2011 LET THEM EAT CAKE = CLASS WARFARE

Noor

July 21, 2011

Snippits and Snappits

LET me begin with a few outrageous Let Them Eat Cake moments of the past decade.

Let Them Eat Cake Moment #1

Susan Sheybani, an assistant to Bush campaign spokesman Terry Holt said American workers unhappy with low-quality jobs should find new ones ~ or pop a Prozac to make themselves feel better. “Why don’t they get new jobs if they’re unhappy ~ or go on Prozac?”

Let Them Eat Cake Moment #2

Let Them Eat Cake Moment #3

George Bush: I don't want some mom whose son may have recently died to see the commander in chief playing golf. I feel I owe it to the families to be as ~ to be in solidarity as best as I can with them. And I think playing golf during a war just sends the wrong signal."

Let Them Eat Cake Moment #4

Let Them Eat Cake Moment #5

One of the things we have started to hear from the Marie Antoinette class is a general sense of wonder at the notion that anyone considers them rich; a great many of the people who make big six-figure incomes consider themselves middle class. A University of Chicago professor arguing against the repeal of the Bush tax cuts made waves by saying he was "just getting by" with his $250,000 income, while ABC's Charlie Gibson and CNN reporter Kiran Chetry in recent years suggested that $200-$250,000 is middle class (Chetry's exact quote was that "in some parts of the country," $250K "is middle class").

All of this is a testament to the amazing (and rapidly expanding) cultural divide that exists in this country, where the poor and the rich seldom cross paths at all, and the rich, in particular, simply have no concept what being broke and poor really means. It is true that if you make $300,000 in America, you won't feel like you're so very rich once you get finished paying your taxes, your mortgage, your medical bills and so on.

For this reason, a lot of people who make that kind of money believe they are the modern middle class: house in the burbs, a car, a kid in college, and a trip to Europe once a year, what's the big deal? They'd be right, were it not for the relative comparison ~ for the fact that out there, in that thin little ithsmus between the Upper East Side and Beverly Hills, things are so backwards that public school teachers and garbagemen (oops, Sanitary Engineers) making $60k with benefits are being targeted with pitchfork-bearing mobs as paragons of greed and excess.

Wealth, in places outside Manhattan, southern California, northern Virginia and a few other locales, is rapidly becoming defined as belonging to anyone who has any form of job security at all. Any kind of retirement plan, or better-than-minimum health coverage, is also increasingly looked at as an upper-class affectation.

That the traitorous Tea Party and their Republican allies in congress have so successfully made government workers with their New Deal benefits out to be the kulak class of modern America says a lot about the unique brand of two-way class blindness we have in this country. It's not just that the rich don't know the poor exist, and genuinely think a half a million a year is "not a lot of money," as one "compensation consultant" told the New York Times after the crash.

It also works the other way ~ the poor have no idea what real rich people are like. They apparently never see them, which is why the political champions of middle America are at this very minute campaigning in congress to extract more revenue from elderly retirees and broke-ass students while simultaneously fighting to preserve a slew of tax loopholes for the rich, including the carried-interest tax break that allows hedge fund billionaires to pay about half the tax rate of most Americans.

This is also going on because both parties are betraying the desires of the actual voters, who by and large actually do favor taxing the wealthy (they favor it intellectually anyway, when asked by pollsters). But we don't see mobs on the street demanding Stevie Cohen and John Paulson and George Soros give up their special 15 percent tax rate, because no actual people have ever seen Stevie Cohen, John Paulson or George Soros in the wild.

To most people, the undeserving rich guy is the ex-police lieutenant down the street who's been collecting a six-figure pension for years after spending two decades writing traffic tickets before retiring at 43. Seeing that guy lounging in the dugout pool you paid for with your constantly rising property taxes is enough to piss anyone off, which is why it's not hard to understand where a lot of that Tea Party anger is coming from.

But if you want to see a real asshole, you have to somehow get invited to things like the $5 million birthday party of another guy on the list below, private equity creep Steven Schwarzman.

After throwing his elaborate fete for himself, Schwarzman ~ who is said to make $400 million a year, and made $600 million when his company went public ~ compared Barack Obama to Hitler for even considering rolling back his carried-interest exemption, which, again, allows him to pay 15% taxes while some of the rest of us pay twice that or more. "It's a war," he said. "It's like when Hitler invaded Poland." 

