The Best Business Writing 2013

To: Lloyd H. Dean, Wells Fargo

Dear Lloyd,

In May 2007, I became the first person in my immediate family to get a degree, at age 38. I graduated owing more than $100,000 in private student loans. Payments were more than $1,100 per month. My 74-year-old retired father is the cosigner for most of these loans, but in September 2008, my dad lost $70,000 of his pension with the banks’ collapse.

In December 2009, after just one year in the workforce, I was laid off due to cut-backs. For most of 2010, I wasn’t able to find steady employment. In January 2011, I ran out of deferment with my private student loans. The banks began chasing my father as the cosigner. They have wrecked his line of credit and called in his home equity loan on which he never missed any payments.

In June 2011, my father saw a lawyer to try to get the payments reduced to something proportionate to his fixed income. In October 2011, he got word that the lawyer failed to get payments reduced enough. My dad wrote me a letter saying he had to sell his life insurance and rearrange his will to protect my sister and stepmom.

The letter arrived last Saturday.

He had a stroke on Sunday.

Now Wells Fargo is harassing him for payment of another student loan.

I am asking you to please suspend collection actions against my father until I have a job that will pay me enough to make the payments myself.

I always believed getting an education was the only way to succeed in life. Now I regret it every single day.

Sincerely,

Deena DeNaro

Durham, NC 27701

To: Susan S. Bies, Bank of America

Dear Ms. Bies:

I read that a lot of Wall Street executives do not understand why the Occupy Wall Street protesters are doing this. I thought it might help if you knew a little about life in a different part of America.

I live in a small town in Illinois. Years ago there was a manufacturing plant here and a thriving downtown business district. But the manufacturing work moved overseas, where I’m sure it could be done more cheaply, and the plant closed.

Over the years, we have lost most of the local businesses, including both of our grocery stores. In the last few months, the pharmacy and hardware store closed. Our newspaper had to lay off all but one part-time employee. Our school district is in desperate financial straits—they have cut spending so deeply that there is now only one English teacher for the entire high school. And still, the board just received a projection that it will run out of money to operate the schools within two years.

Almost 15% of us are out of work—and that doesn’t include many of us who are employed at minimum wage ($8.75/ hour) jobs like clerking at Walmart, which is an hour round-trip drive from here with gas at $3.40. More than half of the children at the school qualify for free or reduced lunches because their family incomes are so low. Our food pantry says it served over 10% of the families in our community in the last year. Imagine that you’ve worked hard all your life and now, with your children watching, you have to line up for a handout at the food pantry.

There are coffee cans on the counter of the convenience store for people with cancer or injured kids without medical insurance. You throw in your change and hope it will help somehow.

Our neighbors, with teenagers our children grew up with, are about to be evicted from their house. Their car was repossessed. Their father works in construction, and there hasn’t been much of that going on since the real estate market crashed, which you may remember. Whose fault was that—his? He does any work he can get now, and so does his wife. They can’t get enough to keep a roof over their heads.

People have nowhere to live, while houses stand empty. Teachers have been thrown out of work, while the school has no one to teach the kids. The road to the town north of us is closed indefinitely because the bridge is unsafe. We have people in town with the skills to fix it who need the work desperately, but there is no money to pay for it.

I have had the privilege of relatively high-paying work at times in my life, and I know that being comfortable or well-off can insulate a person from the reality that others are not. You’re working hard, you feel you deserve to be well paid, and everyone else should just do the same. But that is an easy and false conclusion—most people do not have the opportunity you have been fortunate to receive.

I hope this picture of how some of the other 99% are doing sheds light on what Occupy Wall Street is all about. The enormous disparity of incomes in this country is unjust and growing. People in your world are doing great (from what we hear, “great” doesn’t begin to describe it), while the rest of us are going down. It is a disaster and it cannot continue.