Today's essay, "Embarrassment of Riches," by The New Yorker's Sheelah Kolhatkar examines one of the great problems facing the United States in the coming century: economic inequality that mirrors the history of the United States in th 1920s. Abigail Disney, the focal point of the discussion of economic inequality in 2020, is the granddaughter of Walt Disney has proudly become "a traitor to her class" in the argot of the 1% in 2020 that echos the ethos of the 1% in the 1920a. If this is (fair & balanced) admiration of a crusader agasint economic inequality in our time, so be it.
[x The New Yorker]
Embarrassment Of Riches — The Ultra-Wealthy Who Argue That They Should Be Paying Higher Taxes
By Sheelah Kolhatkar
TagCrowd Cloud provides a visual summary of the blog post below
Abigail Disney remembers the moment, two decades ago, when she no longer wanted to fly on her family’s private plane. Disney is the granddaughter of Roy O. Disney, who founded the [Walt] Disney company with his younger brother, Walt, in 1923, and her father was a longtime senior executive there. Abigail’s parents owned a Boeing 737, one of the largest private-aircraft models on the market, and they let her use it for family trips. For many years, when Abigail was raising her four children, she would take the plane to Ireland, to visit her mother’s castle. The plane “was like a flying playpen,” Abigail told me recently. “I’ve known the pilot since I was a teen-ager.” One day, when her children were older, she took an overnight flight from California to New York, where she lives. She was travelling alone, but there was a full staff on duty to cater to her needs. As she got into the queen-size bed and secured the safety belt that stretched across the mattress, preparing to sleep for the next few hours, an unpleasant feeling came over her. “I couldn’t help thinking about the carbon footprint of it, and all the fuel,” she said. “It just felt so wrong.”
It wasn’t the first time that Abigail, who inherited part of her grandfather’s fortune, had experienced discomfort about her wealth and how little she had done to deserve it. As a child, she would go with her grandfather to Disneyland, where she was treated as a special guest. “He loved taking us to the front of the line,” she said. She would hang her head as they marched past other families who had been waiting for rides in the hot sun. “I’d say, ‘Grandpa, they hate us,’ ” she recalled. “And he’d say, ‘I worked so hard all those years so you could go to the front of the line.’ ” As a young adult, Disney forged her own life in New York City, first as a mother and later as a documentary-film producer. She eventually stopped flying on the private plane, although it took a year or two. (“These things are hard to give up,” she told me.) And she started advocating for peace and women’s equality.
In 2011, she joined an organization called the Patriotic Millionaires, a group of wealthy Americans who are concerned about rising income inequality and who speak out in favor of policies traditionally considered to be antithetical to their economic interests. She began to make public appearances and videos in which she promoted higher taxes on the wealthy. She told me that she realized that the luxuries she and her family enjoyed were really a way of walling themselves off from the world, which made it easier to ignore certain economic realities. “Coming face to face with it feels fucking awful,” she said. “That’s why the wealthy have the private planes and the bottle service in the back and the limousines with the tinted windows.”
In March, 2018, she received a Facebook message from a custodian at Disneyland who was asking for help. He said that many workers there were barely able to survive on what they were paid, and that their union was fighting for a fifteen-dollar-an-hour minimum wage, without success. The local press had recently published several sensational reports about Disneyland, including a story about a sixty-one-year-old night janitor at the Disneyland Resort who had died, alone, in her car, where she had been living. That year, the Walt Disney Company had reported almost thirteen billion dollars in profit; the night janitor was estimated to have been earning thirteen or fourteen dollars an hour.
“I spent almost a month sitting on it, thinking, What can I do?” Abigail told me. She is a shareholder in the company but has never had a formal role there, and was wary of interfering in the family business. “It was hard for me to decide that I could take this on,” she said. To learn more about what was happening, she flew to Los Angeles and met with fifteen or so Disneyland employees at the Anaheim office of Workers United Local 50, an affiliate of the Service Employees International Union that represents about seventy-five hundred food-service workers at Disney theme parks. “I have a healthy skepticism about the way that unions characterize things, so I was not inclined to simply accept whatever was told to me,” she said.
Abigail had told the union representatives that she didn’t want her visit to attract publicity, so some of the workers were summoned to the office without being told whom they were meeting. They sat in a circle and talked about their economic struggles. A full-time hair stylist named Rebekah Pedersen told Abigail that she, too, had often slept in her car. Abigail recalled that a thirty-year veteran of the park said that she had also recently been homeless for a time, and that some of the workers said that they were on food stamps. (A spokesperson for the company issued a statement saying, “We strongly disagree with this characterization of our employees and their experience at Disney.” The company also said, “Disney has made significant investments to expand the earning potential and upward mobility of our employees.”)
