by Negin Farsad
At some point he noticed that I always reheated my coffee in the morning—I’m just one of those people who likes hot coffee, go figure. One day, I got up for my midmorning coffee reheat when I was startled by a stuffed bunny casually sitting in the microwave. The boss popped out laughing hysterically. “I punked you!” he said. This kind of thing happened all the time—trust me, The Office is real.
So I decided to blow that joint and explore other options, the kind of options that would let me pay my rent and my cell phone bill at the same time, in the same month. So I got a corporate job as an economic crime analyst. I was just like Edward Snowden, working on government projects contracted out to our private firm. Except I had no access to any sensitive data, and I totally didn’t have high-level hacking skills or an interest in defecting to Russia. Otherwise, just like Edward Snowden.
My job was to investigate economic crimes, so when a huge company or a government lost a bunch of money in some major fraud situation, we would figure out how it happened. What I learned is companies that already make a lot of money get really mad when a comparatively small amount of money is stolen from them. Even if they’re still on top of the world and still making a ton of money. Basically, it was like working for an aid organization, except the aid was doled out by one percenters for one percenters. And the aid workers in this case got nice, boozy lunches.
This was my first exposure to the moneyed class—to people who understood what a “benchmark index” was and didn’t care who knew it. I learned a lot about these people in the time I was a fake corporate drone:
RULES THAT ONE PERCENTER OFFICE BROS LIVE BY
Gym is for lunch hour.
Happy hour is for lunch.
Steak consumption is a sign of power.
If you don’t have season tickets to high-profile sporting events, you’re no better than an animal.
Always take a crazy photo on a golf cart whenever you go on vacation.
Always take a wacky photo on top of a ski slope.
All packages should be delivered to the office, including the family pack of condoms from Amazon.
Heaven doesn’t accept people who stay at three-star hotels.
The subway is full of savage plebeians except for you. You are an elegant, classy rider.
Fantasy football should be scheduled into the workday.
Stay at the office longer than your boss.
Always get a car service after 8 P.M., even if your apartment is only five blocks away.
Always get a car service before 8 A.M., even if your apartment is only five blocks away.
If I harbored any lingering doubts about whether I could be a part of Club White, this corporate job cleared it up for me. When the firm decided to ease the dress code, every white boy in the office came by my desk asking me not to fuck it up for everyone. I was doing comedy gigs at night, which gave me the reputation of a rabble-rouser, that is, investigator by day, comedian by night, and always donning “fun” outfits on Fridays. Everyone was concerned I would take my fun outfits too far. They wanted control of the fun outfits. They wanted a Stepford coworker—sister to the Stepford wife, except that she has a job and earns a living, but like the Stepford wife, she gets in line, doesn’t say shit, and does not wear fun outfits.
It’s no wonder that corporate offices attract sameness. Apparently “cultural fit” is the top hiring priority. Cultural fit doesn’t ask, “Can an applicant do the job?” but “Do I want to hang out with this applicant?” To test cultural fit, a study out of Northwestern University found that bosses like to chat, they like to test personal chemistry by figuring out what a candidate is into:
Bonding over rowing college crew, getting certified in scuba, sipping single-malt Scotches in the Highlands or dining at Michelin-starred restaurants was evidence of fit; sharing a love of teamwork or a passion for pleasing clients was not.3
So did I really have Stepford coworkers? Yes, yes I did. I had them by design. A design that stifles corporate offices all over the country. We often blame the lack of diversity in the workplace on the job seekers—they don’t try hard enough, they simply don’t apply for these jobs. Or we somehow put the blame more abstractly on society. But the hiring process is very clearly managed by people. There’s nothing abstract there. Even if minority candidates apply for a job and all their qualities are spot on, they still might not get the job, because “cultural fit” means sameness, it means comfort. And being around black, Latino, or uncategorizably ethnic people might not elicit comfort.
