5/25/2016 Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal With Income Inequality - The New York Times

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SundayReview | OPINION

Capitalists, Arise: We Need to DealWith Income InequalityBy PETER GEORGESCU AUG. 7, 2015

I’M scared. The billionaire hedge funder Paul Tudor Jones is scared. My friendKen Langone, a founder of the Home Depot, is scared. So are many other chiefexecutives. Not of Al Qaeda, or the vicious Islamic State or some otherevolving radical group from the Middle East, Africa or Asia. We are afraidwhere income inequality will lead.

For the top 20 percent of Americans, life is pretty good.

But 40 percent are broke. Every year they spend more than they have.

While so many people are struggling, even those on the higher end of themiddle class have relatively little after paying the bills: on average, some$1,300 a month. One leaky roof and they’re in trouble.

If inequality is not addressed, the income gap will most likely be resolvedin one of two ways: by major social unrest or through oppressive taxes, such asthe 80 percent tax rate on income over $500,000 suggested by ThomasPiketty, the French economist and author of the best-selling book “Capital inthe Twenty-First Century.”

We are creating a caste system from which it’s almost impossible to

5/25/2016 Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal With Income Inequality - The New York Times

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escape, except for the few with exceptional brains, athletic skills or luck. That’swhy I’m scared. We risk losing the capitalist engine that brought us greateconomic success and our way of life.

Ken Langone and I both feel very grateful to this country, and we havebeen meeting with chief executives, trying to get action on inequality.

This country has given me remarkable opportunities. I am an off-the-boatimmigrant, having arrived in the United States as a teenager from Romania in1954. I had been separated from my parents when I was 7 because they hadtraveled to the United States and could not return to Romania when it wastaken over by the Soviet Union. When I was about 10 I was placed in a hard-labor camp along with my 15-year-old brother. With the help of the Americanpeople and the intervention of President Dwight D. Eisenhower, we werereunited with our parents after five years in the camp. Through kindness andcompassion, I was invited by the headmaster of Phillips Exeter Academy toattend his school. From there I went to Princeton and the Stanford BusinessSchool.

During more than 50 years in the marketing, advertising and publicrelations business, I was helped by many kind people to fulfill the Americandream.

Ken Langone was the first in his family to finish high school and attendcollege. His grandfather made a living in Italy with his hands. He has beensuccessful in business as well as in philanthropy. New York UniversityHospital became the NYU Langone Medical Center.

Would young people like Ken and me get those opportunities now? I don’tthink so.

Who will be courageous enough to start the ball rolling? The most obviouschoice is our government. But the current Congress has been paralyzed.

5/25/2016 Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal With Income Inequality - The New York Times

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We business leaders know what to do. But do we have the will to do it?Are we willing to control the excessive greed so prevalent in our culture todayand divert resources to better education and the creation of more opportunity?

Business has the most to gain from a healthy America, and the most tolose by social unrest or punitive taxation. Business can start the process in twosteps. First, invest in the actual value creators — the employees. Startcompensating fairly, by which I mean a wage that enables employees to shareamply in productivity increases and creative innovations.

The fact that real wages have been flat for about four decades, whileproductivity has increased by 80 percent, shows that has not been happening.Before the early 1970s, wages and productivity were both rising. Now mostgains from productivity go to shareholders, not employees.

Second, businesses must invest aggressively in their own operations,directing profit into productivity and innovation to boost real businessperformance. Today, too many corporations reduce investment in researchand development and brand building. As a result, we see a general decline inthe value of their brands and other assets. To make up for those declines andfor anemic revenues, businesses buy back their stock (now at record levels)and thus artificially boost earnings per share.

Someone must break the ice; someone must lead. Companies includingHome Depot, Costco Wholesale, Whole Foods, Publix, Qualcomm, Starbucksand Gravity Payments are taking small steps, and compensating employeesmore. These are the green shoots we need. Similar changes must be made bymany more businesses.