The execution of Marie Antoinette, 1783. Push the people to the edge until they fall over into irreversible frustration and you can be involved in a tide of violence. This Queen was clueless as to what life was really like for regular people, just as those quoted and discussed here seem to be dismissive and clueless of the people at the bottom tiers of society. She paid with her life. Although we know today, that this French revolution was also the result of machinations of the banking class, especially the Rothschilds, as part of the NWO plan to destroy all monarchies.

If you think your local Andy Griffith is a greedy pig because he retired in his forties and built an addition to his garage with your tax money, try hanging out with a guy who eats $400 crabs, throws himself $5 million parties where he is serenaded by Rod Stewart and Patti Labelle (who sang "Happy Birthday"), and then compares the president to Hitler when word leaks out that he might have to pay taxes at the same rate as a firefighter or a kindergarten teacher.

But America never gets to meet that guy, because all of those parties are invite-only, and the only reporters that go tend to do so with kneepads on ~ like the extraordinary Andrew Ross Sorkin, who as Sirota notes, predictably wrote a slurpilicious "In Defense of Schwarzman" piece after the event (his thesis, to the extent that I could make it out, seemed to be that there are even bigger assholes than Schwarzman). As a result, the popular outrage gets steered toward state employees greedily living off their own pensions, not toward the truly deserving targets hiding in the Hamptons and Gstaad and St. Tropez.

In the midst of this prole-crushing economic emergency engineered by wealthy speculators and their political puppets, we now find ourselves watching those same modern-day Marie Antoinettes at once celebrating their station and begging for sympathy as if they were the real casualties of the decade-long economic slowdown they created.

There was, for instance, Lebron James' parade of free-agent narcissism in the shadow of an economically destroyed Cleveland ~  and then there was one of the architects of that economic apocalypse, Cavaliers owner and Quicken Loans CEO Dan Gilbert, pretending that the move of a single basketball player to Miami was the root of Cleveland's problems, and not the subprime bomb Gilbert himself had dropped on the city.

There was historian Doris Kearns Goodwin suggesting those politicians who followed Wall Street and voted for the bank bailouts exemplified the same heroism as those who fought for the passage of the Civil Rights Act in the 1960s.

And, more recently, there was that searing image of President Obama convening a $35,800-a-plate Upper East Side dinner with "a committee of bankers, private equity executives and hedge fund managers" as the economy burns.

This LTEC attitude covers everything from finances to reproduction as in
DAVID BECKHAM RE-IGNITES HYPOCRISY OF OVERPOPULATION ALARMISTS 

Then there is the attitude that humans are guinea pigs:

VACCINES AND EXPERIMENTS ON WOMEN, CHILDREN AND MINORITIES

  
This LTEC has also extended to the arts, the cultural accomplishments of humankind over the ages. Fine arts are just not there for people any longer, becoming almost solely the domain of the wealthy. Classical music has disappeared because it has been removed from the realm of everyday folk.  Don't start me on reading and education, but it is a fact that, although there were fewer books when America was in the colonial days, the literary level was very high and books contained concepts that today's minds would be incapable of comprehending. This is very much part of the LTEC syndrome surrounding us all today.  

SNIPPITS and SNAPPITS: THE TWENTIETH CENTURY ART SCAM

But the most obvious place it is being felt today is through finances. To learn more, I advise the following to truly understand the mindset of these creatures:

 

SNIPPITS AND SNAPPITS: THE HANDBOOK OF HUMAN OWNERSHIP

 WHAT IT ALL BOILS DOWN TO 

IS CLASS WAR.
THEY HAVE DECLARED IT UPON US. 
WHEN WILL WE START 
TO FIGHT FOR OUR RIGHTS?!!! 
PEACE CAN BE AN OPTION 
BUT IT MUST BE 
PEACE WITH PURPOSE, 
THAT OF THE UNITED MASSES!!
and NO, 
THIS IS NOT A CALL TO COMMUNISM!!
THAT IS ANOTHER BOLSHEVIK PLOT.

THE NEW "LET THEM EAT CAKE"

By David Sirota 

July 13, 2011

Salon

There is an emerging reality in America that few politicians, in either party, are ready to address. American society is becoming feudalized, with increasingly impregnable walls between the classes. This is ironic for a nation largely defined by its opportunity for upward mobility and fluid class structure and, since its founding, been known as “the land of opportunity”. Here are ten modern, shocking, illuminating moments that prove just how out of touch the powerful really are from the rest of us.

