I expected the mortgage credit crisis to affect the super rich here in NY and around the world, as did many of my friends. We gaze out at the skeletons of condos being erected in every neighborhood, with their toppling cranes and occasional shards of falling glass, and wonder aloud who is going to fill these expensive monstrosities? With the dollar so low, haven’t the Eurorich already bought their pieces of NY real estate? And if there is a financial crisis, doesn’t that mean that hedge fund guys and others whose wealth is based on not making anything will be less flush? Aren’t those guys the intended buyers for these apartments and bachelor pads? We wonder if these condos will end up empty if these guys fall on hard times.
A couple in a restaurant introduce themselves to me. She is a real estate broker mainly in the Upper East Side. So I ask her if there is a downturn in her market, and she says no, not in the slightest. The truly rich are barely affected, she says, and the hedge fund guys make so much money that even if they make ten million less, it’s not all that significant to them. Maybe they will forgo the Miami condo, for now, but this rarefied part of NYC will remain unaffected, so she claims.
Others make similar assertions. A few recent articles mention that the spending of the super rich continues unabated. It’s written about because, like my friends and I, many assume that everyone will be hurt by the falling house of cards. But so far, at least according to these articles, the super rich are immune, and they will go on partying, buying contemporary art and building condos as the bottom falls out for the bottom half of society.
So far, it seems there is some invisible financial dividing line below which low-income homeowners and all the companies that depend on their dollars—the Foot Lockers, Zales, and Office Depots—will go completely bankrupt. This is happening right now, and it’s happening amazingly fast. It’s not just one or two bankruptcies, and not just mom and pop stores on main streets, but huge chains that used to seem invulnerable in their ubiquity. These were the stores that put mom and pop out of business and now they’re going under?
What will happen when half the country is unemployed, with no medical insurance, stuck in a sheet rock house miles from public transportation? They’ll be ripe for religion or revolution if you ask me. Bibles and bullets. Will they still support the billions a day spent in Iraq? I don’t think so—even now they don’t. One would expect they’ll be pretty pissed off watching the rich and famous party endlessly and continue their glamorous lifestyle—or maybe not. Surprising to me, those being duped and exploited by banks and entrepreneurs often envy their “betters”—they want to be that person in the Beemer or Lexus, and will mortgage everything they’ve got to have a symbolic piece of it. Instead of anger and action we get envy—the bane of every outside agitator, union organizer, and young revolutionary.
I remember when MLK decided to tie the Vietnam War in with domestic issues like poverty and racism, and many thought it ill advised. They assumed he would lose some support—there were still some in favor of the Vietnam War at that point—and that it might dilute the focus on jobs, racism, equality and votes.
I think he was right. This stuff is tied together. Katrina and Iraq are not separate issues. The securities and safeguards guaranteed to the super rich by the Bush administration and the credit crisis are probably linked as well. I don’t mean conspiracy linked—the connections and actions don’t have to be premeditated or thought out in advance to make a network. There are organic emergent forces at work, self-organizing systems arising that benefit some and not others. That too sounds complex and conspiratorial, but it’s not.
Torch Song
I don’t often indulge in the usual blog thing of aggregating, i.e. pointing to articles in newspapers and magazines, but there’s a lovely and surprising piece in the NY Times Arts section disguised as yet another article on the China Tibet issue and the Olympic torch relay. The piece points out that the torch relay originated with the Nazis. It was a bit of stagecraft thought up by Carl Diem and filmed by Leni Riefenstahl for her 1938 hymn to Aryan supremacy, Olympia. The Wagnerian imagery is mythic: within a landscape of Greek ruins, a naked and pure human specimen holds a javelin as it is lit by a bowl of fire, and then transports the burning torch to the Rhineland—well, the symbolism is pretty obvious.
