Moguls steal home while companies strike out
By
Bill Moyers and Michael Winship Read Spanish Version
From
Truthout
From
our offices in Manhattan, we look out on the tall, gleaming
skyscrapers that are cathedrals of wealth and power — the Olympus
ruled by the gods of finance, the temples of the mighty, the holy of
holies, whose priests guard the sacred texts of salvation — the ones
containing the secrets of subprime lending and derivatives as
mysterious and elusive as the Grail itself.
This
last couple of weeks, ordinary mortals below could almost hear the
ripcords of golden parachutes being pulled as the divinities on high
prepared for soft, safe landings — all this while tossing their
workers like sacrificial lambs into the purgatory of unemployment.
During
the last five years of his tenure as CEO of now-bankrupt Lehman
Brothers, Richard Fuld’s total take was $354 million. John Thain, the
current chairman of Merrill Lynch, taken over this week by Bank of
America, has been on the job for just nine months. He pocketed a $15
million signing bonus. His predecessor, Stan O’Neal, retired with a
package valued at $161 million, after the company reported an $8
billion loss in a single quarter. And remember Bear Stearns’s
Chairman James Cayne? After the company collapsed earlier this year
and was up for sale at bargain basement prices, he sold his stake for
more than $60 million.
Daniel
Mudd and Richard Syron, the former heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie
Mac — aka the gods who failed — are fighting to keep severance
packages of close to $24 million combined — on top of the millions
in salary each earned last year while slaughtering the golden calf.
As it is written in the Gospel According to Me, when the going gets
tough, the tough get going.
But
let’s change the metaphor for a moment and go to our sports desk,
because if religion is no longer the soul of capitalism, as Max Weber
once taught us it was, we have to venture somewhere else to try to
understand the continuing follies of the new gilded age. And so, we
travel just a few miles north of Wall Street to the House that Ruth
Built. Babe Ruth — the Sultan of Swat — who ruled Yankee Stadium
and sired generations of princes after him: DiMaggio and Gehrig,
Mantle, Maris, Berra and Jackson. Yankee Stadium, as fabled a place
to Americans as Ilium was to the ancient Greeks, is about to be
demolished and replaced next year by a brand new stadium.
On
Opening Day in 1923, New York Governor Al Smith threw out the first
ball and John Philip Sousa led a big brass band playing his famous
marches. It was the Roaring Twenties, when the money flowed like
bootleg whiskey, the pride before the fall. In 1930, the year after
the market crashed, as the Great Depression began, Babe Ruth was
taking home $80,000 a year, more than the president of the United
States, Herbert Hoover. "Why not?" Ruth asked. "I had
a better year than he did."
Yankee
star Alex Rodriguez had a better year than both of them. This season,
A-Rod is making $28 million, just part of an annual Yankee payroll of
$209 million, the richest in baseball. Their owner, George
Steinbrenner, is among the Forbes 400, one of the country’s richest
tycoons.
But
when it came to paying for the new, $1.3 billion pleasure dome, the
millionaires on the field and King Midas in his skybox came up with
some razzle-dazzle plays to finance their new wealth machine –
tax-free bonds, requiring ordinary citizens to subsidize the
construction, and hundreds of millions more for new parking garages,
a train station and parks that supposedly will replace the ones
seized by the city to make room for the new stadium. The Little
League games that used to flourish on sandlots just outside the old
ballpark have been moved miles away, sent down to the minors on a
long road trip.
That’s
O.K., you may think; there will be plenty of room in the new stadium
for the tax-paying public to come root, root, root for the home team
— even the Coliseum in ancient Rome had bleachers for the commoners.
But, in fact, there will be 5,000 fewer seats in the stands. And
while the Yankees reportedly promise that half of what’s left will
cost $45 or less, those seats that used to cost $250, right behind
the dugout, will now cost you $850. And if you want to be near home
plate, you’ll have to cough up $2,500 — per game.
Meanwhile,
there will be more luxury suites and party rooms where fat cats can
gather, safely removed from the sweaty masses. Corporations and
wealthy individuals will be able to rent the luxury suites for
anywhere from $600,000-$850,000 a year — tax deductible — assuming
they haven’t filed for bankruptcy this week.
Why
aren’t the fans and taxpayers giving the Yankees a Bronx cheer? They
did, but city officials rolled over them while making sure local
politicians stayed in the lineup. The politicians are getting their
own luxury suite at the new stadium for free — and first shot at
buying the best available seats.
The
new colossus will cast its majestic shadow across the South Bronx,
one of the nation’s poorest neighborhoods. The residents will watch
from the outside as suburban drivers avail themselves of 9,000 new or
refurbished parking spaces. Never mind all the exhaust, even though
in this part of New York City respiratory disease is already so high
they call it "Asthma Alley."
Not
that the well-to-do in the infield seats will have to hear the
wheezing. They’ll have exclusive access to a private club, a private
entrance and a private elevator, totems of this gilded age. Let the
games begin.
Bill
Moyers is managing editor and Michael Winship is senior writer of the
weekly public affairs program "Bill Moyers Journal," which
airs Friday nights on PBS. Check local airtimes or comment at The
Moyers Blog at www.pbs.org/moyers.
http://www.truthout.org/article/moguls-steal-home-while-companies-strike-out