The president of Workers United Local 50, Chris Duarte, who attended the meeting, told me that he could see that Abigail was struggling to process what she was learning. “She didn’t want to trash her family name,” he said. “The company does a lot of good things. But to have this ugly thing in the closet—I know it bothered her.” Abigail spent the next few weeks working on an e-mail to Bob Iger, the company’s CEO. The Walt Disney Company is one of the largest and most profitable media businesses in the world, and in 2018 Iger, who that year announced a new streaming service and who had directed the company’s acquisitions of Marvel, Pixar, Lucasfilm, and 21st Century Fox’s film and TV assets, received almost sixty-six million dollars in total compensation. That was more than fourteen hundred times the median pay of a company employee. Although some in the business world say that Iger deserves his staggering salary because of the company’s financial success, Abigail found the pay ratio disturbing. “It is something that the whole country is engaged in—shaving every benefit off workers’ lives, making sure they are living as close to the bone as is humanly possible,” she said. (Iger has pointed out that his salary was unusually high in 2018 because of a one-time stock award that he was granted after the acquisition of 21st Century Fox and as part of an agreement that he would remain at Disney for three years. His annual compensation was $39.3 million. Disney has defended Iger’s compensation package, saying that he has “delivered exceptional value for the company, its shareholders and employees.”)
In the US, executive compensation has increased, on average, by nine hundred and forty per cent since 1978, according to one estimate; during the same period, worker pay has risen twelve per cent. Income inequality hasn’t been this extreme since the nineteen-twenties. A recent study by the economists Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman found that, as a result of cuts to estate and corporate taxes, as well as the 2017 GOP tax bill, the four hundred richest Americans pay a lower over-all tax rate than any other group in the country. In a Times Op-Ed, Saez and Zucman wrote, “This is the tax system of a plutocracy.”
In Abigail’s message to Iger, she argued that the company would be damaged by reports that some employees were being paid so little. The press had been reporting rumors that Iger was thinking about running for President, and he had said in an interview that America was “gravely in need of optimism.” (Oprah Winfrey publicly told Iger that she would canvass for him in Iowa.) This was an opportunity, Abigail said, for him to set an example by offering more generous wages. She wrote, “You could become the leader of the most ethical multi-billion-dollar multi-national business the world has ever known.” Iger responded a few days later, thanking her for her e-mail. He said that he was proud that there hadn’t been any work stoppages during his tenure, and he suggested that she follow up with the human-resources department.
In June, 2018, a ballot initiative that proposed raising the minimum wage to fifteen dollars an hour was introduced in the city of Anaheim. It would apply to all employers in the city, the largest of which, by far, was Disneyland. In July, four months before the midterm elections, when the ballot measure was up for a vote, the company agreed to increase hourly wages to fifteen dollars for about ten thousand of Disneyland’s thirty thousand unionized workers, and to raise the wages of its nonunion workers as well. (The measure passed.) Still, Abigail felt dissatisfied. Earlier this year, after some public comments that she had made about Iger’s salary—she called it “insane”—were widely circulated, she decided to go further. On Easter, while taking a train to visit her college-age son, she posted twenty-two messages on Twitter criticizing the disparities at the company. “Let me [be] very clear,” the first one read. “I like Bob Iger. I do NOT speak for my family but only for myself. . . . But by any objective measure a pay ratio over a thousand is insane.” She went on, “What on earth would be wrong with shifting some of the profits—the fruits of these employees’ labor—to some folks other than those at the top?” Within two hours, she saw that her tweets had been viewed half a million times. “By that night, it was at three million,” she said. “And I thought, OK, something’s happening.”
She began thinking about how to translate the viral moment into something more lasting. “It’s really easy to reduce someone like me to a crazy rich girl,” she said. “I needed to find a way to maintain my credibility and not seem like I had an axe to grind about Disney.” Since then, she has testified before Congress about worker pay, worked with activist groups fighting for more progressive economic policies, and given dozens of speeches and interviews. Abigail told me that she hopes that the CEOs of other companies are paying attention. “Have you seen the movie ‘Caddyshack’?” she asked. “There’s a gopher, and he pops up every so often.” She added, “I’m the gopher. So I’ll continue to pop up periodically and be the bane of their existence, because I don’t want them to feel comfortable. They are participating in a social and economic process that is destroying actual human lives. And I’m just not going to go along with it. Especially not with my name attached.”
Disney is one of the highest-profile figures in the Patriotic Millionaires, which now has more than two hundred members in thirty-four states: technology entrepreneurs, software engineers, Wall Street investors, industrialists, and inheritors of family fortunes. Although Abigail is best known for her criticisms of the Disney company, the group’s mission was initially a simple idea endorsed by a half-dozen rich people: “Please raise our taxes.” The members now have the broader goal of pressuring their wealthy peers to confront what they believe are the destructive effects of trickle-down economics—the idea, which has driven US policy decisions for several decades and has largely been debunked, that reducing taxes on businesses and the wealthy will benefit low- and middle-income workers. Members of the Patriotic Millionaires lobby lawmakers and affluent individuals to instead support policies that would, for instance, increase the minimum wage and raise taxes on corporations and the rich. “If you want to change social norms, you’ve got to be out there going public about your beliefs,” Eric Schoenberg, a former investment banker, said, during a breakfast that the group held in New York, in October.
