{"id":17722,"date":"2013-09-24T17:25:25","date_gmt":"2013-09-25T00:25:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=17722"},"modified":"2013-09-24T17:25:25","modified_gmt":"2013-09-25T00:25:25","slug":"the-masters-of-the-universe-are-moral-idiots","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=17722","title":{"rendered":"The Masters Of The Universe Are Moral Idiots"},"content":{"rendered":"

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AIG’s CEO Robert Benmosche, the CEO of AIG, told the Wall Street Journal<\/em> that anger because much of the bailout money given to AIG was used for gigantic bonuses, is “just as bad and just as wrong” as lynchings were.<\/p>\n

No, really, that’s what he said<\/em>.<\/p>\n

The uproar over bonuses “was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses, and all that \u2014 sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.”<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Ezra Klein<\/a> points out that Benmosche’s view on how immoral it is to criticize Wall Street is not unique among his class:<\/p>\n

Benmosche is expressing a view that was pretty common back in 2010 and 2011, when it was kind of a thing for members of the besieged 1 percent to compare public anger over their compensation to the way Nazi Germany treated the weak. There was supermarket mogul John Catsimatidis<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cTaxes are going to go up regardless. What I\u2019m afraid of is, we shouldn\u2019t punish any one group. Whether we\u2019re punishing people who are wealthy,\u201d he said. \u201cNew York is for everybody; it\u2019s for the poor, it\u2019s for the middle-class, it\u2019s for the wealthy. We can\u2019t punish any one group and chase them away. We \u2013 I mean, Hitler punished the Jews. We can\u2019t have punishing the \u20182 percent group\u2019 right now.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Blackstone’s chairman Steven Schwarzman had this to say<\/a>:<\/p>\n

\u201cIt\u2019s a war,\u201d Schwarzman said of the struggle with the administration over increasing taxes on private-equity firms. \u201cIt\u2019s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.\u201d<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I was in an off-the-record meeting with top Wall Street folks where similar comparisons to Nazi Germany were tossed around. It really was a meme on Wall Street that the singling out of the wealthy for criticism \u2014 and, more to the point, taxation \u2014 had a direct historical precedent in Nazi Germany, where the Jews were first demonized, then taxed, and then, well, you know. The sense was that the rich in general, and Wall Street in particular, weren’t just being criticized, but that they were being turned into a dangerously despised minority.<\/p>\n

That’s the context of Benmosche’s comment. I would bet he’s made the same point a number of times in private rooms to appreciative nods. When you say and hear that kind of thing often enough, however, you forget how insane and offensive it is \u2014 and then you say it to the Wall Street Journal.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

How much self-regard can these people have? How much perspective can they lack?<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

AIG’s CEO Robert Benmosche, the CEO of AIG, told the Wall Street Journal that anger because much of the bailout money given to AIG was used for gigantic bonuses, is “just as bad and just as wrong” as lynchings were. … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[106,102],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-17722","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-class-poverty-labor-related-issues","category-conservative-zaniness-right-wingers-etc"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17722","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=17722"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17722\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":17724,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/17722\/revisions\/17724"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=17722"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=17722"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=17722"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}