I get it. It’s easier to work with people who are like you. And if you’re a minority, I hate to add another item to your endless to-do list, but this is where you disarm them with something other than a shared collegiate sports team. (This is where you make… white people laugh. Oh she said the name of the book in the book again! AH!) And I’m not saying to be an Uncle Tom—or an Uncle Karime or an Aunt Katsumi—you don’t have to pretend to embrace all of their whiteness. You’re not in a polo club, and that’s fine. But open the door and don’t be forgettable.
I like to make myself the butt of the joke. I ask questions and riff! “Oh, you like to ski? I went on a bunny slope once, and ended up with a broken pinky toe.” “Oh, you’re from Nebraska? I once got hit with a batch of poison ivy right outside Johnny Carson’s childhood home in Nebraska.” “Oh, you like hockey? I don’t go to hockey games because I have an irrational fear of the puck hitting me in the face.”
I find the in and make the connection. Even if they have more money and power than you, even if they have seen the world and have an investment portfolio, even if they show up to work on a gold-plated scooter, they will respond to someone with a light heart who treats them as an equal. Talk to them like you’re talking to your idiot best friend from middle school—only with bits of professionalism on the edges.
White people, you’re not off the hook. Step out of your comfort zone, because you may end up with a better workforce. But you don’t even have to listen to me! Listen to researcher Katherine Phillips: She found in a study that “diverse groups outperformed more homogeneous groups not because of an influx of new ideas, but because diversity triggered more careful information processing that is absent in homogeneous groups.”4 BAM! You’ll make more money. Don’t you want to make more money?
Once you’re there, you should learn the lay of the land, because offices are a political minefield. The good news is that because we have bred this sameness for many generations, you’ll find a reliable set of categorizable people, delineated in the graph on the next page.
In my office dealings, I also learned to stay away from very sexual interns. I learned that unkempt IT dudes were also most likely to store photos from my laptop in a personal stash. I learned that whenever I have a document to fill out that I don’t understand, I should bypass all the junior executives and head straight to the sassy older ladies who get shit done, because they’ll actually be able to help me. I also learned that I was missing out on huge promotion potential, because I didn’t go to basketball games and my parents didn’t have a weekend home in Sag Harbor where I could invite everyone on a summer Friday. I could hold down a drink, but otherwise, the social engagement that got my coworkers their promotions and bonuses and pats on the back was very white and very masculine.
Negin’s Corporate Office Population Breakdown
In fact, at the end of my first year there I learned that I had been hired at $5,000 less a year than my male counterparts. That’s right—someone let it slip that the two women in my cohort were paid less than the men. The only nice thing I can say about this is that sexism is reliable. It will always hurt. And when a corporation can save a buck by exercising it, they will. Reliably. I guess it’s nice taking the guesswork out, like I know I’ll make less because of the tits! Wee!
In the same way that office sameness wasn’t in my head, unequal pay isn’t in my head, either. The national statistic cited by the White House still points out that women earn 78 cents for every dol
lar a man earns.5 Even if you break it down by field, lawyer ladies, physician broads, and CEO chicks all earned less than their counterparts with testicles (78.8 percent, 71.7 percent, and 79.9 percent respectively).6 So, no one is making it up.
What was worse was that when I found out I was paid less, I did absolutely nothing with that information. I didn’t want to seem disagreeable. I wanted to keep my job because I needed it. I got scared. Like a dumbass. If more women talk about their pay, more women will eventually realize they’re not getting equal pay. And then maybe they can do something about it. Unlike me.
Speaking of cash monies, this job was also the first time I learned about bonus season. Come January every year, the people of the wide-ranging financial arts are given really nice little gifts from their jobs. I know what you’re thinking: It’s nice for an employer to give a bonus. When I got that $25 gift certificate at Starbucks from my boss, I felt pretty good about it. But bonuses here were more like Starbucks gift cards times five thousand. I never forgot the grabby-handedness of the office bros during bonus season.
