The least egalitarian country, in a prosperous world, the United States, and New York, champion of inequality in the United States. One. The second is as follows: 97% of the jobs created in New York State in 2008 are in the fast food sector. Third: With the victory of Bill de Blasio as Mayor of New York, the class politics of the 1920s revived.

These three phrases are distinguished by the Barcelonan newspaper La Vanguardia from the excellent report “History of two burgers” by journalist Andy Robinson. Born in Liverpool (UK) in 1960, an expert in sociology and economics, Robinson, based in Catalonia, is a reporter travelling around the world. In his book “A Reporter in the Magic Mountain” he explains the cavities and tricks of the elites that meet at the summit in Davos.

Now Robinson has told in La Vanguardia the chronicle “Global Cities / Specific Cities” how inequality has increased in some of the world’s most prominent cities: New York, London, Paris, Rio de Janeiro, Barcelona... The main exponent of the misery of the United States, even if it sounds like a lie, is not Detroit, but New York itself.

The report “History of two burgers” is a report that should be read obligatorily to young people living on Friends, Sex in New York and, in general, in the stupid series they have seen on all television. Starting with the big picture on the right: Mini Mouse and Sesam Street ghost try to catch customers at the door of downtown MacDonald, where neon lights glow. Below we explain: “Fast food, cheap jobs. Many fast food workers who have created thousands of jobs in recent years have to resort to social services in order to eat them.”

One and two out of four who need food at New York's cheap pizzerias and hamburgers need municipal services. The journalist interviewed the waiters who charge 250 dollars (185 euros) with a working day of 34 hours a week. Junk food vendors spend $7 billion on social aid for public entities.

With this data, Berkeley University has shown that this is a plague across the country in the study “Low-wage fast-food jobs leave hefty tax bill, report says.” “The fast-food industry takes US taxpayers US$7 billion a year, as when they pay so little to workers, they force families 52% to ask for social aid. (...) Also those who need 40 hours a week. The fast food industry moves about $200 billion a year. Their normal employees earn on average $8.69 per hour. Only 13% are provided with health care.”

Worse than in 1928

The mainstream media is talking about the resurrection in New York, the acceleration of its economy. But regeneration is based on the fact that working people are moving down.

People who until recently were considered to be a middle class have to move with a reduction in their income level. Harlem, the outskirts of Broklyn, Bed-Stuy, known as the cradle of trapezi-growers, are now the fate of the rich. House prices have risen as wages have gone down, so we can rent them as if they were going to buy. The precarious worker must go further, leaving his position to a remote.

Robinson has described the same phenomenon in all the cities he has chosen. Some neighbourhoods have been increasingly abandoned by spending cuts imposed by public institutions. On the other hand, in those that have always been chic, luxury shops, rich restaurants have multiplied, and the price of housing has risen like a rocket. The poorest poor, the rich have to invest piles, real estate speculation has spread to the neighborhoods that have recently become fashionable. One is astonished to know that some favelas in São Paulo are involved in that madness, of course, with a broad view of the sea.

The journalist has traveled the streets of New York looking for housing prices. An old man, old man, said to him, “A low weight will cost you four million, buddy. It’s like in London, they come from all over the world to leave their money, from Europe, from Asia.” He's seen a four bedroom penthouse for sale for $39.5 million. The seller is the son of Robert de Niro, a real estate agent.

The bloody aggravation of inequality is widespread throughout the United States. The Pew Research Center has recently published “the inequality of earnings in the United States, which grows over the decades, is today the largest since 1928.” The accounts taken by researcher Emmanuel Sanz, who works at the University of Berkeley. In 1928, on the eve of that great crisis, the top 1% of families received 24% of the U.S. profits and 90% of the bottom 51% of the profits.

Then, the intervals were shortened. At the end of the war, in 1944, the richest had 11% of the benefits, and 90% of the benefits had 67%. In the 1970s, they began to grow again at intervals. In the end, in 2012, 1% of the richest population had 22.5% of total income and 90% of the bottom, for the first time less than half, 49.6%.

For Marxist geographer David Harvey, the laboratory of this worsening that has been going on since 1970 is New York itself. This is where the American elite first established a new neoliberal project, after declaring economic failure in New York, and then extending the model to the whole world by the hand of Ronald Reagan and Margaret Thatcher, either to South America, Britain and with the latest crisis to the whole of Europe.

In 1975, banks became real owners of the City Hall drowned in debts, began looting union power, dismantling the public sector and reorganizing the distribution of wealth in the middle of the fiscal crisis for the benefit of the rich. In Harvey’s words, “New York has pioneered the neoliberal policies adopted by Reagan, in which the International Monetary Fund (IMF) established in the 1980s (...) to prove that what happened to New York can happen to anyone.”

Since this autumn there is a show in which the new mayor, De Blasio, will be able to change that situation. Your progressive programme has raised great hopes. Everyone is waiting for him.