 more if there is or not. Thank you, that was great. I think it really sets us up for a very substantive conversation going forward about what needs to be done next. I'm delighted to introduce our next speaker. Barbara Ehrenreich is the author of over a dozen bestsellers, including Nicollin Dymd. And this land is their land. She is a proud board member of the Institute for Policy Studies. And most recently, she founded the Economic Hardship Reporting Project, which is mentoring poor journalists to write about inequality. Most important, she has a great sense of humor, something in desperately short supply in our country today. And today, I love that the title of her talk, she is going to talk to us today about the rich wrecking things. Barbara, the floor is yours. Very much, dear, dear. Thank you all for, well, I have a lot of friends here. Thank you for inviting me. I may be very sensitive to class tensions. And I sort of feel there's something here in this conference an undercurrent of ambivalence toward the wealthy, maybe even a little outright hostility. So I thought I should put in a good word for them, it's kind of changing rules here, but a lot of us here work for or with nonprofits dedicated to reducing inequality. And our nonprofits, probably including some of the splendor that we find in ourselves surrounded by right now in the Mayflower are underwriting all these things. So I think we should give a round of applause to those of you who have funded efforts like this. Thank you for being class traders. We need more of you. And I want you to go back out into your world, your demographic, and recruit more. Now, why are we doing what we do? Most of us who are not, in most cases, donors, why do we fight inequality? What's in it for us? What's the motivation? Well, because, if you think about it, inequality is immoral and unfair, right? We feel that. But and we feel disgust, in fact, at the extremes that we see around us even in this city. But I want to make another point here, not about immorality or so on, but about the presence of the super rich in our society. And I don't know whether that starts at 1% or 0.1%. But their presence has become a burden on the rest of us. Really, it's weighing us down. Let me take the case of housing. I live across the river in Virginia. And again and again, I have seen affordable housing torn down to make room for unaffordable housing. I used to say, hey, I'm for affordable housing. Of course, now I wonder. Because to be judged affordable is to be doomed to destruction in housing. That's what's happening. Or in higher education, we want our kids to get the best possible educations. But once you have families that insist on gourmet cafeterias and condo-styled dorm rooms for their children and families who can pay to get people to take the SATs for their children, then it gets out of reach for the rest of us, even for the upper middle class. Another thing they'll be here about them, they suffocate us physically, the very well theme. Because who does the polluting? Well, we all do some. We're all guilty a little bit. But the rich on a vastly different scale. I feel bad if I have to ride in an airplane because of the fossil fuels I'm burning up. But there are people who not only have multiple private planes, by the way, have a private plane for their pets to travel in, with the pets companions too, I'm sure. But these are some of the ways they interfere with our lives and crush us financially, physically. But here's the sort of emotional sign now. They crush us spiritually. And what I mean by that is, for one thing, we are social animals. We humans. We need places to gather, to celebrate, to talk to strangers, to parties, whatever. And we are losing those spaces fast due to such things as overpolicing. Now, it looks bad if you're especially people with color gathering on the streets. But also, things like the erection of barriers along sidewalks so nobody can sit on any kind of ledge and strike up a conversation. Even spikes put into the places one might sit in otherwise. And finally, this is something that you've probably never heard at an economically oriented conference. But I have to say it, our spirits are crushed when we can no longer experience the beauty of nature, of mountains, of shores, of lakes, of all the things that in some inarticulate way make me love America. Even the sky. I was in Midtown Manhattan a couple of weeks ago. And I got scared. Because if you look up from Midtown Manhattan, from the sidewalk level, and the sky has been taken away, the sky has been eaten up by these huge needle-shaped buildings for the ultra-rich so that everybody else lives in perpetual shade. And of course, the ultra-rich don't even live in their 50-story or higher apartments because they've got too many other places to live in. You know, 50 years ago, the far right in this country decided that the poor were too much of a burden for the rest of us. So they eliminated welfare. They cut Medicaid and every other program that helped the down and out and the financially precarious. Today, they are beginning to understand, or we are beginning to understand, that the very rich, or most of them, have become as unbearable a burden or far more unbearable burden. They are the burden that is destroying America. We are being crushed under this weight. If we're going to survive as a nation, a viable nation, we have to redistribute the wealth downwards for once. And since, unfortunately, the very rich, as a class, are not going to do that, we're gathered here then to figure out how to help them do it.