As Ken and I talk to business leaders and try to drum up support for ourcause, we find almost unanimous agreement on the nature of the problem andthe urgent need for solutions. That’s the good news. Our concern is action. Wehave been told by chief executives that to pay employees more fairly, they needmore support from their boards, from prominent business leaders, from the

5/25/2016 Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal With Income Inequality - The New York Times

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media and even from the government, to combat the intense market pressureto maximize short-term shareholder returns.

So while we celebrate those who do the right thing, how can we movemore businesses and chief executives to act now? We really don’t want civilunrest or an 80 percent tax rate to jar us into action.

There is a way to start. Government can provide tax incentives to businessto pay more to employees making $80,000 or less. The program would existfor three to five years and then be evaluated for effectiveness.

The benefits would be huge. People would have more money to spend,and many would no longer need government help. That would mean areduction in entitlements.

Finally, that other America, the one that hasn’t been able to climb out ofdebt, will know that help is coming — not as an increase in governmentsupport, but as a fairer way to share in the hard work and incremental value abusiness generates. As has been proved again and again, shareholders alsowin, because satisfied employees produce better results.

Is this idea simply pie in the sky? Not really. Senator Mark R. Warner,Democrat of Virginia, is working on a somewhat similar bipartisan plan tointroduce in Congress. I don’t know yet what it would cost. But not actingwould be far more costly. The urgency is clear. A fair and responsible freeenterprise system is still the best engine ever invented to create opportunityand a higher standard of living.

PETER GEORGESCU is the chairman emeritus of Young & Rubicam, who is atwork on a book about the death of the middle class.

Next week Mr. Georgescu will answer reader questions about what businessleaders can do to fight income inequality. Leave a question for him in thecomments with this article or on the Times Opinion Facebook page. Update: Mr.Georgescu’s Q. & A. with readers.

5/25/2016 Capitalists, Arise: We Need to Deal With Income Inequality - The New York Times

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A version of this oped appears in print on August 9, 2015, on page SR6 of the New York editionwith the headline: Capitalists, Arise.

© 2016 The New York Times Company

7/10/2016 Editorial: Black Students' Lives Matter • Building the school to justice pipeline

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CONTENTSVol. 29, No.3Spring 2015

COVER THEME:RHYTHM ANDRESISTANCE

Celebrating SkinTone • The scienceand poetry of skincolorBY KATHARINEJOHNSON

Other People’sLives • Personapoems teach insightand empathyBY LINDACHRISTENSEN

“I Am a Feather” • “IAm” poems basedon “The DelightSong of TsoaiTalee”BY BOB PETERSON

FEATURES

They DeserveGood Teaching, Too• Social justice in aclassroom forstudents withautismBY LEANNACAROLLO

Ellos tambiénmerecen una buenaenseñanza • Lajusticia social en unsalón para niñoscon autismoPOR LEANNACAROLLO,TRADUCIDO PORNICHOLASYURCHENCO

The Koch BrothersSneak into School •Rightwingbillionaires buy theirway into socialstudies classesBY BILL BIGELOW

A Tale of TwoDistricts: The LongReach and DeepPockets ofCorporate ReformBY STAN KARP

DEPARTMENTS

EditorialBlack Students’Lives Matter •Building the schooltojustice pipeline

Black Students’ Lives MatterBuilding the schooltojustice pipeline

BY THE EDITORS OF RETHINKING SCHOOLS

David Bacon

We’re at a tipping point. The killings of Trayvon Martin, Jordan Davis, Mike Brown,Tamir Rice, Renisha McBride—and far too many other African Americans—have put torest the myth of a “postracial” America. In death, these Black youth—shot down withimpunity because of the color of their skin—have provided a tragically thorougheducation about police terror and institutional racism, and ignited the Black Lives Mattermovement.

The hashtag #BlackLivesMatter was originally created by queer Black women activists Alicia Garza, PatrisseCullors, and Opal Tometi as a call to action after George Zimmerman was acquitted of the murder of TrayvonMartin in July 2013. Their battle cry went viral and then turned into a national uprising when Darren Wilson, apolice officer in Ferguson, Missouri, killed Michael Brown, an unarmed Black teenager. The movement explodedwhen Staten Island police officer Daniel Pantaleo was not indicted for choking to death Eric Garner.