Patriotic Millionaires was founded by Erica Payne, a political strategist who had worked on Bill Clinton’s inaugural committee and had served as the deputy national finance director for the Democratic National Committee before getting an MBA from Wharton. She has long, dark hair and a gleaming smile, and she speaks at a high velocity. She was a cheerleading champion in high school, in North Carolina, and proudly displays a trophy from that era in the Patriotic Millionaires’ main office, in downtown Washington, DC, just a few blocks from the White House. In 2010, Republican tax cuts were about to expire, and it had become clear that President Barack Obama was going to give in to lobbying pressure and extend the cuts, even for wealthy people. “I thought that was horrifying,” Payne told me. “As did two millionaires I was talking to.” Those millionaires were Guy Saperstein, a civil-rights lawyer, and David desJardins, an early employee at Google.
Payne wrote a short open letter, urging Obama to let the tax cuts expire, and Saperstein and desJardins signed it, as did forty-five other people who qualified for the tax cut, including the musician Moby and Ben Cohen, the co-founder of Ben & Jerry’s. Payne called the group the Patriotic Millionaires for Fiscal Strength, posted the letter online, and sent it out as a press release. It was immediately picked up by the media, Payne said, probably because “lots of wealthy people say they want to do good in the world but fewer of them want to specifically advance the things that would actually bring good in the world but that may cost them.” The letter got the attention of the White House, and Payne was invited to attend Obama’s 2012 Tax Day address.
She began approaching Democratic donors and businesspeople to pitch the idea of an organization focussed on three core beliefs: that if people work full time they should be paid enough to meet their basic needs; that regular people deserve as much political power as the wealthy; and that rich people and corporations should pay higher taxes. Payne speaks bluntly about these goals. People who support tax cuts for high earners and reductions to social programs are “very deliberately attempting to create a permanent underclass,” she said. “You want people to suffer and die earlier, because your greed is more important to you than another human being.”
Payne also runs the Agenda Project, a progressive political-advocacy organization that she founded in 2009 and which she describes as aiming to “dismantle the conservative premise and shove it into the dark recesses of the human psyche, where it belongs.” She has a knack for illustrating policy battles in ways that are both bizarre and memorable. In one of the Agenda Project’s ads, which she made during a Republican push to drastically cut Medicare, an actor who resembles Paul Ryan, the former House Speaker, wheels an elderly woman through an idyllic wooded park before steering the wheelchair to the edge of a cliff and pushing her off; other ads of Payne’s have targeted the Tea Party, Mitt Romney, and antiabortion activists. The videos are cheaply made, and a little crude, but they generate attention.
Payne manages the Patriotic Millionaires with a similar savvy. Many members are embarrassed by the group’s name, for instance—preferring not to identify themselves as millionaires, because it seems tacky, or objecting to the implication that non-members might not be patriotic—but Payne is adamant that it must be kept. “A hundred per cent of our members hate the name, and every time we have a gathering we have thirty minutes set aside so they can bitch about it,” she said. “And then, at the conclusion of the thirty minutes, I tell them we’re not going to change the name.” She added, “The brand was very intentional. I think the lack of subtlety in the name is part of the way that we actually achieve our end goal.” One of the group’s members, Jacqueline Boberg, a former technology salesperson, agreed that it had an odd power. “Republicans will open the door, because who wouldn’t?” she said. “You’re patriotic, and you’re a millionaire!” Frank Patitucci, the owner and CEO of NuCompass Mobility, an employee-relocation firm, told me that the group had proved a draw with the press. “I joined this organization because it gave me the most leverage,” Patitucci said. “You write a letter to the editor as Joe Blow, it might be ignored. But if you write as a Patriotic Millionaire you have an opportunity to make a bigger impact.”
To qualify for the group, members must have an annual income of at least a million dollars, or assets worth more than five million dollars. That could include many families who would describe themselves as upper middle class—who, for instance, own homes in cities with hot real-estate markets. When I asked Payne how hard it was to persuade rich people to join, she said, “I think the last time I checked there were about three hundred and seventy-five thousand taxpayers in the country who make a million dollars a year in income”—there are now almost half a million—“and we have a couple hundred members.” She laughed. “If you ever needed a back-of-the-envelope calculation of how many of America’s élite are concerned about the basic well-being of their fellow-citizens, that should give you a rough estimate.” Members include Chuck Collins, the heir to the Oscar Mayer fortune; Roberta Kaplan, the civil-rights lawyer; Jeffrey Gural, the real-estate investor; and George Zimmer, the founder of Men’s Wearhouse.
It might seem disingenuous for people to try to change the rules after they have already amassed fortunes via the old, “rigged” system; some might also see their efforts as a way to generate flattering publicity or to alleviate feelings of guilt. But the group’s members say that they are concerned about the future of the nation. Some of them feel that severe inequality fuels corruption and has led to the election of Trump and other right-wing leaders across the world. Many of them believe that inaction on inequality could lead to the kinds of violent street protests recently seen in countries like Chile.