NUMBER 10:  MULTIMILLION-DOLLAR PARTIES WHILE THE GLOBE BURNSTHE NEW "LET THEM EAT CAKE" 

As the economy for most regular people continued to sputter toward the end of the Bush years, and as Wall Street was gearing up to administer its mortgage-meltdown pile driver on unsuspecting Americans, multimillion-dollar parties became all the rage.

The most famous of these was the $5 million birthday bash for the Darth Vader of private equity, Stephen Schwarzman. (This orgy of ostentation was made even more disgusting by New York Times' Andrew Ross Sorkin and his "In Defense of Schwarzman" apologia that is, in retrospect, a perfect example of how an entire Let Them Eat Cake propaganda system replaced serious financial journalism.)

But before Schwarzman could be held up as an anomaly, he was soon topped by a $20 million celebrity-studded hotel party right in the heart of the desperately poor Middle East. Held just weeks after the global economic meltdown commenced, the bash included "a fireworks show that organizers said was visible from outer space," according to the New York Daily News.

Today, revelry in the shadow of destitution is ubiquitous to the point of mundanity. In New York, for example, it's million-dollar bar mitzvahs just a short subway ride away from the pulverizing poverty in the Big Apple's outer boroughs.

NUMBER 9: RECEIPT DROPPING AS A NEW STATUS SYMBOL

A few weeks ago, the absurdly wealthy began a new obnoxious fad: leaving eye-popping receipts around, just for us poor saps to behold.

As Mediaite reported, first a bunch of Boston Bruins players racked up a $156,000 booze bill in four hours ~ and then had the receipt photographed and published at Boston.com.

Then a Philadelphia Eagles wide receiver tweeted news that he and friends had spent more than $10,000 in 17 minutes ~ and again, out came a photograph of the receipt.

Then, hedge fund manager David Tepper left a receipt lying around the Hamptons showing a $99 million balance in his petty-cash ATM savings account.

Inadvertent? In some cases, perhaps ~ but only in the sense that some of the top-hat-and-monocle crowd weren't necessarily trying to brag.

Nonchalance, though, is a statement unto itself, because here's the thing: Many of us who are not masters of the universe have a deathly fear of losing those little scraps of paper that include snippets of our financial information. We fear that because we don't want anyone to steal our multihundred-dollar fortunes. For many zillionaires that concern is trumped by the desire to flaunt their riches.

NUMBER 8: KING MIKE'S SPENDING SPREE

Though you would not know it from looking only at Manhattan, New York City is the most economically unequal city in America and the ninth-most-unequal city on the planet. Indeed, things for regular New Yorkers have gotten so awful during the recession that Crain's New York recently sounded the alarm on what it calls a "middle-class exodus." And not surprisingly, these trends have accelerated during the time the city has been ruled by that quintessential Marie Antoinette, billionaire media mogul Michael Bloomberg.

There are many "Let them eat cake" moments to ogle at during the reign of the aristocrat many now call King Mike.

There are his regular jaunts to Bermuda, where, like jet-setting royalty, he rules the Big Apple in exile.

There are his efforts to defund social services and public schools while tenaciously fighting any attempts to tax billionaire Wall Streeters.

And most recently, there was his declaration that low-income parents opposing his radical and unproven corporate-reform agenda for schools were doing so only because they "never had a formal education, and they don't understand the value of education."

But no display of Bloomberg elitism tops his decision to drop $102 million on a reelection campaign that brought him just 50.7 percent of the vote. As the New York Times reports, Bloomberg shattered all previous campaign spending records, outspending his low-profile Democratic opponent by 14 to 1. That translates into King Mike paying a stunning $174 per vote ~ or $20 million for each point in his meager margin of victory. Or, in business terms, the amount Bloomberg spent in a few months on a municipal election is almost twice what many major corporate brands spend on their worldwide advertising campaigns over an entire year.

The timing was particularly grotesque because it came just as he was saying his city's fellow elites couldn't afford to pay more taxes, at exactly the moment that the recession was pulverizing the Big Apple's dwindling middle class.

NUMBER 7: THE LAMENT OF THE PERSECUTED WALL STREETER

The $700 billion TARP bailout and the ongoing multitrillion-dollar Federal Reserve bailouts of Wall Street were, in themselves, epic acts of Let Them Eat Cake-ism, especially since they've come at the very moment politicians are citing budget deficits as reason to cut people off food stamps and unemployment benefits. But in the spirit of Marie Antoinette's aphorism, it's important to find the one moment that sums up that unprecedented pillaging of the federal treasury.