As the Black Lives Matter movement has grown, Black students have played a pivotal role. For example, atSeattle’s Garfield High School, some 1,000 students, led by the Black Student Union (BSU), walked out the dayafter the nonindictment of Wilson was announced. As 17yearold Issa George, vice president of the GarfieldBSU, told the Seattle Times: “This is our time, as youth, to speak. . . . The waking up that America has done in thepast couple of months—something that us as youth get to witness and get to be a part of—has been extremelypowerful.”

College, high school, and even middle school students have staged protests and school walkouts in cities aroundthe country. According to reporting by the Nation’s George Joseph and others, student activists of the BaltimoreAlgebra Project held a diein when their local school board voted to shut down the first of five schools. The boardfled, and the students took over their chairs to lead a community forum on the closures.

Black students take these risks because they know their lives and futures are at stake—from police violence onthe street; from the dismantling of their communities through foreclosures, gentrification, and unemployment; andfrom the destruction of their schools through corporate reform.

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Short Stuff

Long IslandTeacher BoycottsCommon CoreTests

Charter DisciplineRules Don’t MeetCodes

Black Girls Matter

SF CatholicSchools Fight New“Morality Clauses”

New MexicoStudents ProtestPARCC

In Memoriam

RememberingHarold Berlak

Resources

Our picks for books,videos, websites,and other socialjustice educationresources

Good Stuff

Fairy Tales RetoldBY ELIZABETHMARSHALL

Got an idea for anarticle? Got a letterfor us? Contact JodySokolower: jody@rethinkingschools.org

The SchooltoGrave Pipeline

For the past decade, social justice educators have decried the schooltoprison pipeline: a series of interlockingpolicies—whitewashed, often scripted curriculum that neglects the contributions and struggles of people of color;zero tolerance and racist suspension and expulsion policies; and highstakes tests—that funnel kids from theclassroom to the cellblock. But, with the recent highprofile deaths of young African Americans, a “schooltogravepipeline” is coming into focus. Mike Brown had just graduated from high school and was preparing to go to collegewhen police killed him. According to a 2012 investigation by the Malcolm X Grassroots Movement, a Black personis killed by law enforcement, security guards, or vigilantes every 28 hours. A recent ProPublica report found that“Blacks, age 15 to 19, were killed at a rate of 31.17 per million, while just 1.47 per million white males in that agerange died at the hands of police.”

The Black Lives Matter movement inspires us to fight the schooltograve pipeline as an example of structuralracism, after decades in which antiracism has been defined in excessively personal terms through antibias ordiversity training. Antibias work focuses primarily, and often exclusively, on internal and interpersonal racism. Inother words, if you strive to not be racist in your personal relationships, that’s good enough.

There is definitely a place for personal reflection and discussion of racist attitudes and beliefs. And there is nodoubt that many individual police officers need antibias training and to be held responsible for their actions. Butthat’s not enough, as the statistics on police violence, incarceration, school suspension and dropout rates,inequitable school financing, and school closures make clear. These are all sharp indicators of structural racism.When Michelle Alexander says mass incarceration is “the new Jim Crow,” she insists that the racist structures thathave existed since slavery have mutated and changed, but they have not been eradicated. We can’t understand,teach about, or change what’s happening in this country if we don’t face this fact. And our students know that.Being an effective teacher in today’s society means taking the Black Lives Matter movement seriously.

For all the “students first” rhetoric of the corporate education reformers—who claim their policies are directed atclosing the “achievement gap”—they are conspicuously absent from the Black Lives Matter movement. In fact, thecorporate reform agenda is in direct conflict with the goals of the movement. In city after city, Black students arethose most affected by the decimation of neighborhood schools, the “no excuses” discipline and rote teaching ofcharters like KIPP, the substitution of endless test prep for meaningful curriculum, and the imposition of twoyearsandI’mgone Teach For America corps members on our highest needs students.

