In a world where the growing gap between the rich and poor keeps getting larger, we are not surprised to learn that the painting pictured here, “The Field Next to the Other Road” by American painter Jean-Michel Basquiat, just sold to a so-far anonymous buyer for $37.1 million at a Christie's auction.
At the same auction, a Picasso painting sold to an anonymous buyer for $179.4 million, breaking all records for an artist’s work sold at auction.
For Christie’s, it was a $1 billion art sale that broke all the records. For the rest of us, it’s cause for concern. There’s something wrong with this picture. Neil Irwin, senior economics correspondent for The New York Times, put it this way in a recent column:
“The astronomical rise in prices for the most-sought-after works of art over the last generation is in large part the story of rising global inequality. At its core, this is the simplest of economic math. … But the number of people with the will and the resources to buy top-end art is rising, thanks to the distribution of extreme wealth.”
As New York dealer Francis Beatty, of Richard Feigen & Co., told artnet after the sale, “Fifty million is the new normal.”
If that’s the new normal, something definitely is wrong. It’s wrong because average working Americans are not just falling behind – they’re sinking. Adjusted for inflation, incomes are at their lowest point since 1996, reports Inequality.org.
Meanwhile, last year, the CEOs whose companies make up the S&P 500 Index received, on average, $13.5 million in total compensation – an increase of 15.6 percent from the previous year, according to data compiled by the AFL-CIO’s Executive PayWatch.
“It hasn't always been this way,” AFSCME Pres. Lee Saunders wrote in Roll Call. “There was a time in our not-so-distant past when poor Americans could work their way into the middle class. There was a time when people in the middle class could afford to buy a home, send their kids to college and save for retirement. Today, middle-class families must make a choice - a home, college or retirement. They no longer can do all three.”
Saunders wrote that “Unions were and continue to be the only organizations willing to stand up and fight for working people and the middle class. And it is unions that can get us out of the mess we're in now.”
AFSCME is trying to help create an economy that works for everyone.