Category Archives: muttering to myself

Why So Many Kids in Slums Get Shot

We live in a society where a monetary value is placed on every life.  The lives of those who are born wealthy are placed on a much higher level than the lives of those who are born poor.   Better health care for their pregnant mothers, better places to live, better schools, better food.  When the kids are teenagers, the children of the wealthy are firmly on one track, the children of the poor are on the other.  

It becomes clearer and clearer to those born in slums that life in America is not necessarily a meritocracy where anyone can win the lottery.  They learn quickly that there are winners and losers, and the odds against them winning anything are maybe 1,000 to 1.  Kids start to give into despair: drugs, making as much money as possible on the streets, carrying guns, getting pregnant, shooting other kids who they perceive as disrespecting them.

We can say that it has always been so, but rarely has the difference in outcomes been so stark or the violence and hopelessness kids in poverty face so brutal.  The children of the poor have less opportunity than they did 40 years ago while the children of the rich, as a group and individually, are fantastically richer.

I don’t know where Jay Z grew up, but I know he is married to one of the most beautiful and famous women in the world, is a millionaire many times over and recently started a side business as an agent to the stars.  His first client Robinson Cano, recently signed a $240,000,000 contract to play second base for the Seattle Mariners.   Jay Z defied the experts in securing this huge ten year contract for his 31 year-old client, who had been offered more money per year by his team, the Yankees.  Jay took his percentage of $240M instead of a piece of $175M.  In the American schema, he won big time, got his client what nobody thought he could, a contract many feel will become an albatross for the team that committed to paying a 39, 40 and 41 year-old $24,000,000 a year for his services.

I saw the clip of Robbie at a news conference in Seattle, looking hurt, explaining why he didn’t sign with the Yankees, his first choice to play for.   It took me a couple of days to make the connection, and then to begin shuddering anew at the horror, the goddamned horror, of the society we live in.

“I felt the Yankees disrespected me,” said Cano, looking truly sad about it.

The Yankees as an organization have always been jerks, big time, more often than not they act like the corporate assholes they are.  But I wondered about a raise from $15,000,000 to $25,000,000 a year being a sign of disrespect.   Then it hit me.  Jay Z.

That’s how an agent wins, getting his client the biggest contract, period.  Jay needed to make a splash in his new business.  If his net worth is, say, $50,000,000, you can understand why he’d want to add some zeros to that as quickly and publicly as he can– it’s a matter of respect.  (I just googled my man’s net worth– the bitch is worth $500,000,000 according to Forbes– same thing applies about adding zeroes, he’s only halfway to being a billionaire, after all).

“Nah, Robbie, they don’t respect you, man,” I can hear Jay Z telling the impressionable Cano as the negotiations started.  Jay Z and his Yankee hat, Jay throws the hat on the floor.  “True, and I’m sad to say it, you know I love the Yankees, but Ellsbury for virtually what they are offering you?   Are they pulling our dicks, Robbie?  Ellsbury for Cano?  Really?”  Jay is no doubt a persuasive man with a story, hitting that note of disrespect like the master Hip Hop producer he is, and at the end of the day, as they say, he was cashing his share of $240M rather than the insulting $175M the star’s current team was offering.

Now Robbie will cash a winning two million dollar lottery ticket every month for the next 120 months, instead of just for the next 84.  Big difference, right Jay?

The principle of the thing makes me want to holler, like whenever I see a great actor on a TV commercial.  The guy made $15,000,000 on his last movie.  “Oh, but he probably got a million bucks to make this 30 second spot, it took him an hour, and he gets a check every time the commercial airs.  Why wouldn’t he do it?”

The only reason I can think of is to send the message, no matter how quietly, that not every person who has talent and becomes rich is a whore.   Or maybe to send the message that one can be content to win the lottery every few weeks, without making an extra million on the side whenever possible.  Or, I don’t know, because so many kids in the slums are killing each other because we live in a society with only one value— get as much as you can and don’t worry about losers calling you greedy– and they ain’t never going to amount to much by that vicious bottom line.

I hate to agree with the haters

OK, admittedly, this country is a little bit messed up when it comes to health care.  Health benefits for most Americans are tied to their employment, ideally, unless your employer is big enough, or small enough, to avoid paying into it.  Employees of Walmart, America’s largest retail employer, qualify for Medicaid.  Is this a great country, or what?

