On Behalf of the Plutocrats

Kathy Wylde, the longtime head of the Partnership for New York City, started her career as a community organizer— and has a message for today’s young socialists.

- David Freedlander

ON THE LAST FRIDAY in September, two-dozen protesters descended on the co-op 740 Park Avenue, laying crosses, small Stars of David, and Islamic crescents on the grassy median in front of the building, each one symbolizing another thousand of New York’s covid dead. They chose this building, an imposing Art Deco behemoth known in the tabloids as the “Tower of Power,” because it is home to the highest concentration of billionaires in the United States. “Billionaires are experts at social distancing, and they are excluded from the communities that they have an impact on, and so we are bringing our rage and our suffering to them because they are so complicit in what is happening in New York right now,” said Alice Nascimento, one of the protest’s organizers. “They get rich, and we die.”

The protest was one of dozens that had sprung up in the city since June, when a reckoning with racism collided with a global pandemic that had left millions jobless in New York alone. The next day, the Democratic Socialists of America protested in front of Mike Bloomberg’s house a few blocks away from 740 Park, and for weeks before that, there had been a series of loud marches and drum circles on the tonier streets of the Hamptons and in front of Jeff Bezos’s Manhattan apartment. All of this harkened back to the Occupy days, and the days of the recession before that, and the one before that, with protesters calling for more taxes on the rich and more justice for everyone else.