Black Lives Matter doesn’t just mean Black people don’t want to be shot down in the streets by unaccountablepolice. As antiracist teachers and students, we need to expand the slogan to include:

Stop closing schools in Black neighborhoods.

Fund schools equitably.

Support African American studies programs and substantive multicultural curriculum.

When activists staged a Black Lives Matter diein in Detroit last December, Will Daniels, from United StudentsAgainst Sweatshops, told the Nation: “As a Black student, my rationale for doing the diein was that structuralracism causes not only police brutality, but also the starving of majority Black schools. This is a subtler form ofviolence.”

Let Black Children Be Children

The murder of Tamir Rice exposes a connection between individual racism and structural racism with importantimplications for teachers. Tamir was only 12 years old when police showed up at the Cleveland park where he wasplaying with a toy gun and shot him down within two seconds of their arrival. When his 14yearold sister ran over,she was tackled to the ground and handcuffed. The officer who called in the shooting described Tamir to thedispatcher as a “Black male, maybe 20.”

Overestimating the age, size, and culpability of Black children is a widespread phenomenon, according to TheEssence of Innocence: Consequences of Dehumanizing Black Children, based on research led by Phillip AtibaGoff and Matthew Christian Jackson of UCLA. One of their studies involved 264 mostly white femaleundergraduates who were asked to assess the age and innocence of white, Black, and Latino boys. The studentssaw the Black boys as more culpable and overestimated their age by 4.5 years. “Perceptions of the essentialnature of children can be affected by race and, for Black children, this can mean they lose the protection affordedby assumed childhood innocence well before they become adults,” said Jackson. “Black children may be viewedas adults when they’re just 13 years old.”

It’s not much of a stretch to see how this affects Black children in schools where the majority of their teachers arenot African American. Any time teachers or administrators see Black children as older than they are, “just beingteenagers” (or preteens, or little kids) becomes something threatening that has to be controlled or disciplined.

7/10/2016 Editorial: Black Students' Lives Matter • Building the school to justice pipeline

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How can children grow and learn if the adults around them see them as older and “guiltier” than they are? Whatwill it take for school communities to eradicate this deeply embedded prejudice?

Why Not “All Lives Matter?”

As the Black Lives Matter movement has grown, some participants have questioned whether “All Lives Matter” isa more inclusive slogan. Although we recognize the serious impact of racism and other forms of oppression onmany groups of people in the United States, we think it’s important to understand and talk with others about thehistorical and current realities behind this specific demand. As Alicia Garza, one of the movement’s originators,explains:

When we say Black Lives Matter, we are talking about the ways in which Black people are deprived of our basic humanrights and dignity. . . . It is an acknowledgment that one million Black people are locked in cages in this country. . . . It is anacknowledgment that Black women continue to bear the burden of a relentless assault on our children and our families. . . .#BlackLivesMatter doesn’t mean your life isn’t important—it means that Black lives, which are seen as without value withinWhite supremacy, are important to your liberation. Given the disproportionate impact state violence has on Black lives, weunderstand that when Black people in this country get free, the benefits will be widereaching and transformative for societyas a whole.

A civil disobedience demonstration that closed down the federal building in Oakland during Martin Luther King Jr.weekend highlighted the connections. Behind a banner reading “Third World for Black Power,” protesters identifiedthemselves as Arabs, Filipinas/os, Latinas/os, Koreans, Chinese, Palestinians, and South Asians “for Blackresistance.” As Filipina activist Rhonda Ramiro said: “The wealth accumulated through the enslavement of Blackpeople in the United States enabled the United States to go around the world and colonize countries like thePhilippines. We see our struggle for independence as linked 100 percent.”

Within that framework, how teachers apply this understanding will obviously vary from classroom to classroom,depending on how old the children are, their experience and knowledge about the issues involved, and the level ofcommunity that has been built in the classroom.

