We Don't Hate The Wealthy, We Hate You

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It's an even split: about 50% of this letter is nonsense, and about 50% of it makes a certain amount of sense.

Fuck you. You don't speak for me and my "mood," and that bit of arrogant presumption will be all I'll read of your bullshit.

I didn't know that America was a nation of 200 million+ Uncle Alberts.

Actually, I really hope it isn't...

Damn right you do.

Pretty much spot on - Occupy is generally the furthest extreme. poll after poll shows the average American pissed off at Wall Street and the Government for their various shenanigans. Add in ridiculous benefits for execs while offshoring work that could be done here for 10 years, skyrocketing cost of education to get a good job, skyrocketing cost of health care, high inflation covered by government lies, high unemployment also covered up by government lies, massive fraud in the housing industry, and you've got a pretty pissed of population that understands that they are here just to be consumers to fill the powers that be, either corporate or governmental, coffers.

They clearly don't dislike the concept of financiers, instead of the way it's handled. I haven't seen much outrage over investment capital, I've seen plenty over predatory lending and bubble generation. You can have one without the other, its just it limits the options for companies for the later, and they'd rather be able to speculate their heart away with other people's money that they are holding in trust.

It's great how some people expect me to be impressed by them just now realizing that fact.

Whatever conversation is going on in your head right now has nothing to do with reality.

But I'm sure a point was made in there, somewhere, to your own satisfaction, so you have that going for you.

The idea of citizen consumers is a very old one.

I don't know much about the Yankees but I agree with the summary of this letter.

It rarely does.

What would you like to know?

Michael Vick?


While I'd like to think that this letter's basic premise is largely spot-on, it ignores the what-have-you-done-for-or-to-me factor. The people who don't care for pro sports are more likely to complain about being paid minimum wage to do useful things while athletes are paid millions of dollars to throw a ball around. Pro sports fans are more likely to save those complaints for when their team raises ticket prices yet again, or doesn't have enough money to sign a free agent.

Microsoft apparently has done nasty things on a large scale in terms of patents and market manipulation and whatever else, but the average person probably gets more worked up over being charged a few bucks for an overdraft.

Michael Vick is still dirt AFAIC, but as far as Philly fans and the media are concerned, all is forgiven because he's back out there with the Eagles and putting on a good show on the football field and obviously that's all that matters.


And yes, you also have people who simply resent the abstract category of "rich" in general, just as you have people who dislike blacks or foreigners or poor or religious or non-religious in the abstract. They may make exceptions for particular individuals they approve of, but the underlying bias is still there.

A Christmas Message From America's Rich
POSTED: December 22, 9:05 AM ET
Matt Taibbi

It seems America’s bankers are tired of all the abuse. They’ve decided to speak out.

True, they’re doing it from behind the ropeline, in front of friendly crowds at industry conferences and country clubs, meaning they don’t have to look the rest of America in the eye when they call us all imbeciles and complain that they shouldn’t have to apologize for being so successful.

But while they haven’t yet deigned to talk to protesting America face to face, they are willing to scribble out some complaints on notes and send them downstairs on silver trays. Courtesy of a remarkable story by Max Abelson at Bloomberg, we now get to hear some of those choice comments.

Home Depot co-founder Bernard Marcus, for instance, is not worried about OWS:

“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”​

Former New York gurbernatorial candidate Tom Golisano, the billionaire owner of the billing firm Paychex, offered his wisdom while his half-his-age tennis champion girlfriend hung on his arm:

“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.​

Then there’s Leon Cooperman, the former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit, who said he was urged to speak out by his fellow golfers. His message was a version of Wall Street’s increasingly popular If-you-people-want-a-job, then-you’ll-shut-the-fuck-up rhetorical line:

Cooperman, 68, said in an interview that he can’t walk through the dining room of St. Andrews Country Club in Boca Raton, Florida, without being thanked for speaking up. At least four people expressed their gratitude on Dec. 5 while he was eating an egg-white omelet, he said.

“You’ll get more out of me,” the billionaire said, “if you treat me with respect.”​

Finally, there is this from Blackstone CEO Steven Schwartzman:

Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30 interview with Bloomberg Television, Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who pay no income tax.

“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64. “I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be part of the system.”​

There are obviously a great many things that one could say about this remarkable collection of quotes. One could even, if one wanted, simply savor them alone, without commentary, like lumps of fresh caviar, or raw oysters.

But out of Abelson’s collection of doleful woe-is-us complaints from the offended rich, the one that deserves the most attention is Schwarzman’s line about lower-income folks lacking “skin in the game.” This incredible statement gets right to the heart of why these people suck.

Why? It's not because Schwarzman is factually wrong about lower-income people having no “skin in the game,” ignoring the fact that everyone pays sales taxes, and most everyone pays payroll taxes, and of course there are property taxes for even the lowliest subprime mortgage holders, and so on.

