I find it amusing when people regale me with a story or opinion that mirrors one of my published commentaries. Such was the case yesterday when a colleague vented her incredulous take on an article in the current issue of the New Yorker titled: Super-rich irony: Why do America’s super-rich feel victimized by Obama? Of course the irony is that the super-rich (aka the one-percenters) are the ones who have benefited most from his presidency.
Here, in part, is what incited her indignation:
The growing antagonism of the super-wealthy toward Obama can seem mystifying, since Obama has served the rich quite well. His Administration supported the seven-hundred-billion-dollar tarp rescue package for Wall Street, and resisted calls from the Nobel Prize winners Joseph Stiglitz and Paul Krugman, and others on the left, to nationalize the big banks in exchange for that largesse. At the end of September, the S. & P. 500, the benchmark U.S. stock index, had rebounded to just 6.9 per cent below its all-time pre-crisis high, on October 9, 2007. The economists Emmanuel Saez and Thomas Piketty have found that ninety-three per cent of the gains during the 2009-10 recovery went to the top one per cent of earners… the top 0.01 per cent captured thirty-seven per cent of the total recovery pie, with a rebound in their incomes of more than twenty per cent, which amounted to an additional $4.2 million each…
[Yet] the rich feel that they have become the new, vilified underclass. T. J. Rodgers, a libertarian and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has taken to comparing Barack Obama’s treatment of the rich to the oppression of ethnic minorities—an approach, he says, that the President, as an African-American, should be particularly sensitive to. Clifford S. Asness, the founding partner of the hedge fund AQR Capital Management, wrote an open letter to the President in 2009, after Obama blamed “a small group of speculators” for Chrysler’s bankruptcy. Asness suggested that “hedge funds really need a community organizer,” and accused the White House of “bullying” the financial sector. Dan Loeb, a hedge-fund manager who supported Obama in 2008, has compared his Wall Street peers who still support the President to “battered wives.” “He really loves us and when he beats us, he doesn’t mean it; he just gets a little angry,” Loeb wrote in an e-mail in December, 2010, to a group of Wall Street financiers.
(The New Yorker, October 8, 2012)
In fact, this mystifying “thick-wallet, thin-skin” whining was exposed in infamous fashion just weeks ago when Republican presidential nominee Mitt Romney was caught on tape inciting (reverse) class warfare by telling the super-rich (at a political fundraiser) that the poor (aka the 47 percenters) are just parasites living off the taxes paid by the super-rich like them.
But here, in part, is what I wrote in this respect months ago:
What is delusional about [the despairing complaints about Obama being bad for business] is that chief among those lamenting this despair are people who have benefited most during his presidency. Most notable are Wall Street bankers whose firms he bailed out and who raked in record profits as the DOW rose an unprecedented 56 percent. But they are joined at the hip by corporate CEOs—whose companies are sitting on trillions in profits and who earned so much in compensation, their despair must be some perverse form of thriver’s guilt…
[T]he craven agenda of bankers and CEOs to transform Obama’s presidency from hope to despair is surpassed only by the cynical agenda of Republicans and their media enablers to simply destroy it. Which makes it as perverse as it is ironic that the book currently at the top of the New York Times Best Seller list is The Great Destroyer by Obama hater David Limbaugh (yes, Rush’s baby brother)…
This explains why, from day one, Republicans have done everything in their power to undermine all of Obama’s initiatives to create jobs and improve the economy. And they have done so just to be able to claim that he does not deserve reelection because he did not do enough to create jobs and improve the economy: this is what politics in America has come to folks.
(“Delusions of Despair Undermining Obama Presidency,” The iPINIONS Journal, June 21, 2012)
It is worth noting that this New Yorker article is 10,000 words but, conspicuously, offers no insight on the cause of this Obama-derangement syndrome that afflicts so many of the super-rich. By contrast, I not only present all of its symptoms in just 1,000 words, but also offer that only one word explains this syndrome: racism.
No doubt many of you were shocked to read about these super-rich, and presumably intelligent, Americans invoking Hitler to condemn Obama.
Well, it’s axiomatic that nothing makes intelligent people say ignorant things quite like trying to rationalize their racism. In this respect, the whining among the super-rich about Obama being bad for business is damning enough. But nothing betrays their ignorance quite like their Tea Party-like accusations about Obama being the second coming of Adolf Hitler hell-bent not just on helping the Iranians exterminate the Jews, but also on turning the United States into a socialist paradise.
But I won’t even dignify their allusions to Hitler with any further comment. Instead, I shall suffice to note the ignorance inherent in these folks assailing Obama (as the worst president in U.S. history) for championing policies like healthcare reform and financial regulations, while hailing FDR (as the best president in U.S. history) for championing similar policies … in spades.
What do you think explains this contradiction…?
Oh, one more thing: The setting of this New Yorker exposé was a private dinner last May in Las Vegas hosted by a group of billionaires. Some of you may think my allusion to the Tea Party with respect to them is (almost) as unfair as their allusions to Hitler with respect to Obama. But I doubt you’ll think so when you learn that this exposé ended by giving readers this embarrassing peek behind their closed door:
[T]he conference concluded in the Bellagio’s grand ballroom, with the most billionaire-friendly speaker of all: Sarah Palin. She strode onto the stage and opened her talk with a rousing greeting, ‘Hello, one per cent! How y’all doing!’
Enough said?
Except that, where racism explains most of this Obama derangement syndrome among the super-rich, I should add that only one word explains the rest: fear.
Specifically, the fear of prosecution for Madoff-like shenanigans has many Fat Cats on Wall Street sweating bullets. And this fear was made real just days ago when the New York attorney general filed fraud charges against no less a syndicate than the über masters of the universe at JPMorgan Chase & Co. This is why a critical number of rich folks see Romney’s promise to rollback financial regulations as a get out of jail free card: for them, defeating Obama is personal only to the extent that it’s their hide on the line….
Related commentaries:
New Yorker…
Delusions of Despair