What All These "Heartwarming" News Stories Really Say About America

Last week, two news blips threw the modern reality of the American dream into sharp relief, revealing, yet again, a system in which executives amass ever greater fortunes while workers are squeezed within an inch of their life—the shocking but unsurprising consequences of an increasingly trickle-up economy. On Thursday, the Economic Policy Institute released a report showing that the American CEO-to-worker compensation ratio was 312-to-1 in 2017. As recently as 1989, that ratio was 58-to-1 and, in 1965, it was a mere 20-to-1. In the span of 50 years, the executive-to-stiff imbalance ballooned by more than 1,500 percent, an extreme, among industrialized countries, and unique to the U.S.

On the same day, CNN caught social-media flak for the latest in a series of grim vignettes in which a major television network repackaged a tragic story of economic despair as heartwarming uplift, tweeting out: “This teacher battling cancer ran out of sick days, so school employees showered him with theirs.” The teacher in question, Robert Goodman, had been teaching history at Palm Beach Gardens Community High School in Florida for 23 years. But his more than two decades of service somehow didn’t amount to the dignity of enough sick days for stage III colon cancer.

The CNN tweet was no incidental flub, but emblematic of a particular kind of corporatist American worldview: the billionaire libertarian radicalism—promoted by the Koch brothers and their ilk through ideological think tanks, gobsmacking campaign spending, and extremist judges—in which living wages and healthcare are not a shared responsibilities or corporate obligations but dependent on individual charity. In just the past month, three major networks—CNN, CBS, and ABC—published similarly troubling human-interest stories. In addition to CNN’s sick-day-starved cancer patient, ABC highlighted donating vacation time to new moms as a “trendy” baby shower gift, with examples in Missouri and Nebraska, both states in which there is no state-mandated maternity leave. And CBS News tweeted out, “HEARTWARMING: A teacher breaks down in tears after the mother of a student buys her a car so she can get to work every day,” set in Alabama, which has one of the lowest average teacher salaries in the country.

Here we had the cruel, calamitous symptoms of Koch capitalism reframed as the human capacity for generosity. It was about as warming as the efforts of Hans Christian Andersen’s Little Match Girl, who, in a classic fairy tale from the Danish Gilded Age, hadn’t been able to sell matches all day and so, as the smells of roasted goose drifted from bright homes, lit matches to warm her cold hands until she froze to death in the streets.

Fundamentally ill-suited to charting the appalling rise in wealth inequality, our major media outlets lionize the ever-expanding fortunes of the very, very rich and the working poor’s outsized empathy—a big bank accounts versus big hearts narrative that works in tandem. The richest man in modern history, Jeff Bezos, whose crushing productivity drives Amazon warehouse workers to pee in bottles instead of taking bathroom breaks, gets fluffy lifestyle treatment from The New York Times’s chief fashion critic Vanessa Friedman, who recently named him a “Style Icon.” Leather jackets accrued on mass human misery is back as the new hotness. Not that this is entirely new. Our culture is so saturated with wealth worship, that we don’t know another normal.

In 1984, the year President Ronald Reagan was re-elected in a 49-state landslide, the television show Lifestyles of the Rich & Famous debuted on CBS, and three years later, Forbes published its first ranking of billionaires. That was the same year Reagan reduced the top marginal tax rate to 28 percent from 50 percent, which he had already lowered from 70 percent. Today, we have cash-flashing rich-kid Instagram accounts with millions of followers, the likes of which were mimicked by Treasury secretary Steve Mnunchin and his “modern Marie Antoinette” wife Louise Linton, and television shows centered on various flavors of monied (Real Housewives, MTV Cribs, Who Wants to Marry a Multi-Millionaire?). That the first movie with an all-Asian cast to make a go at the American market in decades was Crazy Rich Asians is, perhaps, no coincidence.