How to Make Black Lives Matter in Our Schools

So what does all this mean in individual classrooms and schools? Here are a few ideas for bringing Black LivesMatter into our teaching:

1. Provide a social justice, antiracist curriculum that gives students the historical grounding, literacy skills, andspace to explore the emotional intensity of feelings around the murder of Black youth by police. At the same time,deep discussion of these heavy issues needs to build on strong classroom community. Students can’t launch intodiscussions of racism without a basis of trust and sharing among students and between students and teacher.That is the slow, steady work of meaningful classroom conversation, purposeful group work, reading and writingabout critical social and personal issues, shared writing, and more. Teachers need to nurture communities ofmutual respect and empathy.

2. Support students who want to have conversations about the Black Lives Matter movement outside theclassroom, in school forums or school clubs. Educators supporting the work of BSUs in schools across the countryhave helped transform the school climate. Black students’ sense of pride and selfworth have helped ignite thisnew civil rights movement.

3. Raise the Black Lives Matter movement with other teachers at our schools and in our unions. It’s not enough toprovide students with historical lessons. History is being made today by teachers planning Black Student LivesMatter forums and dieins, advocating for hiring more Black teachers, and participating in many other actionsaround the country.

This is the moment social justice educators have been waiting for. When pro football players ran onto the field withtheir hands up in a demonstration of solidarity with the “Hands Up, Don’t Shoot” protests that followed MichaelBrown’s murder, some people in the audience supported them; others were opposed. But everyone knew whatthey meant. This is a sea change. The topic of police violence against Black people and systemic racism is on thetable in a way it hasn’t been for a generation. It’s time to put aside the test prep and build a schooltojusticepipeline.

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HOUSEHOLD INCOME IN THE U.S. (modification of Dr. Felton-Koestler, 2014 activity- http://www.todos-math.org/assets/TODOSconference2014/Presenter_Handouts/felton%20-%20todos%202014%20-%20handout%201%20-%20income%20lesson1.pdf)

1. Examine the household incomes (individual bags) within your quintile. What do you notice?

2. Imagine that each household in your quintile made exactly the same amount of money. a. How much would each household make? Show how you can use the blocks to solve this

problem. b. Do you know the mathematical name for the quantity you found? c. Fill in Tables 1 and 2 below by talking to the other quintiles (other tables in the room). d. You can find the actual values from 2014 (most recent available) in table “H-3 All Races” at

https://www.census.gov/data/tables/time-series/demo/income-poverty/historical-income-households.html

Lowest

quintile Second quintile

Third quintile Fourth quintile Highest quintile

Top 5%

If each household earned the same

233,000

Table 1. Approximation of U.S. Income for Black households Lowest

quintile Second quintile

Third quintile Fourth quintile Highest quintile

Top 5%

If each household earned the same

342,000

Table 2. Approximation of U.S. Income for White households

Table 3 shows the household incomes for all 20 bags/households for Blacks. “Household” 1 “Household” 2 “Household” 3 “Household” 4 First 1000 4000 10000 12000 Second 12000 17000 22000 29000 Third 27000 31000 38000 47000 Fourth 45000 52000 60000 79000 Fifth 76,000 113000 124000 233000

Table 3. Our Household Incomes for Blacks -2014

Table 4 shows the household incomes for all 20 bags/households for Whites.

Table 4. Our Household Incomes for Whites – 2014

3. Find the 2014 median U.S. household income for Black and White households (use tables 3 and 4).

a. What do you notice about these values? What does it mean for Black and White households?

4. What additional observations can you make about the household incomes of Black and White families?

Quintile “Household” 1 “Household” 2 “Household” 3 “Household” 4 First 4000 10000 17000 21000 Second 26000 32000 34000 41000 Third 49000 53000 60000 67000 Fourth 76000 84000 93000 112000 Fifth 121,000 161000 174000 342000

Hou

Income vs. Wealth

5. What observations can you make within and between the two graphs below? What kinds of questions could you ask? What mathematics would you do to answer them? What additional data could help you further this inquiry?

6. Given this exploration, what can/will you do?

Hou