The group has produced TV ads and online videos and has sent members to speak at rallies; before important votes, it often targets members of Congress who are likely to be influenced by rich businesspeople in their districts. In New York State, the group has lobbied to close the carried-interest tax loophole, which shields the income of many hedge-fund and private-equity-fund managers, and it has advocated for a so-called pied-à-terre bracket, which would apply to people with part-time homes. Several members, including Molly Munger, the daughter of Charlie Munger, the longtime vice-chairman of Warren Buffett’s firm, Berkshire Hathaway, have spoken in favor of a wealth tax.
In February, Morris Pearl, a former executive at the asset-management firm BlackRock and the chair of the Patriotic Millionaires, wrote an article for the group’s Web site expressing support for Elizabeth Warren’s proposed wealth tax, which would impose a tariff of two per cent on fortunes greater than fifty million dollars and three per cent on those above a billion. (Warren recently doubled her proposed billion-plus tax rate, to six per cent.) The group helped develop a bill, introduced in the House of Representatives in November, that would impose a surtax on the country’s highest earners, and it is working on other legislation, including a bill that would raise the estate tax.
In July, the House passed another bill supported by the Millionaires, called the Raise the Wage Act, which would increase the federal hourly minimum wage to fifteen dollars by 2025 and would eliminate a law that permits tipped workers to be paid as little as two dollars and thirteen cents an hour. Judy Conti, the government-affairs director of the National Employment Law Project, one of the groups with which the Millionaires pushed for the bill, told me that, before the legislation was introduced, two hundred and three House members had indicated that they would support it—fifteen votes short of the number needed for Democratic leadership to introduce it for a vote.
The US Chamber of Commerce and other business groups argued that the bill would kill jobs. Many of the undecided members of Congress were moderate Democrats who supported raising the minimum wage but thought that fifteen dollars might be too high and worried about the consequences for small businesses in their states. The Patriotic Millionaires, working with several other organizations, made a list of around thirty undecided House members and identified those who might be especially receptive to business leaders who supported the bill. The group then contacted those members and their staffs. Conti said, of the Patriotic Millionaires, “They help us make the business case for the minimum wage and give moderate members a measure of the cover they need to vote yes. They will talk to members about how taking the high road is the best business strategy, how this is part of how we invest in our workers, that when we treat them better they work better for us—we have less turnover, higher productivity—and when workers in our community have more money in their pockets they spend it at our businesses.” The bill passed with thirteen more votes than it needed. When I asked her how impactful the group had been, she said, “When you’re looking for those last votes, it’s micro-targeting. If they can help deliver two members—and they helped deliver at least two members—they’re effective.”
Beginning in the early eighties, the remnants of the post-FDR era of social democracy gave way to the age of Ronald Reagan, which brought deregulation, tax cuts for the wealthy, and the promise that free-market capitalism would lead to widespread prosperity. In spite of ample evidence that the new system wasn’t working as anticipated, this ideology has dominated economic policymaking ever since. Sean Wilentz, a historian at Princeton, told me, “We live in a world where supply-side economics, which was always a fraud, became a religion.”
After the recession of 2008-09, the Occupy Wall Street protest movement focussed public attention on the financial industry and its influence on government. The anthropologist David Graeber, one of the movement’s early organizers, helped popularize the term “the ninety-nine per cent” to describe everyone who wasn’t among the wealthiest “one per cent,” a tiny group that controls forty per cent of the nation’s wealth. In 2014, the French economist Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-first Century, based on a decade of research into the distribution of wealth, became a surprise best-seller. Piketty argued that, without aggressive taxation, the very wealthy would continue to pull further ahead of everyone else. Abigail Disney told me that, although she didn’t get through all eight hundred and sixteen pages of the book, she “certainly got the gist of it, and the gist of it was really important.”
That year, the entrepreneur Nick Hanauer, one of the first investors in Amazon, gave a TED talk called “Beware, Fellow Plutocrats, the Pitchforks Are Coming.” After describing his multiple homes, his yacht, and his private plane, Hanauer argued that the US was at risk of becoming a neo-feudalist rentier society similar to France before the Revolution. In an essay in Politico, he wrote, “Revolutions, like bankruptcies, come gradually, and then suddenly. One day, somebody sets himself on fire, then thousands of people are in the streets, and before you know it, the country is burning. And then there’s no time for us to get to the airport and jump on our Gulfstream Vs and fly to New Zealand.”
In the past few years, many economists, including Emmanuel Saez and Gabriel Zucman, as well as Esther Duflo and Abhijit Banerjee, of MIT, have tried to demonstrate that extreme inequality can be reversed. In the lead-up to the 2020 elections, pundits and politicians on the left and right have been asking how best to fix capitalism. In January, the Fox News host Tucker Carlson spent fifteen minutes criticizing free-market capitalism as a system that exploits average people. Polls indicate that the number of Americans who support some form of socialism has risen dramatically. In March, during an interview on “Morning Joe,” the former Colorado governor John Hickenlooper, who was running for President as a business-friendly Democrat, refused to call himself a capitalist.
