Matt Taibbi has a post up pointing us to this essay by Max Abelson at Bloomberg which includes these pearls of wisdom from a few one percenters...
Home Depot Inc. co-founder Bernard Marcus, regarding Occupy Wall Street
“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” “Are you kidding me?”
John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp., the ninth-largest U.S. bank, regarding a Dodd-Frank Act provision
“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive,” Allison said. “This attack is destructive.”
Blackstone Group LP CEO Stephen Schwarzman speaking 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.”
Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc.
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,”
Leon Cooperman, former chief of Goldman Sachs’s money-management unit
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,” They make products that “fill store shelves at Christmas…”
Taibbi unleashes in particular on Schwarzman:
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).
Read more: http://www.rollingstone.com/...
Taibbi also zeroes in on JP Morgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in a memorable slashing:
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.
It seems obvious that Occupy has put the privileged on notice and certainly on the defensive. Like a child who is threatened with loosing his prize toy, the tantrums will continue, and we'll see more and more quotes from the "victims" of increased sunlight on the operations and results of the wholesale buying of our Federal, state and local governments. It is past time to put up the "Not for Sale" sign, starting with Congress.