It’s not even because Schwarzman probably himself pays close to zero in income tax – as a private equity chief, he doesn’t pay income tax but tax on carried interest, which carries a maximum 15% tax rate, half the rate of a New York City firefighter.

The real issue has to do with the context of Schwarzman’s quote. The Blackstone billionaire, remember, is one of the more uniquely abhorrent, self-congratulating jerks in the entire world – a man who famously symbolized the excesses of the crisis era when, just as the rest of America was heading into a recession, he threw himself a $5 million birthday party, featuring private performances by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle, to celebrate an IPO that made him $677 million in a matter of days (within a year, incidentally, the investors who bought that stock would lose three-fourths of their investments).

So that IPO birthday boy is now standing up and insisting, with a straight face, that America’s problem is that compared to taxpaying billionaires like himself, poor people are not invested enough in our society’s future. Apparently, we’d all be in much better shape if the poor were as motivated as Steven Schwarzman is to make America a better place.

But it seems to me that if you’re broke enough that you’re not paying any income tax, you’ve got nothing but skin in the game. You've got it all riding on how well America works.

You can’t afford private security: you need to depend on the police. You can’t afford private health care: Medicare is all you have. You get arrested, you’re not hiring Davis, Polk to get you out of jail: you rely on a public defender to negotiate a court system you'd better pray deals with everyone from the same deck. And you can’t hire landscapers to manicure your lawn and trim your trees: you need the garbage man to come on time and you need the city to patch the potholes in your street.

And in the bigger picture, of course, you need the state and the private sector both to be functioning well enough to provide you with regular work, and a safe place to raise your children, and clean water and clean air.

The entire ethos of modern Wall Street, on the other hand, is complete indifference to all of these matters. The very rich on today’s Wall Street are now so rich that they buy their own social infrastructure. They hire private security, they live on gated mansions on islands and other tax havens, and most notably, they buy their own justice and their own government.

An ordinary person who has a problem that needs fixing puts a letter in the mail to his congressman and sends it to stand in a line in some DC mailroom with thousands of others, waiting for a response.

But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.

Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.

Some of these people take that VIP-room idea a step further. J.P. Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon – the man the New York Times once called “Obama’s favorite banker” – had an excellent method of guaranteeing that the Federal Reserve system’s doors would always be open to him. What he did was, he served as the Chairman of the Board of the New York Fed.

And in 2008, in that moonlighting capacity, he orchestrated a deal in which the Fed provided $29 billion in assistance to help his own bank, Chase, buy up the teetering investment firm Bear Stearns. You read that right: Jamie Dimon helped give himself a bailout. Who needs to worry about good government, when you are the government?

Dimon, incidentally, is another one of those bankers who’s complaining now about the unfair criticism. “Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” he recently said, at an investor’s conference.

Hmm. Is Dimon right? Do people hate him just because he’s rich and successful? That really would be unfair. Maybe we should ask the people of Jefferson County, Alabama, what they think.

That particular locality is now in bankruptcy proceedings primarily because Dimon’s bank, Chase, used middlemen to bribe local officials – literally bribe, with cash and watches and new suits – to sign on to a series of onerous interest-rate swap deals that vastly expanded the county’s debt burden.

Essentially, Jamie Dimon handed Birmingham, Alabama a Chase credit card and then bribed its local officials to run up a gigantic balance, leaving future residents and those residents’ children with the bill. As a result, the citizens of Jefferson County will now be making payments to Chase until the end of time.

Do you think Jamie Dimon would have done that deal if he lived in Jefferson County? Put it this way: if he was trying to support two kids on $30,000 a year, and lived in a Birmingham neighborhood full of people in the same boat, would he sign off on a deal that jacked up everyone’s sewer bills 400% for the next thirty years?

Doubtful. But then again, people like Jamie Dimon aren’t really citizens of any country. They live in their own gated archipelago, and the rest of the world is a dumping ground.

Just look at how Chase behaved in Greece, for example.

Having seen how well interest-rate swaps worked for Jefferson County, Alabama, Chase “helped” Greece mask its debt problem for years by selling a similar series of swaps to the Greek government. The bank then turned around and worked with banks like Goldman, Sachs to create a thing called the iTraxx SovX Western Europe index, which allowed investors to bet against Greek debt.

In other words, Chase knowingly larded up the nation of Greece with a crippling future debt burden, then turned around and helped the world bet against Greek debt.

Does a citizen of Greece do that deal? Forget that: does a human being do that deal?

Operations like the Greek swap/short index maneuver were easy money for banks like Goldman and Chase – hell, it’s a no-lose play, like cutting a car’s brake lines and then betting on the driver to crash – but they helped create the monstrous European debt problem that this very minute is threatening to send the entire world economy into collapse, which would result in who knows what horrors. At minimum, millions might lose their jobs and benefits and homes. Millions more will be ruined financially.

But why should Chase and Goldman care what happens to those people? Do they have any skin in that game?

Of course not. We’re talking about banks that not only didn’t warn the citizens of Greece about their future debt disaster, they actively traded on that information, to make money for themselves.