More business leaders have begun to say that inequality has reached dangerous levels. In April, Ray Dalio, the founder of the hundred-and-sixty-billion-dollar hedge fund Bridgewater Associates, posted a lengthy essay on LinkedIn in which he wrote that American workers in the bottom sixty per cent of earners have had no income growth, after adjusting for inflation, since 1980, while the incomes of the top ten per cent have doubled and those of the top one per cent have tripled. One graphic ranked wealthy countries in terms of the likelihood that a child born into the lowest economic quartile would move into the top quartile; the US was second to last, ahead of only China. Dalio warned that, if capitalism wasn’t drastically changed, the US would have “great conflict and some form of revolution that will hurt everyone.”
On April 10th, a video of Representative Katie Porter, of California, questioning Jamie Dimon, the CEO of JPMorgan Chase, went viral. Dimon had previously spoken about the many Americans “left behind,” noting that forty per cent of people in the US earned less than fifteen dollars an hour, and that the same percentage said that they didn’t have four hundred dollars in savings to deal with an emergency. JPMorgan Chase had just reported $9.2 billion in profit for the first quarter and almost thirty billion dollars in revenue; Dimon had been paid thirty-one million dollars the year before. Porter described the monthly budget of a hypothetical new employee at a Chase bank in Irvine, California—a single mother who was earning sixteen dollars and fifty cents an hour. After paying the rent for a one-bedroom apartment that she shared with her daughter, plus the costs of utilities, food, child care, and a basic cell phone, the woman, Porter said, had a five-hundred-and-sixty-dollar deficit each month. “My question for you, Mr. Dimon, is: How should she manage this budget shortfall while she’s working full time at your bank?” Porter said. Dimon seemed uncomfortable; he told Porter that he “would have to think about it.”
Dimon chairs the Business Roundtable, which represents the CEOs of America’s largest companies, and, in August, the group issued a statement proposing to redefine “the Purpose of a Corporation.” The group advised companies to take into account the interests of “all stakeholders,” including customers, employees, suppliers, and local communities. Although the statement was signed by dozens of CEOs, it lacked details or specific commitments, and some critics saw it as an attempt to preëmpt the most radical proposals from the Democratic Presidential candidates, such as banning stock buybacks and mandating that employees have a voice in selecting a company’s board of directors.
Over lunch at a vegan restaurant in Manhattan, Morris Pearl, a sturdy, unflappable man with a crown of white hair, who was wearing a windbreaker—he likes to travel around Manhattan by bicycle—told me that he decided to dedicate himself to the Patriotic Millionaires full time soon after making a business trip to Athens in the summer of 2013, during Greece’s economic crisis. He had been a member of the Patriotic Millionaires for some time, and had become so vocal about his view that top earners should be paying higher taxes that his day job, at BlackRock, where he specialized in valuing complex bonds, had become a bit awkward. He had travelled to Athens to meet with a group of international bankers who were trying to assign values to the defaulted loans of a Greek bank that was seeking a bailout from the International Monetary Fund. At a lunch meeting one day with the bankers, he was returning from the dessert table when he noticed a commotion on the street below. “I thought at first it was a parade,” he said. “Then I realized it was a demonstration in front of parliament.” He went on, “I turned around and looked at these twenty bankers, worrying about their capital and liquidity issues. I wondered if I was really doing anything to help people in Greece.”
Pearl also recalled a family vacation on Paradise Island, in the Bahamas, at a resort staffed by low-wage workers. One of his children said that the only people who seemed to enjoy their jobs there were the trainers who worked with the dolphins. “I hadn’t thought about it until my kids brought it up,” Pearl said. “I don’t want our country to end up like South Africa. If you recall, apartheid did not end well for the rich people or the poor people.”
For its first nine years, the Patriotic Millionaires operated out of Washington and New York. This year, the group expanded to the West Coast, in part to attract more members from the technology industry. Kelsea-Marie Pym, the group’s executive director, pointed out that California has been at the forefront of implementing the kinds of economic policies that the group wants to see enacted nationally. “Our goal is to begin to challenge the wealthy to understand that inequality is at such a destabilizing level right now that, by sitting on the sidelines, you’re effectively adding to the problem,” Pym said.
In mid-August, members of the Patriotic Millionaires gathered for one of the first meetings of the organization’s California chapter, at the Fremont Hills Country Club, between San Francisco and San Jose. Charles Simmons, a former executive at Sun Microsystems and NetApp, had arranged for the use of the space. He told me that his recent experience as a math tutor for high-school students in the poor community of East Palo Alto, along with Trump’s election, had spurred him to become more politically active. Simmons and about fifteen other people took seats around a banquet table decorated with white orchids. The first item on the agenda was the multimillionaire-surtax bill, which was expected to be introduced in the House. The tax would include a ten-per-cent surcharge on all income above two million dollars, raising the top tax rate from thirty-seven per cent of income to forty-seven per cent. It would also apply to investment income, including capital gains and dividends, addressing what many tax experts see as a crucial weakness in the current laws. Pym had prepared a fact sheet about the bill, along with a list of talking points that members could use to promote the tax.