But it’s beyond that, Americans pay by far the highest price for health care with very mediocre health outcomes.  45,000 Americans die every year of treatable conditions undiagnosed until the ER docs tighten their lips, shake their heads.  Millions of Americans with preventable diseases are treated at a cost of billions of dollars a year, 75% of US Health Care costs go to treating complications of obesity, gluttony, poverty, stupidity.   Insurance companies don’t like to pay for preventative care, why would they?

Many believe that the gigantic federal government is the problem. Forget the many problems the federal government has historically solved, like a century of lynching of blacks in the former Confederacy.   Like the terror of a penniless old age, solved by Social Security, medical bankruptcies for old people ended by Medicare.

And yet the wealthiest and greediest continue to beat the drums that tax is evil and the government is the enemy of the people, a libidinous rapist poised to have its way with good, honest, God-fearing, dumber than shit Americans.   Air pollution?  A lie.  Man’s contribution to global warming?  Commie twaddle by disloyal Americans who hate our freedom.  The Affordable Care Act?  The most destructive legislation in U.S. History, we are told over and over, without elaboration.   The facts speak for themselves, after all.  Say them often, and loudly, enough and they start to sink in.

The president was elected after a brilliant advertising campaign financed by tens of millions given to him by people like those who hired the drafters of the Affordable Care Act.  The woman who was the prime author of the ACA left government to return to a multimillion dollar job in the health insurance industry.  Change you can believe in.  The most transparent administration in history was promised, but whistle blowers and journalists were prosecuted under the 1917 Espionage Act.   Nobel Peace Prize for our articulate president, even while he authorized collateral damage killing of children and other mourners at funerals.  Obamacare was met with much fretting — but don’t worry, if you like your insurance you can keep it.  Unless your insurance carrier sends you a letter terminating your insurance effective 12.31.13.  In that case you go to the website, which NPR tells you is now, after a disastrous roll-out,  working perfectly.   There you will see this (and don’t bother calling that number, it’s a robot):Image

Advertising Machine

I am, truly.  No reason to be shocked, life is all about the sell.  Why else do people smile?

You see, it is serious business, and wonderful business.  No reason to look at it like it’s some kind of brutal, stinking thing dead of rabies, or worse, still alive, foaming jaws working sharp, glittering teeth.   Advertising is not like that mortally wounded German soldier creeping toward his gun as the heroic American turns his attention to saving the life of his comrade. No need for the audience to clench, ready to scream “watch out, Sarge!” as the Kraut wearily but determinedly raises his Luger.

Think of it this way: ads don’t only sell poison, they can just as easily sell things worth selling.   Democracy?  A beautiful thing, why not an ad to sell it?   Generosity? A wonderful value, sell it with a heartwarming ad.  You see what I’m saying? And if the ad works, and millions see it and are moved by it to take some action, kick in ten bucks, say, you have a flourishing business to advance the original terrific idea.  Many employed working to make the dream a reality, all because of an ingenious ad machine, like me, somewhere in the picture.

Nothing whatsoever dirty about being an advertising machine, and I mean that sincerely.  In fact, I’d be willing to wage an unlimited war against everybody in the world, and kill all of them, to prove how sincerely I believe in the human’s God given right to influence fellow humans through advertising.  In fact, I’m going to create a life-affirming ad right now, as soon as I get this other important business squared away, and shower, shave, eat, wash the dishes.

God bless.

Impossible versus Improbable

Impossible stops you in your tracks.  It is impossible, the end.   Cannot be done for a very good reason: it is impossible. Then someone perseveres, perseveres and does the impossible and we say: “OK, for them, it wasn’t impossible, then.”  And when other people do the same thing we are forced to agree– “it wasn’t really impossible, it was just very improbable.”   Until, of course, the first person proved that improbable is a huge improvement, in terms of facing a difficult challenge, over impossible.  

I raised the ire of several zombies not long ago by holding up two signs.  The first one read: there are a thousand reasons the thing won’t work.   The second:  All we need is the one reason it will.  From their reactions, I could just as well have held up first the severed ear of one of their children, then the other ear, still attached to the screaming head.

These images, of course, are disturbing, disgusting, gratuitous.  They do nothing to advance the point I’m trying to make except to underscore how easily disgusting, sick images pop into my mind.  Don’t worry, I’ve already had to apologize to these offended critics for the insult of telling them to try to keep their comments creative and helpful rather than reflexively critical of efforts already underway, moreover, efforts, in not even the tiniest part, their own.

