“Exuberance made a comeback this year at Josh Koplewicz’s annual Halloween party. More than 1,000 people packed into a 6,000-square-foot space at the Good Units night club in Manhattan, a substantially larger crowd than in the last several years. The open bar was sponsored by Russian Standard vodka, and Mr. Koplewicz, an investment analyst at Goldman Sachs, was able to snag a big headliner: the hip-hop star Lil’ Kim, who performed dressed in a black cat costume.”
“Wall Street is back spending as much if not more than before,” said the New York cosmetic surgeon Dr. Francesca J. Fusco, whose business is booming again after a difficult few years.
Real estate agents say Wall Street executives have already begun lining up rentals in the Hamptons for next summer. Dolly Lenz of Prudential Douglas Elliman said the bidding this year was “hotter and heavier” than previous years. “There is a passion now in the market I haven’t seen in a while,” she said. She said her clients, almost exclusively from Wall Street, were afraid to lose out. Just recently, Ms. Lenz said, she had three people bidding more than $400,000 for a summer rental in Southampton.
—The New York Times, 11/23/10
What’s causing this renewed party atmosphere? American companies earned profits at an annual rate of $1.659 trillion in the third quarter, according to a Commerce Department report released Tuesday. That is the highest figure recorded since the government began keeping track over 60 years ago. Since bottoming out in the fourth quarter of 2008, U.S. corporate profits have grown for seven consecutive quarters and at some of the fastest rates in history.
Great news for some, but not for the nearly 15 million Americans who remain jobless today. There were five unemployed workers available for every job opening in the United States in September, according to the Labor Department. In an act of holiday compassion, the House failed last month to extend unemployment insurance benefits for another three months. And because the rich still aren’t rich enough, Republicans are ready to go to war to ensure the wealthiest American’s retain the tax cuts Bush put in place in 2001 and 2003. As Paul Krugman notes, making “the Bush tax cuts for the wealthy permanent is a huge budget issue—over the next 75 years it would cost as much as the entire Social Security shortfall.”
The result is the slow institutionalization of an unjust and increasingly inequitable society, a form of backward economic “mission creep” in which the top 1/10 of 1% of the population now earns over 7% of all after-tax income, up almost 500% from 1.2% they earned in 1970.
Where has the countervailing force to ensure fairness and equity in our society disappeared? There must be a new alliance of activists to stop this wave of greed that if left untempered will surely destroy our society. We (and by “we” I mean small and medium-size businesses, labor, the environmental community, human rights activists, and students to name a few) must focus on what unites rather than what divides us. Together we can make our voice for economic fairness heard, and the time has come to begin shouting.