“I have a marketing point,” Blaine Garst, an early Apple employee, with a bushy white beard and a long ponytail, said. “Instead of saying ‘multimillionaires,’ why not say ‘megamillionaires’? You don’t want to include farmers who have two million dollars of land. It’s about perception.” Garst’s comment set off a discussion about who qualified as rich. There was a quick exchange about the threshold for the “0.1 per cent,” which someone said was around thirty-two million dollars, and the “0.01 per cent,” which another person said was seven hundred million or eight hundred million dollars. Alan Davis, who runs a family foundation, said that, although polling has shown that people consider five hundred thousand dollars in income to be rich, two lawyers living together in an expensive city on that sum might not be truly wealthy. “People are trying to come up with the right kind of language,” he said. “Five hundred thousand is ‘affluent,’ two million is ‘rich,’ and ten million is ‘mega rich.’ ” Everyone agreed that it was a tricky issue.
Pearl spoke about some of the group’s recent victories, including its work helping to influence votes on the Raise the Wage Act. “Ideas that seemed crazy, such as a tax on wealth, are now part of the conversation, and our members can take some credit for pushing the needle in that direction,” he said. “I think our group, guided by our staff of seventeen people, is helping our members speak out and make their voices heard, letting them explain that, no, all you guys who read Ayn Rand and couldn’t find Chicago on a map actually don’t know quite as much about what it’s like to be rich as a bunch of actual Patriotic Millionaires who founded businesses, who funded startups, and who met payroll.”
After lunch, I spoke with William (Buz) Battle, a technology executive who told me that he had been raised in a Republican household but that the Trump Administration had driven him to the left. “With the way we’re headed, we need to do more. I need to do more,” he said. I asked him what worried him most. He glanced at his wife, Anne, who was standing next to him. “We could have—I don’t want to say it, but, riots,” he said. “ ‘Social unrest’ may be a better way of putting it. We’re making life bad for a lot of people. And it’s getting frigging nasty.”
Could inequality in the US really become so severe that it leads to social upheaval? I asked the Stanford historian Walter Scheidel, the author of the 2017 book The Great Leveler: Violence and the History of Inequality from the Stone Age to the Twenty-first Century, which argues that violence has been the “single most important means” of reducing, or levelling, wealth and income inequality throughout history. In his book, Scheidel goes back to the end of the Ice Age, when nomadic hunter-gatherer tribes settled into permanent dwellings, which for the first time allowed for the accumulation of wealth that could be passed on to heirs. His research suggests that inequality is inextricably linked to civilization.
America’s wealthy élites, when discussing class-based rebellion, often invoke the French Revolution. But, Scheidel said, that kind of disruption is fairly rare. He noted that levelling happens much more often because of the collapse of a state, such as the fall of the Roman Empire; because of deadly pandemics, like the black death of the thirteen-hundreds, which killed so many people that there were labor shortages and workers’ wages went up; and because of mass-mobilization warfare, such as the two World Wars. The French may have resolved some of their eighteenth-century economic injustices with the guillotine, but in many other countries across Europe the ruling classes retained power until they were dislodged by the turmoil of the First World War.
Scheidel told me that the extreme political polarization in the US is likely to continue but that the Patriotic Millionaires’ fears of violence are probably misplaced. “If they’re worried about wholesale collapse and people with pitchforks coming after them, history does not give any indication that that is around the corner,” he said. “States are too powerful. States are too good at monitoring dissent. The rich are rich enough to not put themselves in danger.” Scheidel said that America’s élites should be more concerned about their quality of life. He talked about organized crime, citing Brazil and other countries where members of the upper classes employ armed guards and worry that they or their children might be kidnapped. “That reduces your ability to enjoy your wealth in a civilized way,” he said. “You’d still have your stuff, but you’d be limited in your ability to make full use of it. If I were rich, I’d probably be worried about getting to that point.”
In September, I met Abigail Disney at her office in Manhattan, just a few blocks from where she lives. The walls are covered in framed photographs—of her children; of the Irish castle, which she now owns; and of meetings that she has had with the likes of Hillary Clinton, Barack Obama, and Meryl Streep. A sign on her desk reads “Feminist AF [Feminist as F***].” Disney has an alert, serious face and light-brown hair that falls in unruly curls; she was sitting cross-legged on a pink faux-leather couch and showed off a few of her tattoos, including a peace dove on the inside of her wrist. She has a slightly defensive way of talking about the comforts she enjoys. She sent her four children to private schools, but she doesn’t have a driver. She wears unremarkable clothes. More than once, she cited the Kardashians as a family who feels no shame about “throwing their money around.”
Disney told me that she had spent much of her early life feeling detached from her family, both culturally and politically. “They were Red-baiters,” she said. “Whenever two workers stood together and had a conversation, that was communism.” In 1941, when the Disney animators unionized and went on strike, Walt and Roy took it personally, and Abigail told me that the two men were resentful about it until they died. She said that they practiced a paternalistic form of capitalism, wanting to take care of their employees on their own terms.
