The petulance epidemic
by Tom Sullivan
A tweet by venture capitalist Nick Hanauer jumped out from the Twitter machine this week:
People don’t get paid what they are worth. They get paid what they negotiate. https://t.co/GaaNXupjPX— Nick Hanauer (@NickHanauer) November 3, 2017
You remember Hanauer for his “controversial” TED talk saying billionaires such as himself weren’t gods. Furthermore (I’m paraphrasing), people should stop taking seriously their claims to special status and privileges as “job creators.” Just a short mental jump away from “the Creator,” Hanauer added.
The JCs’ preferred narrative has worked its way so deeply into the public consciousness that Americans elected an arrogant, narcissistic, supposed billionaire as president one year ago. For who better to run a government that’s not a business as though it were? Oddly enough, he’s proven as superior at running a government as Facebook proved at sniffing out political ads purchased with rubles.
Like many plutocrats, he reacts badly to not getting his way and the deference royalty wealth demands.
The New York Times reported this week that another of the president’s fraternity killed off his own business rather than treat employees as respected partners:
A week ago, reporters and editors in the combined newsroom of DNAinfo and Gothamist, two of New York City’s leading digital purveyors of local news, celebrated victory in their vote to join a union.
On Thursday, they lost their jobs, as Joe Ricketts, the billionaire founder of TD Ameritrade who owned the sites, shut them down.
Digital media is a tough business, to be sure. Still, Ricketts’ approach to to his employees was familiarly authoritarian. He wrote before the vote, “As long as it’s my money that’s paying for everything, I intend to be the one making the decisions about the direction of the business.” When he couldn’t get his way, he threw a tantrum and broke his toy.
Hamilton Nolan writes about the closure in a New York Times op-ed:
Joe Ricketts, the founder of TD Ameritrade whose family owns the Chicago Cubs, is worth more than $2 billion. He is the owner of DNAinfo, a local news site that covered New York City and Chicago with unparalleled skill, as well as Gothamist, a network of city-oriented websites that DNAinfo bought this year. He is also a major right-wing political donor of rather flexible morality. During the last presidential primaries, Mr. Ricketts spent millions of dollars funding ads that portrayed Donald Trump as an untrustworthy, dangerous misogynist. Once Mr. Trump secured the nomination, Mr. Ricketts spent a million dollars to support him.
One might think that such flexibility would allow Mr. Ricketts to bend but not break when faced with every plutocrat’s worst nightmare: a few dozen modestly paid employees who collectively bargain for better working conditions.
Like Martin Blank, the assassin whose Army psych profile showed a certain “moral flexibility” too, one would think Ricketts might roll with it. But no. Spending millions for and against the same untrustworthy, dangerous misogynist is one thing. But negotiate for better wages with serfs who challenge his position in the social pecking order? Well, they had it coming.
To give the Ricketts decision more context, Nolan adds:
It is worth being clear about exactly what happened here, so that no one gets too smug. DNAinfo was never profitable, but Mr. Ricketts was happy to invest in it for eight years, praising its work all along. Gothamist, on the other hand, was profitable, and a fairly recent addition to the company. One week after the New York team unionized, Mr. Ricketts shut it all down. He did not try to sell the company to someone else. Instead of bargaining with 27 unionized employees in New York City, he chose to lay off 115 people across America. And, as a final thumb in the eye, he initially pulled the entire site’s archives down (they are now back up), so his newly unemployed workers lost access to their published work. Then, presumably, he went to bed in his $29 million apartment.
It is unfortunate that petulance got left out of the Deadly Sins. It seems to be epidemic.
Now, if only the American electorate would stop fawning over people who believe their wealth confers on them the right to rule, we might put this country right again. We did it before. We might even pay people decently, too.
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