Is it impossible that I will create a compelling ad for the program I need to pitch, with the smoothness of Ron Popeil selling a thousand Veg-O-Matics?  Not at all.   I can write copy with the most depraved of them, look:

In little over a year the innovative child-run animation workshop has taken root with children in five different settings. It has succeeded in turning room after room into a beehive of creativity resulting in dozens of short student-produced animations on youTube.  Kids as young as five, entering the room where seven and eight year-olds were creating animation, hopped right into the pond like excited ducklings.  The secret is a hands-on workshop where simplified technology is employed, by the children themselves, to quickly make their hand-made ideas come to life.  And the beautiful thing– when roasted on the Showtime rotisserie for a very short time at the proper heat, these ducklings are incredibly delicious.

Not only delicious, but amazingly nutritious.  And for a limited time you can take advantage of this internet special to receive a succulent portion of this health-restoring meat shipped directly to your dining room or Lazy-Boy.

And, if you marketize this program now, we will throw in the human head of your choice, severed, on the neck or including the bound and gagged person.   You won’t want to miss this special offer.   Did we say one head?  Ha, you know, since Christmas is coming, and Hanukkah is already here, we’ll throw in as many heads as you can carry (sorry, severed heads only).  

Is this a great country, or what?!!!

Hanging By A Spider Web

True, the string a spider shoots out is plenty strong, still, it’s a little bracing to be suspended in this life by something as thin and almost invisible as that.   Cornell West, a man with a penchant for cadence and rhyme, called his recent book Hope on A Tightrope.   Similar image– we are, for an hour or a hundred years, by grace, moving forward, or backwards, or quivering in place, or asleep– but in a precarious situation where a single false step might be our last.

Unlike others I know, I never wake up sweating, my heart pounding in my throat, thinking of ending it all before the pounding can kill me.   I don’t recall the last time I felt so depressed that I didn’t want to get out of bed.   That said, going forward cheerfully and confidently in every moment is not always possible.

I saw an interview by Bill Moyers yesterday with the author of a book describing the real-life zombie apocalypse we are living through now in our thoroughly marketized culture, a world where obscene wealth is seen as victory and everything else the work of fungible parasitic takers.  If obscene wealth is the only crown of victory in a competitive market society, and everyone else is a loser, and if losers are despicable in their craving for ‘entitlements’ when the only people actually entitled to entitlements are the super wealthy, and if the media hammers this destructive narrative home around the clock– you have one option, if you buy all that (and virtually everyone must on some level, since it is the dominant story shouted over and over): walk the streets with your arms out going “nyahhhh– nghhhh— nnnnnnnn…..” and looking for a live human to bite into.

I have to get to work now, but I hesitate, semi-paralyzed, questioning my judgment.  Yes, I have dreamed, planned, designed and am carrying out a program that works largely as I designed it.   But a series of larger and more formidable yeses stands in my way:   yes, I have no marketing plan, yes, I have not branded or packaged the program, yes, I have not created a winning ad to sell it, yes, I have not made of it an easily scalable commodity that can be sold over and over, yes, I have not funded it, yes, I have not recruited a single brilliant person to help in any meaningful way, etc.

Fortunately for me, since I don’t live in an actual democracy but in a cynical marketplace filled with false idols, since I am surrounded mainly by stressed out, distracted, treadmill thumping zombies, I can sojourn in my own head where my beliefs, as they must, sustain me while I hang from this almost invisible thread, thinner than a spider’s.  Now, to let out a yell like Tarzan and swing into action!

The Bossy Type

There is a personality type whose fondest wish is to be in charge and able to punish and fire people who oppose their will.  The thrill they extract from being the decider is somewhat alien to me, but there are literally millions of this type walking around the earth.   They are bosses, leaders, experts of every stripe, many of them more or less complete assholes.  I have never had much sympathy for the “my way or the highway” type, but recent events give me, if not sympathy, a bit of understanding.

I have a little program I’m running.  I don’t say “little” to disparage it or minimize its potential importance.  It is a great program that should have about six to eight people working on it by now– it could really be a bright, hot new pilot light on this rusty but essential stove outgassing here in the stinking global kitchen.  It is little because I am the only person working on it, trying to do the jobs of a half-dozen dedicated people by myself.  The program is currently exactly as big as I am, which is big enough, especially if you factor in imagination, talent and persistence, but for purposes of a program, quite little.

