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WALL STREET BANKERS WHOSE CUTAWAY COATS, LARGE TOP HATS, and mustaches suggest they are nineteenth-century robber barons wave protest signs:
Keep things precisely as they are.
I've got mine.
Leave well enough alone.
Change, shmange!
I'm good, thanks.
"Fighting Back" reads the caption-not of an old photo, but the cartoon cover of the October 24, 2011, issue of the New Yorker. The improbable spectacle of a counterprotest by elite bankers neatly inverts Occupy Wall Street's "we are the 99 percent!" mantra.
The New Yorker's caricature of robber barons bearing protest signs, however, is not mere fiction. Its doppelgänger is a network of actual protesters who call themselves the Billionaires. They don tuxedos and top hats, or ball gowns, satin gloves, and tiaras. Their props include champagne glasses, cigarette holders, and huge cigars-as well as bright banners and placards that are professionally printed rather than hand-lettered: "Corporations Are People Too!" "Leave No Billionaire Behind!"
Are they serious? Have the ultra-wealthy recruited supporters or hired actors to take to the streets on their behalf ? Spectators sometimes believe so. The Billionaires, however, are actually satirists who pose as the very power holders they critique. In contrast to Occupy Wall Street protesters, the Billionaires follow a strictly elegant dress code, and say precisely the opposite of what they mean: "Widen the Income Gap!" and "Heirs and Heiresses Unite: Death to the Death Tax!" They adopt names such as Tex Shelter, Lucinda Regulations (as in "loosen the regulations"), Ivan Aston-Martin, Alan Greenspend, Iona Bigga Yacht, Phil T. Rich, Owen Dwight Howse, and Noah Countability.
The Billionaires dubbed the US Labor Day holiday "Cheap Labor Day," and displayed banners proclaiming "No Minimum Wage! No Minimum Age!" Examples of their street actions include the Million Billionaire March during Republican and Democratic National Conventions; a ballroom-dancing flash mob in New York's Grand Central Station; thanking people outside post offices as they mail their tax returns on April 15; or auctioning off Social Security on President George W. Bush's second inauguration day. A featured tag line: "We're all in this together, sort of."
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