Earlier this year, Forbes caused a stir for dubbing its cover star Kylie Jenner as on track to become the youngest-ever “self-made” billionaire—a dubious assertion considering that Jenner came from a famous, rich family whose lifestyle fueled her own rise. But in a country where public roads, public education, and government-protected banks underpin our entrepreneurial system, is anyone really “self-made”? Where would Elon Musk, the oft cited “self-made billionaire,” be without nearly $5 billion in government subsidies or the loan from his father, an emerald mine owner, to start his first business? The concept of self-made has its roots in one of America’s myths of individualism: bootstrapping. The term originally meant something of an impossibility. (Try to actually pick yourself up by your bootstraps and you will assuredly fall down.) But later it came to be an idiom for personal responsibility and self-reliance—a fantastic lie, denying the role of public works and support systems, that mainstream media cheerily promotes in soft news puff pieces.

So, while corporate tycoons make off in golden parachutes, bank bailouts, and friendly tax policies, regardless of performance, we berate the working poor for not doing the near impossible. For much of the country, the partial financial reports on the nightly news crowing of a strong stock market and unemployment dipping below 4 percent are a chimera. Since the early 1970s, workers’ hourly wages, adjusted for inflation, have barely budged, while productivity has risen. And since the 1980s, G.D.P. growth hasn’t materialized in increasing working-class incomes. The only thing that has trickled down to the masses is the fantastical anti-tax, anti-government philosophy for the rich, not profits spread to the poor.

This course of America’s tax-and-service-slashing policies is playing out in myriad forms. Bankruptcy is rising rapidly for seniors, with the rate for people 65 and older three times of that in 1991. According the American Journal of Public Health, as many as 45,000 annual early deaths are associated with lack of health insurance. The economic misery and medical insecurity spreads far and wide. In Boston, a woman, whose leg was caught between a train and platform exposing the bone, begged bystanders not to call the ambulance, crying “it’s $3,000—I can’t afford that.” In Minneapolis, a 26-year-old man died when he rationed his diabetes medicine after aging out of his parents’ health care, and in Florida, a man killed his wife claiming he couldn’t afford her medicine any longer. After more than 50 years of marriage, he shot her in the head with a Colt .32 revolver, called his daughters to notify them, and then called 911 to turn himself in.

It doesn’t have to be this way. The Economic Policy Institute recommends a number of changes to even out CEO-to-worker compensation, including: reinstating higher marginal tax rates on very top, and corporate tax rates higher for higher ratios of CEO-to-worker compensation. Every other industrialized country in the world has mandated paid maternity leave—the U.K. guarantees up to 39 weeks and Norway grants one year—and most provide universal health care with less economic outlay and better health outcomes. But political will for improving the conditions of the working and middle class seems unlikely in the current climate. Following up on last December’s $1.5 trillion tax cuts, which increased the deficit without increasing wages, the Trump administration is working on another $100 billion capital gains tax cut for the wealthy.

With our public safety net shredded by the tax-cut-ravenous ultra-rich, the whim of charity is now the only chance at survival for those unlucky enough to be born into modest means. The trickle of news stories on the “heartwarming” generosity of ordinary Americans are just a tip of the iceberg. Take the site GoFundMe, which has an entire landing page for healthcare, bragging “we’re the leader in online medical fundraising,” and that the site has 250,000+ medical campaigns and $650 million raised per year. There are little green bubbles for various ills, like lymphoma and leukemia, and “trending” fundraising stories, with photos of strangers in hospital beds, with happy families, or pictured at sunset on the beach with a fiancé during healthier times. Scrolling through campaigns, I came across a familiar Brooklyn hip-hop personality, DJ Spinna, his eyes closed in a hospital room and covered in crumpled blankets with tubes running into his nose. He had an emergency appendectomy but, thanks to the largesse of 1,504 kind souls, he managed to raise $69,038 of the stated $60,000 goal.

Not everyone is so fortunate. On GoFundMe, you can browse a diverse unfolding of systemic failure, along with the attendant desperation and hope, increasingly the normal for working Americans. Save Kenneth. Help Blanca beat cancer. For the love of Landry. The fight for Josh. Step up for Angela. Each page a portrait of loving kindness, the bonds of family and friendship, and the goodness of fellow Americans. It is endless. And obvious that as long as we cut taxes for the rich and protections for workers, there will be plenty of heartwarming stories for our media conglomerates to harvest.