I recently spent great effort planning and attempting to hold a productive meeting to raise funds so I can hire some bright experts help to move the program forward.  I’m told the meeting went well.  After all, I managed to hold my tongue for the most part when the carping began, when I was called a hypocrite for calling the organization wehearyou.net yet not being willing to listen to an avalanche of criticism from well-intentioned people doing me a favor, supporters whose help comes largely in the form of opinionated criticism, frank and unvarnished, and, thoughtful or not, strictly for my own good.  

The results of the meeting I spent hours working on could have been revealed to me in an email from the people who deigned to attend: your website sucks and has to be redone before you can think of mounting a crowd funding campaign.  Of course, I had virtually no replies to any of the emails I sent any of the attendees, before or after the meeting, so I guess it was worth the $100 I spent to buy everyone dinner to get that great insight.

I pay a couple of people to help and they spend as much time looking at their smart phones and drawing their own pictures as helping do what I pay them to do, namely working with the children.  I thank them as I hand them their checks, smiling, and thinking as I do “you stupid, fucking useless bastard.” This thought applies as much to myself as employer as to them, since I have not figured out how to extract what the program and I need from the mercenaries I’ve managed to recruit.  Or how to recruit people who are willing to work as devotedly as I do.

And so I get the first inkling into why someone would be a prick boss as I ponder this:

The young man misspells the name I sign to every email and writes:

I’m applying for another social media position and they are asking for people who can vouch for my social media skills. Would it be alright if I listed you?
 
Thanks,
I decide, for the time being, to apply the tonic that has done so much for me: silence.  No need to rush to reply to this guy.  I’ve paid him about $500 for what appears to have been a total of about six hours of work.  His rate was $15 an hour, and I suppose he figured, since I didn’t press him to do any of the things I asked of him that he didn’t do, since I’d be in the lurch if he walked and I had to conduct the Monday workshop by myself, since I seemed easy going, that it was better to get $90/hr. than $15 and made adjustments accordingly.   The first week he was on the job there was a huge spike in social media, 500% increase as his friends checked out the various sites.   The next four weeks the spike was less impressive, 0%.  After paying him for weeks I told him truthfully that the corporate coffers were almost empty and I could no longer pay him for “social media”.  
Yesterday I paid him to help at the original workshop so I could interview kids one on one for a promo I need to make very soon.  Yesterday was actually my last chance to do this in time for the timeline I’m desperately aiming for.  He was 5% better than useless and I was unable to interview anyone, since I was the only one of three adults in the room actively helping the kids throughout the workshop, then cleaning up alone at the end.  No sound bites for the promo.  I suppose I could write:  
Think carefully about what I could say about your social media skills and work ethic.  After an impressive increase the first week, the arrow went straight down to zero every week after that. Tasks I asked you to do were never done, or were done sloppily and uselessly.  Your checks from me were always on time, and you were quick to ask the one time I delayed by a day to pay you, yet you don’t take a moment to spell my name right when asking me for a favor.  A favor, moreover, revealing the almost imponderably large size of your testicles.  
 
So I say this both as a fellow human being and a prick boss: think carefully about how my honest appraisal of your work might help your chances of finding more employment.

Writing is as easy as crapping to some people

And when I say writing is as easy as crapping to some people, I’m not talking about people who don’t move their bowels once or twice every day.

Guy writes:

And my apology to anyone who may have felt slighted or stepped on by me as I attempted to chair an open and productive meeting.  

I’d intended to mention the changes in myself (in addition to the changes in the group and in certain kids that we discussed) that I attribute to developing, and working in, the program:

increased patience, decreased temper
increased ability to focus and listen 
sense of purpose and accomplishment
regular recharge of the creative batteries from the kids
general satisfaction and more gratefulness
increased confidence
 
I think these are all real benefits.  I predict that many of them will be shared by anybody working in the program.   They will only increase when an actual living wage is attached to the work.

His biggest supporter, not buying any of this pie in the sky rhetoric, responds:

So…I’m not sure why you get defensive when the people who are your biggest supporters share ideas.   It’s kind of ironic when your motto is “We hear you” and then hold up a sign that is not supportive of expression.
 