People like Dimon, and Schwarzman, and John Paulson, and all of the rest of them who think the “imbeciles” on the streets are simply full of reasonless class anger, they don’t get it. Nobody hates them for being successful. And not that this needs repeating, but nobody even minds that they are rich.

What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.

Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.

But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.

Nobody with real skin in the game, who had any kind of stake in our collective future, would do any of those things. Or, if a person did do those things, you’d at least expect him to have enough shame not to whine to a Bloomberg reporter when the rest of us complained about it.

But these people don’t have shame. What they have, in the place where most of us have shame, are extra sets of balls. Just listen to Cooperman, the former Goldman exec from that country club in Boca. According to Cooperman, the rich do contribute to society:

Capitalists “are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be” and the wealthy aren’t “a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot,” Cooperman wrote. They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas…”​

Unbelievable. Merry Christmas, bankers. And good luck getting that message out.



Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/politic...age-from-americas-rich-20111222#ixzz1hY1Byav1

Thinking on this some more.

Any government contract or deal where bribery has been proven (as in this case where the public officials are now in jail) should be immediately null and void, with all damages going to the bribing company. So you make a shady deal, and then chop up the loans and sell them, not only does the deal fall through but then YOU have to go reemburse all those you sold the chopped up loans to.

But that will never happen. The owners of our system like things just the way they are.

I was going to say this rule should be a no-brainer, but I guess there are cases where the cure would be worse than the disease in the short-term. For example, if a multi-zillion dollar defense contract were involved . . .

In Memphis, the news makes it seem like the Mortage companies targeted the black community. And blacks were disproportionately hit by the collapse; they have lost far more property than whites. The question is "Why?"

A racist would say it is because they don't have the intellect of whites, but I think it is because of the destruction of their family unit by welfare - and it will only get worse. As will their cries to the government to save them. And so the lawsuits such as Memphis V. Wells Fargo will continue. Sad, but many elements of the black community have a different view of personal responsibility than many elements of the white community.

But it seems I have a different view of responsibility than many in the white community, aka those who sought bailouts.

So you borrowed more than it was worth?! Or did you make a significant payment on equity when you first bought?

Eh, more likely the voters are too apathetic. Sure, you have groups like OWS and the Tea Party, but what are they going to honestly do? Instead of being smelly in parks, they need to train their people to be evangelists, and to infect their communities - through their families first, then reproduce their ideals and methods, etc.

Why are they writing to to the head of JPMorganChase??

OH.....decided to read Anc's posts. Yes, string him up by the balls.

^ Could you smell the hippie stink in them?

You should have refi-ed for $600,000 invested it in retirement savings and then declared bankruptcy or walked away from the house. Corporations do it all the time because it's the smart thing to do with the money so why didn't you?

BTW the OP shows the difference between someone who creates value added, which we like (someone like Bill Gates or Steve Jobs), and someone who rent seeks (like the Wall St banks who loan money to people they know can't pay it back but then change the bankruptcy laws to force them into debt peonage. There is a massive difference between adding value (creating new wealth) and rent seeking (attempting to use the political system to get a greater share of existing wealth without actually creating new wealth).

Read Anc's post.

God, just fuck the hell off with this slanted victimhood BULLSHIT. Unless someone put a gun to their heads and forced them to sign a mortgage, they have no one to blame but themselves and should be held to the responsibilities they willingly assumed.

"But...but..corporate bailouts! "

A) Most people would not have allowed that if they had any say in it.

B) Another person's (or entity's) unconscionable acts do not justify you committing some bad acts of your own.

C) FUCK THE HELL OFF WITH THE SLANTED VICTIMHOOD BULLSHIT.

Bullshit UA. It's been established that the banking industry went after minorities on purpose, giving far more predatory loans to them. The wording is an endless series of obfuscations, which smart people who have lived in this society all their lives would have trouble deciphering. People without high education levels and immigrants were particularly at risk for being fleeced.

The lenders and the realtors - the later who are paid to work FOR the customer - actively lied their asses off on a regular basis to people, working against the customer's self interest because they got paid. Period.

It was a con game - and it even was against the interest of the larger banks in many cases. Only a few of the big ones the board and executives seemed to be in on it - most of it was mid level guys selling off these crap derivatives that made their fortune while destroying the company they worked for.

Are you just completely unethical, or dumb as a post? Because someone who is intelligent that has an ethical basis understands that yes, there was very morally repulsive actions going on by con men who were bilking the system and damn near took down the world economy along the way.

It isn't your moral right to fuck as many people as possible to become rich. It's pretty disgusting behavior.

Did they go after them with weapons and death threats to get them to sign up? No? Then they're not victims and there's no excusing them from the responsibilities they accept.

I don't buy the apologistic bullshit, is all. Failing to beat you over the head with the fine print on the loan you're signing is not fraud. And you can take your "if you were smart and moral you'd agree with me" and jam it right up your condescending ass.