NEW YORK (RNS) Never mind the homeless lining up for food at East 51st Street and Park Avenue in midtown Manhattan.
Never mind high vacancy rates at nearby office towers caused by companies folding and jobs evaporating.
Never mind abandoned shops and shuttered restaurants.
Never mind a 17.5 percent functional unemployment rate, or a rising tide of foreclosures, or families forced into personal bankruptcies, or states so broke that they are eviscerating public education.
At East 55th and Park, customers are back at the dealership mulling $320,000 Ferraris and $135,000 Maseratis. With financial firms set to resume mega-bonuses, as if the Great Recession caused by their incompetence and greed had never happened, the race to buy expensive toys is on again.
Seven-figure bonuses are once again bidding up multimillion-dollar brownstones and apartments, with buyers paying cash for them. Always the trendsetter in wretched excess, Donald Trump is said to be angling for a $12 million jet costing $2,500 an hour to operate. Buyers were out in force at the year’s big yacht show in Fort Lauderdale, Fla.
With three investment firms on Wall Street set to award $30 billion in bonuses this year and overall incentive pay in the clubby financial industry estimated to rise 40 percent, it’s clear that last year’s debacles merely weeded out weak firms like Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns and left Uncle Sam holding the bag on toxic assets. They did nothing to challenge the avarice that led financial managers to play high-stakes poker with Americans’ hard-earned wealth.
How can New York financial types be so clueless and heedless?
For one thing, their behavior has a long history. Fabled financier J.P. Morgan is said to have launched his fortune by selling defective rifles to the Union Army at a 700 percent markup. Robber barons like Henry Clay Frick, Andrew Carnegie, James B. Duke, and John D. Rockefeller bought respectability late in life, but they built their fortunes by virtually enslaving their workers and by rigging monopolies.
Even as America sank into a Great Depression that they had a large hand in causing, New York’s tycoons built skyscrapers, opened grand hotels like The Pierre, lined Fifth Avenue with lavish apartment buildings, and lived large.
Today, with 45 billionaires, New York City has the worst income disparity in the nation, with the top 5 percent earning an average compensation of nearly $900,000 a year and the bottom 5 percent averaging only $13,000. Left tattered is the social contract that saw wealth as having community obligations. Leading philanthropists admit that today’s giving is about prestige and dodging accusations of greed, not social responsibility.
Even their own churches are struggling to stay afloat, as deep-pocket givers cut their pledges and walk away from urgent appeals for capital to build endowments. Major Midtown churches favored by the wealthy for weddings and funerals are on the verge of financial collapse.
Now is the time for churches to stop courting the ultra-wealthy and avoiding Gospel candor about money. Preachers need to follow the example of Jesus and call the rich to account. Better to lose pledges that were comparatively small to begin with than to lend an aura of respectability to avarice.
Even more, we need to show the wealthy that the “straight and narrow” is a path marked by generosity, self-sacrifice and compassion, not a beeline to the Ferrari dealership.
(Tom Ehrich is a writer, church consultant and Episcopal priest based in New York. He is the author of “Just Wondering, Jesus,” and the founder of the Church Wellness Project, http://www.churchwellness.com. His Web site is http://www.morningwalkmedia.com.)