Little did I know that a few years later, when I was entrenched in the world of social justice comedy, those bonuses would come back and tickle me in the armpits, and I would turn around and slap them. In other words, issues around banking and finance became a big part of my work. In fact, years later I would crush hard on financial issues. They are soooo borring and yet soooo important. The way your money is handled and the way the money from people with far more resources is handled are worlds apart. The average person doesn’t have a team that can figure out how to legally bypass various taxes. But one percenters do. They have teams! Teams that probably wear ties and/or respectable but sporty slacks on more casual workdays!
In 2008, if you’ll recall, the government spent billions of dollars to bail out a bunch of banks.7 This has generated an ongoing tax subsidy to the too-big-to-fail banks to the tune of $83 billion a year.8 Every year. You’d think that in light of that bailout, they would tighten the ol’ purse strings, or pull in the ol’ belt loop, or double-knot the ol’ sneakers. I’m sure there were some purse-, belt-, and sneaker-related modifications to their internal workings. But one practice that remained, in full force, were their annual bonuses.
In the year 2013, bankers received over $91 billion in bonuses.9 We did some crude math and figured that this averaged out to about $300,000 per person. These aren’t people that are earning shitcakes the rest of the year. They’re high earners, so $300,000 is just an added benefit, or what is popularly referred to as a bonus—a term you have seen me use. The bonuses seemed to be a bit much, especially considering that the bailout was for $83 billion, an amount that was loaned with no interest and hasn’t been fully repaid.
Armed with this information, I partnered with the Other 98% and took to the streets! The Other 98% is a nonprofit organization and a grassroots network of concerned people that shines a light on economic injustice, undue corporate influence, and threats to democracy. They named themselves before “1 percent” became the outcry of a nation. With a cameraman in tow, I asked regular people about banking bonuses and little-known fact: Most people don’t know about banking bonuses. Making banking bonuses themselves a little-known fact.
But the pièce de résistance was a petition, signed by over thirty thousand people, directed at Bank of America, asking the CEO for a change. Instead of doling out bonuses to already financially well-off bankers, why not turn that money over to create housing for the 10 million people who were made homeless… by the housing crises… the housing crisis that was created from the financial meltdown… that was created from the banks… the banks that needed bailing out… from the government… funded by the taxpayers.
Look, I don’t have a problem with people being rich. I just don’t understand why they have to be so so so rich while everyone else has to pay a higher rate of taxation on their meager incomes—and then watch those taxes get redirected to bailouts. It seems, you know, unfair, like how can skinny people like the freak boss at my first job eat a million donuts all day and never get fat? (On an unrelated note, fuck those skinny people.)
I took this petition to the Bank of America headquarters and attempted to meet with the president of the bank. To my great surprise, chagrin, and dismay he wouldn’t see me. Yes, I’m sure you’re all surprised that the president of a major U.S. bank with assets of over $2.10 trillion10 wouldn’t meet an Iranian-American Muslim Social Justice Comedian in an imposing red lipstick towering over everyone at five foot three-point-five inches whose other main task for the day was refining a bit about “running into her trainer at a pastry shop.” Not to worry—I was assured by the “security desk” that my petition would make it to his office.
I’d like to live in a world where it did. As every social justice comedian knows, you have to operate from a place where you think that petition actually made it to the CEO of Bank of America. And that one day, there will be a CEO who has an epiphany, an epiphany brought on by your petition. Or a flaming bag of dog shit you left in front of their mansion. Whichever. Okay, don’t leave a flaming bag of dog shit—I found out the hard way that it’s alienating.
When Sunbathing Meets Offshore Banking
The other thing corporate America taught me is the extent to which people want not to pay taxes. Oh, the lengths the moneyed people will go to avoid paying for the taxes that pay for stuff like roads and schools; oh, what fun they have figuring out new and creative ways of hiding their money.
