It takes more than a nice cruise
ship buffet to make a billionaire.
Just
over a year ago, the Costa Concordia, a Carnival Cruise ocean
liner, ran aground on an Italian reef. Thirty-two died.
“We
expect to fully recover from the ship incident,” the subsequent Carnival annual
report told shareholders.
Earlier
this month, Carnival suffered another “incident.”
The Carnival Triumph, with over 4,200 passengers and crew onboard, lost all power after an engine fire. The ship drifted aimlessly in the Gulf of Mexico for days with toilets overflowing and food rotting. Raw sewage spilled into cabins. Passengers would later describe “an overpowering stench.”
Carnival
CEO Micky Arison never caught a whiff of this stench. He stayed far away. In
fact, two days after the fire, with the Triumph still
stinking, Arison showed up courtside in Miami to watch his beloved Miami Heat
do basketball battle. He owns the Miami Heat.
Arison
owns a great many things. Forbes puts his net worth at a clean
$5 billion.
Some
perspective: The entire bill for the $14,000 checks — about $45 million —
amounts to less than 1 percent of Arison’s personal fortune.
The
Carnival Triumph survivors have received an offer, too.
Passengers who waded through sewage on the Triumph for five
days will get a refund, travel home, a credit toward a future cruise,
and $500.
More
perspective: Under U.S. airline regulations, passengers denied boarding on an
oversold flight get up to $1,300 if the delay to their final destination
costs them more than four hours.
Cruise
giants like Carnival don’t face many regulations with that sort of bite. On the
high seas, as Senator Jay Rockefeller points out, “the world is theirs.”
An
international maritime organization does, to be sure, exist. But its guidelines
don’t carry the force of law. Corporations can violate these guidelines and face no real consequences.
Those
few maritime standards on the books that look really tough essentially only
serve for show. All cruise ships, for instance, must now have auxiliary power
systems to maintain propulsion and basic passenger services should a fire knock
out the main power system, the fate that befell the Triumph.
This
standard, rather conveniently, only applies to ships built after July 1, 2010
and doesn’t cover the Triumph, built in 1999,
or just about every other cruise liner on the seven seas.
All
these ships could, of course, retrofit to meet the new 2010 safety rule. But
that retrofit would make a dent on corporate profit margins. And billionaire Carnival CEO
Micky Arison doesn’t like to see anything dent his profits.
Especially
taxes. Over the previous five years, a Senate hearing last year revealed, Arison’s Carnival Corp. paid just 1.1 percent of its $11.3
billion profit in local, state, and federal taxes.
Dodging
taxes and safety regulations certainly helps keep dollars flowing into the
pockets of top cruise industry execs. But you don’t get to become a billionaire
just by stiffing Uncle Sam and skirting safety rules. Moguls like Arison also
never miss an opportunity to nickel-and-dime their passengers.
Passengers
on cruise liners, for instance, used to have access to any on-board restaurant without
paying anything extra. Now they pay extra if they want anything besides a
buffet.
All
cruise ship passengers, of course, have at least a basic level of personal
affluence. Whatever shipboard indignities they suffer, in the end, pale against
the indignities so many millions of families suffer today, on a daily basis, in
Great Recession America.
But
symbols do matter — and what more vivid symbol of the indignity our
contemporary corporate-driven inequality imposes than the Carnival Triumph?
Thousands of people adrift, going nowhere in a nightmare of sewage and stench,
while a billionaire chief executive sits far away in a courtside seat and
cheers.
OtherWords columnist
Sam Pizzigati is an Institute for Policy Studies associate fellow. His latest
book is The Rich Don't Always Win: The Forgotten Triumph over
Plutocracy that Created the American Middle Class.
OtherWords.org