There have been many individual instances of shocking elitism that somehow portray the rich as oppressed. Until last year, my personal favorite was the one where a top Wall Street fundraiser for President Obama complained that

"the investment community feels very put-upon" and that bankers "feel there is no reason why they shouldn't earn $1 million to $200 million a year, and they don't want to be held responsible for the global financial meltdown" that they created.

However, we got a new winner when September 2010 rolled around. That fateful month, the nation was formally introduced to hedge fund manager Anthony Scaramucci, who used a nationally televised presidential town hall meeting to declare himself the man that "represent[s] the Wall Street community."

Lecturing President Obama ~ a president who had helped pass the multitrillion-dollar Wall Street bailouts, refused to prosecute Wall Street wrongdoers, and almost singlehandedly halted U.S. House-passed legislation cracking down on excessive bonuses at bailed-out banks ~ Scaramucci declared that though Wall Street pay was at that very moment continuing to break records, Wall Streeters nonetheless feel "like a piñata."

"Maybe you don't feel like you're beating us with a stick, but we certainly feel like we've been whacked with a stick," he said. "When are we going to stop whacking Wall Street like a piñata?"

Not only did Scaramucci somehow manage to mix an aw-shucks aggrieved-regular-guy shtick with a self-important declaration that he "represents the Wall Street community"; not only was he speaking as a member of a hedge fund industry whose 25 top execs made $1 billion each during a recession year that saw middle-class wages continue to flat line; and not only did he find a particularly colorful victim metaphor about piñatas while simultaneously failing to mention the bailouts ~ he pulled it all off in the context of a nationally televised White House event, deliberately seizing the media attention as an opportunity to tell the world to eat cake. Wonder what kind of bonus he earned for that.

NUMBER 6: PLEADING POVERTY AT $500,000 a YEAR

As Mother Jones has reported, the average American family in the bottom 90 percent of income earners makes just $31,244 a year ~ and, to reiterate, that's the average, meaning many make far less. Similarly, the median net worth of American families is a mere $120,000 ~ and remember, "net worth" means the sum value of all of a family's assets liquid or otherwise, from income to home to car to furniture to the kids' dirty undies.

So when you see a newspaper article during the recession about how difficult it is to live on far more than the average American's income, you can be forgiven for thinking you are reading either (a) the Onion, (b) the in-house newsletter of 18th-century Versailles or (c) an old clip of NBA guard Latrell Sprewell infamously saying a $7-million-a-year contract was an insult because "I have a family to feed." But in 2009 two such articles appeared in a pair of our nation's supposed journalistic beacons.

The Washington Post's article headlined "Squeaking By on $300,000" was absurd enough, but a Sunday Styles piece in the New York Times took that cheeky, gee-whiz journalism a step further. Daring readers to attempt the supposed hardships of affluence, the piece was titled "You Try to Live on 500K in This Town."

(The story naturally fails to mention that the city's median household income is about $38,000 a year, meaning that most New Yorkers take the headline's challenge on a yearly basis.) Instead, it reported on a proposal to limit bailed-out bank salaries to a half million dollars a year, and then proceeded to try to cheekily illustrate how impossible that would be in the Big Apple.

According to the Times' "cold hard math," this is virtually untenable given expenses that include $32,000-a-kid private school bills, $96,000-a-year mortgages, $96,000-a-year co-op maintenance fees, $45,000-a-year nanny tabs and, of course, the undebatable requirement that very rich people take "at least two vacations a year, a winter trip to the sun and a spring trip to the ski slopes." And mind you, the Times was quick to inform us, this doesn't even include other "prerequisites" to living in New York City like "restaurants, dry cleaning... kennels for the dog when the family is away, summer camp, spas and other grooming" and $1,000 suits from Brooks Brothers.

NUMBER 5: BEING WORTH $31 MILLION IS "STRUGGLING LIKE EVERYONE ELSE WITH THE ECONOMY"

What is "rich" and what is "middle class?" Those terms and concepts didn't use to be up for debate ~ to paraphrase the Supreme Court, you knew wealth when you saw it. Yet, as the recession intensified over the last few years, the most basic economic taxonomy has been challenged by a furious propaganda campaign to convince Americans that the super-rich are experiencing the same struggles as we are.

