An anonymous former doorman at 740 Park Avenue describes the Upper East Side building’s residents as “detestable” and complains about their tipping habits and the behavior of their 12-year-old children. Someone else says “some rich people are just dicks.”
Stephen Schwarzman, who gave $100 million to the New York Public Library and who built a firm, Blackstone, that directly employs 1,700 people, is described as “the poster child of capitalistic greed in the last 10 years.”
All this is scheduled to come to television in New York this Monday on Channel 13 in “Park Avenue: Money, Power & The American Dream.”
If the station has any sense, it will use the time until then to reconsider its decision to air the program.
If it doesn’t, its trustees and donors, some of whom live on Park Avenue, may want to consider whether they want to continue supporting an institution that insults them so viciously.
The show comes from such a far-left perspective that it takes aim not only at the residents of 740 Park Avenue but even at Democrats such as President Obama (for supporting bailouts for banks but not mortgage holders) and Sen. Chuck Schumer (“The senator from New York doesn’t think it’s unfair that a veteran fireman can pay nearly double the tax rate of a hedge-fund billionaire,” the program asserts).
Channel 13 and its parent non-profit, WNET, deliver plenty of valuable programming, which is partly why there was such a backlash over presidential candidate Mitt Romney’s proposal to cut Big Bird.
But “Park Avenue” is so over-the-top in its ham-handed oversimplifications, its crude class-warfare and its hard left spin that its funders — who include taxpayers, through the National Endowment for the Arts — will surely be left wondering what went wrong.
The show features interviews with professors at elite universities — Jacob Hacker of Yale, Jeffrey Sachs of Columbia — who all appear to have well-furnished offices, even as the movie complains that the cost of college has gone up more than 500 percent since 1980.
The filmmaker, Alex Gibney, is himself a Yale graduate.
“Park Avenue” seems to have had its origins in an effort by the Copenhagen, Denmark-based Steps International Foundation — with the help of a $2,208,265 grant from the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation — to fund a series of documentaries about global poverty.
It’s certainly possible to make movies or television programs about poverty without attacking rich people, which raises the question of why the Gates Foundation grantees went this route.
A trailer for the movie shows poor people on Park Avenue in the South Bronx while ominously asserting, “They’ve lost their jobs in a recession caused by bankers across the river.”
Maybe, just the way campaign commercials have the little announcement at the end, “I’m [candidate name], and I approve this message,” Bill Gates should have to appear, along with his fellow Gates Foundation funder and trustee, Warren Buffett, at the end of “Park Avenue” to declare that they agree that bankers who live on Manhattan’s Upper East Side cause poverty in America.
The Gates Foundation also does plenty of fine work. But there are library shelves full of books about the causes of poverty, focusing on issues such as the after-effects of slavery and discrimination, misguided but well-intentioned government programs, failures in public health and education and the like.
We’re now at the point where our public-television system and some of our largest charitable foundations are pushing the myth that the cause of poverty is the mere existence of rich people — “just dicks,” as the show calls them — who are somehow controlling the political system to keep the poor down.
The best way to deal with that message: Change the channel.
— Ira Stoll is editor of FutureOfCapitalism.com and author of “Samuel Adams: A Life.”
ira@futureofcapitalism.com