocracy. The problem is that today’s meritocratic elites cannot admit to themselves that they are elites.

Everybody thinks they are countercultural rebels, insurgents against the true establishment, which is always somewhere else. This attitude prevails in the Ivy League, in the corporate boardrooms and even at television studios where hosts from Harvard, Stanford and Brown rail against the establishment.

As a result, today’s elite lacks the self-conscious leadership ethos that the racist, sexist and anti-Semitic old boys’ network did possess. If you went to Groton a century ago, you knew you were privileged. You were taught how morally precarious privilege was and how much responsibility it entailed. You were housed in a spartan 6-foot-by-9-foot cubicle to prepare you for the rigors of leadership.

The best of the WASP elites had a stewardship mentality, that they were temporary caretakers of institutions that would span generations. They cruelly ostracized people who did not live up to their codes of gentlemanly conduct and scrupulosity. They were insular and struggled with intimacy, but they did believe in restraint, reticence and service.

Today’s elite is more talented and open but lacks a self-conscious leadership code. The language of meritocracy (how to succeed) has eclipsed the language of morality (how to be virtuous). Wall Street firms, for example, now hire on the basis of youth and brains, not experience and character. Most of their problems can be traced to this.

If you read the e-mails from the Libor scandal you get the same sensation you get from reading the e-mails in so many recent scandals: these people are brats; they have no sense that they are guardians for an institution the world depends on; they have no consciousness of their larger social role.

The difference between the Hayes view and mine is a bit like the difference between the French Revolution and the American Revolution. He wants to upend the social order. I want to keep the current social order, but I want to give it a different ethos and institutions that are more consistent with its existing ideals.

New Money same as the Old Money

As I stated in the last post, the more things change the more things stay the same. As the Hampton’s gears up for a season that includes million dollar fund raising for Presidential elections, we have a new monied class as exemplified by the Tech Sector. We go through this cycle of boom and bust now every 10 years like clockwork. The quest for riches never ends it seems as that is as much as part of the American Unicorn Mythology as well elections every 4 years with the same hollow promises and handshakes.

I often laugh at each group who become the monied class as they espouse they are going to be different. My mother used to say when someone says that they mean “different like everybody else.” It takes courage to be different I mean doesn’t different mean special and isn’t that the same as the passengers on the short bus?

We are not a classless society, never have been and never will. But we certainly have become a two class one. And by that I mean the Middle and the Rich. No one wants to be poor or admit it and today in the NY Times there was a great article stating for one to be happy in America they believed they needed the average income of $75K annually. This is the actual median income in America according to the US Census: Real median household income in the United States in 2010 was $49,445, a 2.3 percent decline from the 2009 median. That mythical unicorn looks good doesn’t it?

The magic number that defines this “comfortable standard” varies across individuals and countries, but in the United States, it seems to fall somewhere around $75,000. Using Gallup data collected from almost half a million Americans, researchers at Princeton found that higher household incomes were associated with better moods on a daily basis — but the beneficial effects of money tapered off entirely after the $75,000 mark.

The article is attached here but it is a fascinating study of what defines happiness. And apparently its money until well you actually earn said money then not so much. It does explain some of the almost frantic quest to keep the bubbles afloat. Once you earn it you want to keep it and keeping the lifestyle that you bought along with it is expensive. But the grass is always greener… The research states that: a decade of research has demonstrated that if you insist on spending money on yourself, you should shift from buying stuff (TVs and cars) to experiences (trips and special evenings out in addition to buying more experiences, you’re better served in many cases by simply buying less — and buying for others.

As a former Bay Area resident I know that while the cognescenti of Silicon Valley whiz by in their Italian sports cars they do so on roads that are alongside communities of residents who live in dire poverty but serve their food, clean their buildings/homes and tend their gardens. But it all looks great from a Maserati window.

I have also printed below a great essay on the Monied class of the Gilded Age. And by that I mean the earlier one not the present one. There is little difference frankly but as I said…..

Don’t worry be happy or be rich. Whatever. My mother also used to say the “rich are different than you and I” She was rarely wrong.

The New Elitists
By SHAMUS KHAN
Published: July 7, 2012

YOU can tell a lot about people by looking at their music collections. Some have narrow tastes, mostly owning single genres like rap or heavy metal. Others are far more eclectic, their collections filled with hip-hop and jazz, country and classical, blues and rock. We often think of such differences as a matter of individual choice and expression. But to a great degree, they are explained by social background. Poorer people are likely to have singular or “limited” tastes. The rich have the most expansive.

We see a similar pattern in other kinds of consumption. Think of the restaurants cherished by very wealthy New Yorkers. Masa, where a meal for two can cost $1,500, is on the list, but so is a cheap Sichuan spot in Queens, a Papaya Dog and a favorite place for a slice. Sociologists have a name for this. Today’s elites are not “highbrow snobs.” They are “cultural omnivores.”

Omnivorousness is part of a much broader trend in the behavior of our elite, one that embraces diversity. Barriers that were once a mainstay of elite cultural and educational institutions have been demolished. Gone are the quotas that kept Jews out of elite high schools and colleges; inclusion is now the norm. Diverse and populist programming is a mainstay of every museum. Elites seem more likely to confront snobbish exclusion than they are to embrace it.

This was not always the case.

In 1880 William Vanderbilt tried to buy one of the 18 coveted boxes at the New York Academy of Music on 14th Street by offering $30,000 for it. Vanderbilt represented new money, and to the old families controlling the academy his attempt to buy his way into a place reserved for them was a crass affront to their dignity. Money may be king in certain parts of New York society. But not everything can be bought.

