Wednesday, November 30, 2011

How They Really Feel

This man's comments speaks volumes on the attitudes of the wealthy. His disdain for those with less money is palpable. He clearly is equating people's value with the size of their portfolio. Rich people are better.



And it is not just an arrogant attitude; he is also egregiously wrong,his intellectual honesty clearly compromised by his ideology. Notice that he claims to be subsidizing the 99% because he is making big bucks. It is especially ridiculous in light of the massive amounts of money our government has directed at the 1%, and especially the 0.1%, who operate under a self-serving delusion that everything they have is because of skill and hard work. Overlooked by this dickhead are the endless flows of government contracts and concessions to big Pharma, defense contractors and the like. Overlooked are the multi-million dollar giveaways by state and municipal governments as they compete to entice corporations to locate in their areas.

Richie Rich also ignores huge sums given to banks as part of their bailout, money bank executives then used to pay outsized bonuses. And just this week we read that those banks earned roughly $13 billion in interest directly the result of the sweetheart deal they received for tanking the US economy. Here is the gist of it, as related by AllGov:
Thanks to the Federal Reserve’s generous lending during the 2007-2009 financial crisis, banks that were teetering and at risk of collapsing wound up making billions of dollars in profits, according to Bloomberg Markets magazine.

After combing through 29,000 pages of Fed documents released to Bloomberg by court order, the publication determined that banks earned about $13 billion in income by taking advantage of the Fed’s below-market rates. These loans were made without informing the public or Congress of which institutions were borrowing heavily to stave off disaster.
Finally, have a look at the chart below. The corporations in these sectors are generally run by individuals who espouse rugged individualism, a can-do attitude, and the glories of a free market. They also almost always bitch about high taxes and government regulation. As you can see, they rarely pay their share of taxes, but they sure know how to pull in those tax subsidies- nearly $223 billion from 2008-2010.

Source: Citizens for Tax Justice

That's some serious corporate welfare. And from their government-subsidized profits, they pay outsized compensation to people like the guy in the video. If corporate boards claim that their executives deserve their often huge compensation, then those corporations don't need and don't deserve government support.  If you cannot live without taxpayers like me subsidizing your bottom line, then your insistence on fat bonuses is even more morally obscene than it already is.

Or is this a problem only when the recipients are the 99%?

The implicit message: It's just good business, complete with tax write-offs, when rich guys are in on it, and it's socialism only when the poor receive it.

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