concentration of wealth

In the mid-eighties, for just one year, I had an assistant named Karen. When she got engaged, she and her fiance had me over for dinner. As we sat outside enjoying a mid-summer's eve, with her very money focussed fiance, a young turk determined to get rich, we talked in desultory fashion. I wasn't in a hammock but I felt as if I were drifting in a swinging hammock. A pleasant evening.

My daughter wasn't there so she must have been at her father's for the summer long visit. It would likely have been her last summer visit to her dad's. After the incident, I never sent her to his city again and he had to have court-supervised visits until he had court-supervised therapy, which he would not do. I did not impose that requirement, a judge did. She had her own attorney, a guardian ad litem.

The incident doesn't matter to my short commentary. I am just casting about my memory of the evening I am thinking about, wondering where Rosie is. She was not with me so she must have been with her dad. When I had the job with an assistant named Karen, Rosie was still very young, had not started kindergarden. I must be trying to recall a conversation I had in 1987 with Karen and her then-fiance, whose name I do not remember.

I remember he was Jewish and Karen, raised Catholic like I had been, had gotten some resistance from her relatives. I had encouraged her to ignore the fact that he was Jewish. Dave. She also voiced some reluctance about his looks, because she was really 'hot' and he was not. He was perfectly attractive, just not hot.

Dave had taken Karen on several weekend getaways, expensive treats for a young twenty-something who had just started his own tech consulting business, which was very new territory in the land of the Upper Midwest.  When Karen voiced a tiny bit of hesitation about Dave, I sensed she was looking for support. I said "If this guy took you to the Such-and-Such Lodge and paid for separate rooms because you weren't ready for sex, and then took you on a couple more trips when you weren't ready and if this guy has steadfastly been declaring his love for you while you have hesitated, I say go for it, give the guy a tumble. Then give him a chance."

I didn't seal the deal or anything. I gave her what all humans need. Support. She was getting pushback from her Catholic kin and she, good heavens, valued my opinion.

Karen was my sister's age. My sister was, I am pretty sure, a college student in Singapore that year and not communicating with me. Karen used to express amazement that my sister saw little value in having a relationship with me. It was nice to have an adopted little sister who looked up to me.

Oh, because of a move, I had given Karen and Dave my lawn furniture, which was pretty nice stuff. It dated to my marriage when, with my ex's big shot income, we bought high quality stuff. Among other things, I gave them two chaise lounges, the kind you could adjust for different angles.

Karen actually sunbathed in bikinis. I have never sunbathed. I only burn and I never understood the appeal of just laying still to get a tan. Or a burn.  Karen liked my chaise and I had been invited over to see the lawn furniture in its new setting, Dave's back yard. They weren't married yet, did not live together until married.

I left that job, moved on in life and lost touch with karen until I enrolled my daughter in Waldorf, where Karen made an appearance, like a plot point in a novel, as our school secretary.  The gap in which we had lost touch was not long. And she moved on from that Waldorf gig and Rosie switched schools. And life moved on, as it does.

But that evening, for some reason, franchises were on my mind. In the early eighties, franchises were marketed as a path to wealth for some folks. You paid a huge licensing fee, paid for all the construction of the store you franchised, like a sandwich shop, and you had a kind of playbook for running a business. Plus the franchise seller did advertising.  Are franchises still offered by some investment advisors, which was what Dave was doing as he segued into technology consulting?

During this period of time, I had become increasingly aware that our society was undergoing intense systems change, that our economy was increasingly built on concentrating wealth. I said something along these lines to karen and she said "What does that mean?" I said "If you buy a Popeye's Chicken franchise, you make a profit and it stays in the community but some of every dollar you take in is tunneled to Popeye's, to anonymous shareholders. This takes money out of local economies and places it in a vast, anonymous stream of wealth that is able to accumulate and build power."  I was in my early thirties and not the least bit savvy about investments.  Newly divorced, my shedded husband with the MBA alongside his JD did all the investment thinking so I was a little surprised to hear the words that came out of my mouth. Concentration of wealth? Siphoning money out of local economies?  This was before my online life got started. I bought my first computer a couple years after that conversation with Karen and Dave. Where did I get those phrases?  It felt, in the moment, like I was channeling.

And all three of us 'felt' that what I was saying was true. Karen said "What can be done about it?" I shrugged and said "I don't know."

Dave, who as a young turk intended to siphon as lot of wealth from anywhere he could to become a millionaire. And I bet he succeeded. My ex-husband was also income-driven and I bet he has made a lot of money since we parted ways.