In 2012 I went to the Cayman Islands with fellow comedian Lee Camp and Eric, our terrific DP (in this case DP stands for “director of photography,” not the more common “double penetration”), and a brave coproducer, Justin. We were funded in part by the Other 98% and the Yes Men—the Yes Men is an organization known for its sneaky ways in publicly shaming, laughing at, or simply uncovering the truth of all manner of social ills.
The Cayman Islands is known as an offshore banking haven. It’s the kind of tax haven that gives its banking clients an opportunity to get a really nice tan after they’ve spent an exhausting hour moving funds from one bank to another bank, or worse yet, from a briefcase to a bank. Offshore banking also requires readily accessible windsailing and spas. Don’t underestimate how much goes into making a world-renowned tax haven.
To explain offshore tax havens a bit, you know how you could be a barista / schoolteacher / IT guy for fifty hours a week, and right after you disinfect your foot blisters / redline homework assignments / massage your carpel tunnel, you look at your paystub and notice how much you paid in taxes? Tax haven-ites don’t know what that’s like.
They hide that money, and the federal government loses something like $150 billion in tax revenue, mostly from people who have a special relationship with yachts and/or seasonal residences and/or calming bath salts.11 Of course, $150 billion is just an estimate, because we don’t know how much money is being hidden. Because it’s hidden.
The thing about hiding money, too, is that the people who are making the money, they still take advantage of stuff like roads, trash collection, running water, and sewage—so when they’re taking sweet dumps in their toilets, dumps that are then taken away by city sewage and water systems, they’re not paying the taxes that make those sweet dumps possible. Basically, what they should be doing is (1) holding it in, or (2) paying taxes. But with offshore tax havens, they get to do both.
So I went to the Cayman Islands in 2012 right before the presidential elections. Our goals were to (a) look for Mitt Romney’s money and (b) open an offshore bank account. At the time, Mitt Romney was a presidential nominee with an estimated net worth of $250 million—that made him one of the richest presidential candidates in the history of candidates. Sorry, Warren G. Harding, I guess being a newspaper editor just isn’t as lucrative, especially if our metric is “boat ownership.” But questions arose about where and how that money was being made. In some tax returns he listed Swiss bank accounts, in others he didn’t. He also set up shell
corporations in the Cayman Islands that he argued were legal—shell companies are like inactive zombie companies used to move money around. But, when it comes to Cayman tax havens, asking for information is banned—there’s a confidentiality law stipulating that even asking about financial disclosures could get you jailed for up to four years. That tax haven don’t fuck around.
So Lee and I went on a mission to find Romney’s money. The island is full of sand and sport, beautiful blue waters, and a collection of “business” buildings. One such building is Ugland House. Ugland has nineteen thousand businesses registered to it. I’m not sure what any of these businesses did, because Ugland was a small five-story building. It didn’t seem to have a stream of workers coming in and out, taking cigarette breaks after a long morning of making widgets. If you divided the square footage of the buildings by the number of business registered to it, each business would be three to four square inches big. Our guess was that each building provided an address for an endless number of shell corporations that housed endless millions. After asking locals and administrators about where we could find Romney’s “corporation,” we realized that the Caymanians were serious about zipping their lips. But we suspected the money was kept at the Ugland House.
If Romney could keep untaxed money at the Ugland House, that was clearly where we should put our money! Not to brag, but at that point, after every month’s bills were paid off, I had a cool $5–$25 in disposable income weighing me down; Lee had the same. So, we walked into Ugland and proudly asked if we could open up an offshore bank account with our disposable income of $8.46. We were told to stop filming. We kept filming from a—no joke—camera pen on Lee’s lapel. They called security. We left, tried another bank. They called security. We tried another bank. They called security. By the end of the third security call, we were very nervous that we would be jailed for up to four years because we asked questions. We were worried about being kicked out of the country, or kept in the country against our will, or forced to go tanning with Mitt Romney. These fears were probably unfounded, but when you’re in the thick of it, when there’s a security guard blaring at you, it’s hard to distinguish. Either way, we took the footage home and cut together a video, then put it online.