Her parents were conservative. “My mother was Fox News before there was Fox News,” she said. When I asked Disney about her own politics, she said, “I really don’t know why I care about this. I really shouldn’t, given my upbringing. There is no reason why I should give a shit about poor people.” As an undergraduate at Yale, she was swept up in leftist movements on campus. “At first, it was about being among the cool people,” she admitted. A woman gave her a T-shirt featuring Che Guevara and the words “Viva Los Sandinistas,” the Nicaraguan socialist political party that the US had tried to overthrow by backing the right-wing Contras, leading to a decade of civil war in Nicaragua. She wore it constantly. “By the time I graduated from college, I understood that Ronald Reagan was not a good person,” she said. “And my parents worshipped the ground he walked on, so that became a very painful thing.”
At twenty-one, she gained access to part of her inheritance—between ten million and twenty million dollars—and made what she called a “conscious decision” to live apart from her family. “All of my college life and all of my twenties were spent in a painful process of separation,” she said. “I would describe it as no less than agonizing.” One of her brothers remained with the family, in Los Angeles, but Disney moved to New York, where she got a PhD in English literature at Columbia. She said that her parents were embarrassed and angered by her politics. Her father died in 2009, and her mother in 2012.
Her thirties were spent raising her children. Disney said that, when she was in her mid-forties, “I thought, I have no résumé. Why would anyone ever take me seriously? I understood myself to be a person who had no value.” She tried to start a career as a filmmaker, but no one gave much consideration to a Disney heiress. In 2007, she started a production company, Fork Films, which makes movies with a social-justice focus, and the following year she produced her first documentary, “Pray the Devil Back to Hell,” about a group of women who helped bring an end to the Liberian civil war. The film won several awards, including Best Documentary at the Tribeca Film Festival. One of its lead characters, Leymah Gbowee, won the 2011 Nobel Peace Prize.
Last year, Disney put together a bid to buy what was left of the Weinstein Company as it prepared to file for Chapter 11 protection. The deal didn’t go through, and instead she co-founded a company called Level Forward, which funds film, theatre, and TV productions led by women and people of color; the company’s first projects included investments in critically acclaimed Broadway shows like “What the Constitution Means to Me,” the 2019 revival of “Oklahoma!,” and “Slave Play.” She said that she is working on a documentary “about economic inequality and the relentless march over the last fifty years toward treating workers incredibly badly.” When I asked her whether the Disney Company would be a part of it, she declined to answer.
When Erica Payne tracked Disney down one day and urged her to join the Patriotic Millionaires, Disney said to herself, “That’s exactly how I want to use the currency that I have.” She has become one of the group’s most outspoken members. In December, 2017, she appeared in a video attacking the Republican tax bill. In July, 2018, she hosted, with the minister and activist William Barber, a Patriotic Millionaires media conference call to celebrate the passage of the minimum-wage bill in the House.
She sometimes exaggerates. In an interview with Yahoo News this past July, she said that Disney employees had been so underpaid that they were forced to “forage for food in other people’s garbage,” a claim that she later retracted. At a time when political activists are expected to live according to their values, Disney’s role as an ultra-wealthy spokesperson for the underclass makes her a target of vitriol. In late September, someone tweeted at her, “Boy do I despise virtue signaling rich liberal hypocrites living off the money earned by their far better ancestors. Bet you live in a luxury apt in NYC! Why don’t you renounce your corporate grandad’s money and give it ALL away! You never will . . . HYPOCRITE!”
Disney and I discussed another Patriotic Millionaires member, Chuck Collins, the Oscar Mayer heir, who, in 1985, at the age of twenty-six, gave his inheritance away to various environmental and civil-rights organizations. In Disney’s twenties and early thirties, she had considered doing the same. “Honestly, the only reason I didn’t do it was that I was chicken,” she said. “I wish I was a more courageous person.” Over time, she told me, her wealth has grown, and she’s been able to give away much more than she would have if she’d donated it all back then. (She said that her net worth is a hundred and forty million dollars, and that she has given away around sixty-five million dollars. The number is hard to verify; she said that much of it was in the form of grants to social-justice-oriented filmmakers and to organizations that work with low-income populations.) She pointed out that her name and wealth are what enable her to talk about poverty in the first place. If she were an unknown person with less money, she said, TV networks wouldn’t invite her on the air.
I asked her how she felt about the pledge that billionaires such as Buffett and Bill Gates had signed, promising to donate at least half of their fortunes to philanthropic causes. “I’ve given away much more than fifty per cent of my net worth, and I don’t intend to stop,” she said. “And, frankly, if you’re a billionaire and only want to give away half of your fortune, something is wrong with you.” Disney is wary of the idea that the generosity of individual rich people can solve society’s problems. Anand Giridharadas, the author of Winners Take All: The Elite Charade of Changing the World (2018), has argued that much philanthropy does far more to boost the reputations of the donors than it does to help create a more just society. Such gifts also tend to come with generous tax breaks, meaning that taxpayers are underwriting the donations that get hedge-fund moguls’ names put on wings of art museums and hospitals. Instead, Disney wants to convince more people that systemic change is needed. “I get messages like ‘You don’t know what you’re talking about, you’ve never worked a day in your life!’ ” she told me. “And I’m, like, You’re making my point! I’ve never worked a day in my life, and look at me! I’m sitting here in total comfort. You can work all your life and you will never find yourself where I am today.” She said that she doesn’t blame people for being resentful: “I will always be sort of an alien anthropologist looking at poverty from my very rarefied air.”