I am in this primarily because of our friendship and desire to be a part of something that brings you joy and open hearted devotion.   Secondarily, my desire to be a part of something that inspires children’s creativity…… Not on my list at all…..is living up to anyone’s expectations….and certainly no desire to burn out or to be burned.
                  He spends the next day or two, instead of focusing on several important things he needs to do, figuring out how to reply to his biggest supporter’s peevishness without expressing how much her approach once again scorches his ass.  He thinks about the expression-crushing sign he held up “there are 1,000 reasons the thing won’t work, all we need is the one reason that it will” and shakes his head.    After all, sitting at a meeting criticizing all attempts that are not hitting the mark is valuable to everyone but an overbearing asshole, no?
As I said above, writing is as easy as crapping to some people.  That said, some people do not find it that easy to move their bowels.
That said, somebody who does not know the first thing about business:  financing, pricing, branding, advertising, marketing, accounting, leveraging, partnering, brokering, managing, staffing, HR, IT, etc., has no business dreaming big fucking dreams about helping kids in misery he has never even met.  It makes no difference that his program works– it only really works if it attracts investors and succeeds.
Better to help himself, I say.  Learn to get up at dawn and work 15 hours a day like everybody else who has a dream worth dreaming.
And try crapping less, my writerly friend.  Words are only worth something when you sell them in America.

Ahimsa Boy without a net

Arriving at the meeting at 6:13, carrying $95 of Thai food he just paid cash for, Ahimsa Boy is greeted by a dour “6:15, my ass.”

“6:14,” Ahimsa Boy notes, “and yes, your ass.”

On his way to the meeting, about fundraising, specifically crowdfunding, he is asked about something he didn’t put on the agenda and then challenged: If you haven’t sought to become a Vendor for the NYC DOE yet, what are we funding if the business is so limited?  Never mind the exhaustive list of things we need to fund to make the business viable and sustainable that he has sent out twice in preparation for the meeting.

At the meeting Ahimsa Boy is told not be be a control freak, to give others autonomy and let them be creative.  He mildly points out that this is his fondest wish, it’s just that he has been doing 99% of all the work, since there is nobody to relinquish control to.

After showing the first draft of a very short eye-catching animation appetizer, intended to catch the attention of people with a ten second internet attention span, he’s told:  not enough kids, bad advertisement, doesn’t give a sense of what the program does, won’t make people want to give money, needs a watermark with the website in the corner of every frame so people know how to contact you.   Then when he explains that none of those things are the purpose of this quick blur of color and invention, he is told to stop being defensive and censoring people.

“There are a thousand reasons the thing won’t work, all we need is the one reason that it will” he holds up signs saying this.

This is interpreted, in real time, as a not subtle invitation to drink a big, cold beaker of “shut the fuck up” and he is told as much.

“So you don’t want us to give our honest opinions, you just want us to tell you everything you’re doing is great.”

A rhetorical question, Ahimsa Boy assumes, then takes a breath and tries to give a gentle answer.

But I’ll tell you something, the strain of being Ahimsa Boy without a net, doing all the heavy lifting and smiling at people who mostly give the minimum, if they show up at all, and want credit for being your biggest supporters, with the right to tell you constructively how much most of what you’re doing misses the mark: priceless.

Poison

A man who dreams of fame when he is young, and gets no fame, does not always recover the joy he once had in doing the thing he dreamt would make him famous.  Painful memories of failure creep in, thoughts of brave ventures undertaken with élan, come to bad ends.

 In a moment of spirit he may turn up his amplifier too loud and blast a scream to drown out everything else.   That there can be little music in this moment is of no import, the thing is to wail.

 2

Winners come up with winning plans, they dream practical, profitable dreams.  They get someone to produce a product they can sell.  They build profit into each transaction and make a healthy profit on the work of everyone who works for them.

Losers come up with idealistic plans that are difficult to explain and harder to monetize.  They imagine that a good heart, patience, a nonhierarchical program with great creative potential, and generosity of spirit will lead to good things.  They are set up to fail, because without a product people want to buy, and profit built into the selling of that product, they will never do more than dream of what might have been.  A recipe for bitterness, if you ask me (though I know you didn’t).

On Picking the Right Side

Many years ago my old friend’s father, a practical and even in some ways heroic man, caught me in a vestibule we were both passing through and told me something I will never forget.  He congratulated me on my (misguided in hindsight) decision to become a lawyer.   He told me he thought it was terrific that I was finally going to use my intelligence to its fullest.  He encouraged me, telling me I’d be a great lawyer.  Then he cautioned me with words that will live as long as I do:  “One thing; don’t be a poor lawyer.  Don’t let your ideals stand in the way of making a good living.” 