Or so it seemed. After his bid was rejected, Vanderbilt joined other nouveaux riches families like the Goulds, Rockefellers and Whitneys and founded the Metropolitan Opera House Company. With 122 private boxes, there was plenty of space for the city’s expanding elite.

This new elite sought to supplant the old families from their long-held seats, but the transformation was hardly radical. While the old elite was ultimately forced to join the new elite at the Metropolitan Opera after its academy collapsed in financial ruin, they did so in a space that was still comfortable: an opera house. Modern temples of power were built on the foundations of the old. New elites were often conservative in their tastes — building mansions that emulated those of European aristocrats, buying up old masters and building shrines to European art forms.

In his brilliant work on the Gilded Age, “The Monied Metropolis,” the Harvard historian Sven Beckert argues that this era helped consolidate the American bourgeoisie. Originally, the old families of New York formed an elite caste defined by their lineage and were not threatened by the fact that they shared many of the same tastes as common men. Through much of the 19th century, cultural differences between elites and the rest were not so great. Shakespeare and opera held mass appeal. To attend an evening’s concert at the New York Academy of Music might mean hearing Verdi, but also some church music and perhaps vaudeville-esque interludes by popular comedians of the day.

It was the robber barons’ joining of the elite that forced a change. As access to elite status became less limited through family ties and more open to men of new wealth, New Yorkers found a new mechanism of social closure. They created an exclusive culture distinct from that of the common American, the result of which was something far more elitist. Through snobbery elites became a class. They developed a shared culture and sensibility. They also shared common enemies.

The Rockefellers were not the only “new men” on the scene. Others were pouring into Lower Manhattan. Elites feared the rabble who flowed ashore on boats from Europe — eight million people between 1855 and 1890. The wealthy moved uptown. Among their mansions they built an armory in 1880, “defensible from all points against mobs.” Many sent children away to boarding schools to escape the corruptions of the city.

Elites built moats and fences not just around neighborhoods but also around cultural artifacts. The Metropolitan Opera made cultural performances more “pure,” dropping the vaudeville. High ticket prices made the popular music of Verdi less accessible; soon it was the rich and not the rest who enjoyed this music. Even great public institutions like the Metropolitan Museum of Art were only nominally so. It was far from the homes of workers, closed on the one day they had free (Sunday) and known to remove working-class patrons for, as the director of the museum put it, “offensive odors emitted from dirt on their apparel.” The sociologist Nicola Beisel has shown how the fine-art nudes that had once circulated among workers on postcard replications were banned as pornography through the Comstock laws and limited to an imposing building that only “respectable” New Yorkers would enter.

This was the birth of the modern upper-class elite; its own schools, clubs and cultural artifacts made it quite distinct from other Americans.

HOW far we’ve come! Our modern omnivores have filled in the moats and torn down the fences. With exclusion and snobbery a relic, the world is available for the most talented to take advantage of. To talk of “elite culture,” it seems, is to talk of something quaint, something anti-American and anti-democratic. Whereas the old elites used their culture to make explicit the differences between themselves and the rest, if you were to talk to members of the elite today, many would tell you that their culture is simply an expression of their open-minded, creative, ready-to-pounce-on-any-opportunity ethic. Others would object to the idea that they were part of an elite in the first place.

But if you look at the omnivore from another point of view, a far different picture emerges.

Unlike the shared class character of Gilded Age elites, omnivores seem highly distinct and their tastes appear to be a matter of personal expression. Instead of liking things like opera because that’s what people of your class are supposed to like, the omnivore likes what he likes because it is an expression of a distinct self. Perhaps liking a range of things explains why elites are elite, and not the other way around.

By contrast, those who have exclusive tastes today — middle-class and poorer Americans — are subject to disdain. If the world is open and you don’t take advantage of it, then you’re simply limited and closed-minded. Perhaps it’s these attributes that explain your incapacity to succeed.

And so if elites have a culture today, it is a culture of individual self-cultivation. Their rhetoric emphasizes such individualism and the talents required to “make it.” Yet there is something pernicious about this self-presentation. The narrative of openness and talent obscures the bitter truth of the American experience. Talents are costly to develop, and we refuse to socialize these costs. To be an outstanding student requires not just smarts and dedication but a well-supported school, a safe, comfortable home and leisure time to cultivate the self. These are not widely available. When some students struggle, they can later tell the story of their triumph over adversity, often without mentioning the helping hand of a tutor. Other students simply fail without such expensive aids.

These are more than liberal platitudes. Look at who makes up the most “talented” members of society: the children of the already advantaged. Today America has less intergenerational economic mobility than almost any country in the industrialized world; one of the best predictors of being a member of the elite today is whether your parents were in the elite. The elite story about the triumph of the omnivorous individual with diverse talents is a myth. In suggesting that it is their work and not their wealth, that it is their talents and not their lineage, elites effectively blame inequality on those whom our democratic promise has failed.

Elites today must recognize that they are very much like the Gilded Age elites of old. Paradoxically the very openness and capaciousness that they so warmly embrace — their omnivorousness — helps define them as culturally different from the rest. And they deploy that cultural difference to suggest that the inequality and immobility in our society is deserved rather than inherited. But if they can recognize the class basis of their success, then perhaps they will also recognize their class responsibility. They owe a debt to others for their fortunes, and seeing this may also help elites realize that the poor are ruled by a similar dynamic: their present position is most often bound to a history not of their own choosing or responsibility.

It is past time for elites to give up the cultural project of showing how different they are from others. They should commit themselves instead to recognizing that there is a commonweal that we all have a responsibility to improve.