In September, I joined Disney at a dinner to celebrate the twenty-fifth anniversary of United for a Fair Economy [UFE], a nonprofit, co-founded by Chuck Collins, that works on economic-justice issues. The dinner was held in the community room of the Old South Church, on Boylston Street, in Boston. After a guided meditation and a rap-and-saxophone performance by the trans activist and musician Jay-Marie Hill, Disney was to be presented with UFE’s inaugural Class Traitor Award.
For most of the evening, Disney sat at a table near the front of the room, her brow furrowed, scribbling notes on a stack of papers that contained the text of her speech. She wore a navy-blue dress with white skulls printed on it, her tortoiseshell glasses sliding down her nose. Others in the room were helping themselves to rice and beans, but Disney told me that she was too nervous to eat. Instead, she drank a few glasses of Chardonnay. Finally, shortly after 9 PM, three hours into the proceedings, she was introduced by Mike Lapham, a tall, wiry man who heads UFE’s Responsible Wealth project. Lapham spoke about Disney’s support for preserving the estate tax, and how she had helped push for a millionaire tax in New York. “She’s passionate, she’s fearless, she’s fierce,” Lapham said. “She’s an inspiration to so many other rich people to become class traitors.”
As the audience applauded, Disney climbed onstage, clutching her notes. “I love every single person in here,” she said. “I came from a place that shouldn’t have led me here, and, every time I find myself being led here one way or another, it feels so good to be alive. I just want to thank all of you for the work that you do, and the way that the work that you do gives me meaning.” For a moment, the room was quiet, and there was a sense, as there sometimes is when Disney is talking about her wealth and her ambitions, that she might have misread the room. But Disney, who is mostly aware of the unease she causes, tries to use it to her advantage. She looked into the crowd and said, “Now I’m going to start the official part of my speech, and I want to watch you all squirm when I say it. Are you ready?” She paced in a small circle, then leaned toward the audience. “I’m riiiich,” she intoned. She paused before asking, “Did I make you all really uncomfortable?” The shame attached to such an admission, she said, has motivated rich people to isolate themselves from the rest of society: “In their hearts, they know that something is inherently wrong with what they have, as compared with what everybody else has.” She said that she was hopeful that the country was finally waking up from a “fifty-year fever dream” of market-driven economic policy. After her speech, Lapham presented her with a plaque bearing a quote attributed to the aboriginal artist Lilla Watson: “If you have come to help me, you are wasting your time. But if you have come because your liberation is bound up with mine, then let us work together.”
Later that night, Disney boarded a JetBlue flight back to New York. She had been running from meeting to meeting since early that morning, pulling a pink Wonder Woman suitcase behind her. On the flight, she started talking about how we got to the current moment in American politics, naming figures ranging from Martin Luther King, Jr., to Margaret Thatcher and Milton Friedman. She recalled a conversation that she’d had, in 2013, with David Keene, who was the president of the National Rifle Association from 2011 to 2013. Disney had asked him what he was proudest of. He told her, “We flipped the script on guns in America.” She took heart in the simplicity of his answer: if the script could be flipped one way, then surely it could be flipped back. She said that groups like the Patriotic Millionaires, and people like Erica Payne and Chuck Collins, “are tiny little ants in this fight” in terms of their total resources. But the other side is selling “a load of bullshit,” she said. “If what you’re selling is bullshit, then you need a shovel, and if what you’re selling is truth you really only need a teaspoon.”
She spoke admiringly of the activists who populated the social-justice world. “If I feel good, that doesn’t undermine the credibility of what I do,” she said. “And I do feel good doing it. I am the happiest rich lady you will ever meet.” Why, I asked Disney, did she have faith that things would get better, when there was so much evidence to the contrary? “I always keep coming back to the idea that you just keep investing in the future,” she said. “Despair would be easier if I were less comfortable. But, if I were to lose my hope, where does that leave the people around me? I feel a responsibility. I don’t know how to do it any other way.” ###
[Sheelah Kolhatkar is a staff writer at The New Yorker, where she writes about Wall Street, Silicon Valley, economics, and politics. She has written about the Uber C.E.O. Dara Khosrowshahi, the billionaire hedge-fund founder Paul Singer, the rise of artificial intelligence, and the future of the American worker. She appears regularly as a commentator on business and political issues and is a contributor to the New York City public-radio station WNYC and to American Public Media’s “Marketplace.” Previously, she was a features editor and national correspondent at Bloomberg Businessweek, where her work was honored with a New York Press Club award. Her writing has also appeared in New York magazine, The Atlantic, the Times, the Times Book Review, and other publications. She is the author of Black Edge: Inside Information, Dirty Money, and the Quest to Bring Down the Most Wanted Man on Wall Street (2017). Sheelah Kolhatkar receved a BFA (writing) from New York University (NYC) and an MA (English) from Stanford University (CA).]
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