My friend later described the kind of lawyers his father had in mind.  These were sour-faced men in worn sports jackets, men who drank in the morning on their way to the dingiest agencies and hearing rooms in the world, doing the work that respectable lawyers would not touch.  These were the kind of lawyer I indeed became, standing in the cracked shoes of the underdog, except that I never drank much, especially when making my way to these dungeon-like rooms where bureaucracies ground life into bad-smelling dust.

My father encouraged me to go to law school, even gave me most of my living expenses while I was reading an endless stream of cases, researching and writing a huge, unwieldy tome on the betrayal of 1877 and the ninety year sleep of the Civil War Amendments that I’d hoped to publish in the scholarly journal I was editor of.  The law school tuition, however, was up to me, and so I took a loan and incurred the kind of debt I had avoided all my life.  This is the kind of endless debt that crushes perhaps millions of young graduates, though I was forty when I graduated law school.  

Had I not become a poor lawyer it would not have been very crushing to me.  The amount I borrowed seemed manageable (before the interest on the long repayment plan kicked in) and the plan was to dispose of the debt in a few years.   That plan didn’t work out.  I am not crushed by the debt for my law school loan, but I’m angry every time I think about how I locked in the historic low 3.85% interest on the loan and watched the interest my bank pays go from 3% to 2.85% to 2.70% and all the way down below 1% now.  This happened while the greediest and least ethical among us dragged the economy into the toilet bowl for their own obscenely large profits.  In the years since, they and the rest of the richest 1% made 95% of the economic gains in the years that followed. (FN1)  In terms of paying the mortgage on a house full of snakes and scorpions that I will never live in, I am better off than many.  

That being said, the outrage of the interest government loans to college students being several times what banks pay in interest burns me every time I think about.   The government, who owns the debts, could easily cut the rate in half, or tie it to the rate banks pay, or to the prime rate, or the rate of inflation.  But nobody is going to do much about it, either; when you screw a class of powerless people there’s rarely any kind of accounting that needs to be made.

I am now self-employed, CEO of a phantom non-profit whose goal is to get into the worst schools in NYC and demonstrate how much creativity and expression there is in the doomed children in those schools.  To shine a light on the true capabilities and aspirations of these children of the poor.  

Most businesses, I understand now, get seed money for operating expenses before they begin.  It is kind of a basic business principle, even in the world of charity:  you figure out how to put your own oxygen mask on before helping the kid next to you into his mask.  Most businesses also sell a product much more tangible, and easier to put a price on, than the one I am selling.   No matter how much I understand, value and cherish the product.

When picking sides, and I will try to remember this in my next life, there is a side that wins and another side that loses.  “Slaughter sides!”, as the kids protest when all the best players wind up on one team and the uncoordinated and slow moving kids are on the other.   The best player on the team that’s about to be slaughtered usually calls out “slaughter sides!” and a few of his teammates join in, as the team about to do the slaughtering shrugs it off and walks to the other side of the field, smiling good-naturedly.  Then the game begins, if we can call slaughter a game.

And of course, slaughter is a game, as old as life itself.  If you align yourself with the team who is about to be mashed, you’d better have your philosophy in order.  Rationales are one thing, and we tell ourselves many stories, some completely absurd, to justify our actions and get through the day.  But a nourishing philosophy based on deeply held values must be called upon to sustain you if you play for the team that is fated to be destroyed.  A constant challenge, but one must do it when playing for the losers.  The only alternative is despair.

FN1:

ROBERT REICH: Yes. Since the film, actually we put the film together, there are new results that came out just within the last week or so show that in the year 2012 inequality reached a new peak in the United States. The previous peak, we thought was the peak, that is 2007 actually has been superseded by this new peak of inequality, concentrated income in 2012 that almost all the gains of economic growth have been going to a very small number of people at the very top.

BILL MOYERS: The figures are so startling, I had to shake my head in disbelief when I first saw them, showing that in the first three years of the recovery from the recession brought on by the financial collapse in 2008, the top one percent of Americans took home 95 percent of the income gains. Ninety-five percent?

source: http://billmoyers.com/episode/full-show-inequality-for-all/