Caught in the Web: Occupy the Internet

Occupy Wall Street has placed the 1 percent under a microscope. One great source of information on specific one-percenters’ activities and their—corporate, financial, and personal—relationships is an evolving open source site called Little Sis (http://littlesis.org/about), dedicated to bringing “transparency” to powerful social networks (thanks to the Nation’s Investigative Fund for pointing this site out on its blog). The site was the first to break the news last fall, for example, that Diana Taylor (longtime girlfriend of New York Mayor Michael Bloomberg) sat on the board of Brookfield Properties, the company that owns Zuccotti Park. And the Sunlight Foundation provides a useful report on the political giving of the top 1 percent of the 1 percent (http://sunlightfoundation.com/blog/2011/12/13/the-political-one-percent-of-the-one-percent), finding that this group, in 2010, accounted for nearly a quarter of all campaign contributions. The Sunlight Foundation report explores who these givers are—their corporate relationships, their ideological commitments (which are more liberal than we might assume), and their disproportionate influence. Howard Wial of the Atlantic Cities site (www.theatlanticcities.com/jobs-and-economy/2011/10/where-one-percent-live/393) has some informative data on where the richest Americans live. (There are fifty-four metropolitan areas in the U.S. whose share of the 1 percent exceeds their share of all households. Not surprisingly, New York City has the largest number of the very rich, with the Upper West Side’s 10023 zip code boasting the highest concentration of one-percenter households.)

The Occupy moment, plus the prominence of presidential candidate Mitt Romney, is also exposing the brutally anti-labor private equity (PE) industry to harsh public scrutiny. You would think, then, that the Internet would be exploding with entertaining and informative websites with names like baincapitalsucks. com. Sadly, it isn’t, because the industry has anticipated that possibility and has been busy buying up such names, according to a January report in the Financial Times. Still, there are some decent web-based resources on Bain and the rest of its creatively destructive industry. Harvard Business School has a working paper on private equity and job loss here: http://hbswk.hbs.edu/item/6847.html. Based on this study, as Bloomberg Businessweek reported, compared to the control group, the PE-backed firms lost 2.1 percent of their employment in the two years after a deal. In other words, having your company acquired by a private-equity firm is like living through a national recession. (The Bloomberg article can be found at www.bloomberg.com/news/2012-01-12/you-re-so-bain-campaign-asks-is-private-equity-good-for-u-s-.html.)

Not all one-percenters are part of the problem. Privileged people, especially the young, often help bring about change. One such admirable group contributes to a tumblr (a type of short-form, multi-media blog) exploring the need for change through members’ own personal stories (http://westandwiththe99percent.tumblr.com). Titled, “We are the 1 Percent: We Stand with the 99 Percent,” it features pictures of one-percenters, and their personal stories of world travel and first-class education. One young woman writes, “It’s not that I think I don’t deserve this life. I just think everyone else deserves it, too. Raising my taxes would be a good start.”

Some people don’t even seem to know whether they are part of the 99 percent or the 1 percent. (One woman on the abovementioned tumblr cites “health insurance” as a sign of her outsized good fortune.) This interactive app on the New York Times website should help clarify matters: www.nytimes.com/interactive/2012/01/15/business/one-percent-map.html?ref=business. No more fuzzy categories like “working” or “middle” class; enter your annual household income and the site will tell you in which economic percentile you reside. If it’s more than $ 383,000, you’re part of the 1 percent (and since you’re reading New Labor Forum, congratulations—you’re a class traitor).

Now that some...