During a January 2008 Democratic presidential debate, ABC News' Charlie Gibson ~ who made $7 million a year ~ used a question about taxes to insinuate that a household pulling in $200,000 a year is merely making a middle-class income, when in fact, roughly 97 percent of American households make less.

Gibson's message, however out of touch, subsequently oozed into cable TV ~ and from there, into elite culture at large. In 2010, for example, CNN's Kiran Chetry suggested that "in some parts of the country" making $250,000 a year "is middle class" ~ a statement that defies Census data showing that even in the wealthiest enclaves in America, a quarter-mil a year is still three times the median income. Meanwhile, University of Chicago professor Todd Henderson garnered national headlines for an essay railing on the repeal of Bush's tax cuts ~ an essay declaring that his family's $250,000-a-year income meant he was "just getting by."

Over on Wall Street, the definitions became even more skewed. In a 2009 New York Times article on proposals to limit executive pay at bailed-out banks to $500,000 a year, corporate compensation consultant James F. Reda said that such a cap was "pretty draconian." Why? Because, he said, $500,000 a year "is not a lot of money."

Nothing, however, compares to the series of declarations that are emanating from professional politicians in Washington this year ~ and specifically from Rep. Paul Gosar, R-Ariz., and Rep. Denny Rehberg, R-Mont. Their recent statements show how clueless multimillionaire politicians really are about the plight of the average American.

The former, who represents a district with a median income of $32,900, told a recent audience that though he earns $174,000 a year as a public employee and though he's worth more than $2 million, "I ain't wealthy ... I live just like the rest of you folks."

The latter, who represents one of the poorest states in the nation, gets paid the same annual salary and is worth $31 million. Nonetheless, he told his constituents that his family is "struggling like everyone else with the economy."

NUMBER 4: FOR ME, BUT NOT FOR THEE

One of the hallmarks of Let Them Eat Cake-ism is an absolute lack of self-awareness mixed with a complete disregard for hypocrisy or personal responsibility. The end result is an especially nauseating "for me, but not for thee" attitude.

In this recession, that has manifested itself as bankers walking away from their obligations to cover their own losses and happily vacuuming up public bailout dollars ~ all while lecturing strapped homeowners about their moral responsibility to pay their bills.

Recall that in February 2009, Jamie Dimon ~ the $17-million-a-year CEO of the bailed-out JP Morgan ~ went on CNBC to deliver a sermon about the moral obligation of covering one's own losses and not running to someone else for help.

"I don't think just because someone's underwater [in their home], they say, I don't have to stay there," he said. "They're supposed to pay the mortgage, and we should teach the American people, you're supposed to meet your obligations, not run from them."

Following Dimon's lead in 2009 was the Mortgage Bankers Association, the umbrella group for the entire bailed-out industry. In a Wall Street Journal story about underwater homeowners, the group's chief executive, John Courson, was quoted declaring that borrowers had no right to any kind of bailout themselves, and that they should pay back their loans immediately. If they don't, he said, "What about the message they will send to their family and their kids and their friends?"

This, of course, was not a question Courson or his fellow bankers considered when they went to taxpayers begging for a handout. And, as importantly, it was not the question Courson's own trade group made when they short-sold their own headquarters in a complex scheme that may have had them walk away from the very obligations they said homeowners must fulfill. As the Boston Globe reported at the time:

The trade group has sold its 10-story Washington headquarters for $41 million after shelling out $79 million for it three years ago. All but $5 million of that was financed.

It gets better, for it's not clear the Mortgage Bankers Association will pay off all of the roughly $30 million it still owes its lenders on the trophy office building, just a few blocks from the White House... On top of that, giant commercial landlord Tishman Speyer is battling in court with the MBA, contending the trade group still owes $1 million after breaking an earlier lease to move into its now clearly massively overpriced headquarters.

NUMBER 3: LET THEM EAT FORECLOSURES

By 2011, JP Morgan's Jamie Dimon had finally stopped excoriating homeowners for trying to walk away from their obligations in exactly the same way Dimon's fellow bankers had during the Wall Street meltdown. In fact, he seemed to dial back his hard-line position on paying back loans. But the operative word is "seemed."

You see, the gentler Dimon couldn't keep his intense elitism from coming out after his bank began facing legal questions about its moves to aggressively accelerate foreclosures on homeowners.

As more details emerged ~ including revelations of scandalous treatment of active-duty soldiers ~ it became clear that Dimon's new reticence about the morals of paying back mortgages wasn't reflective of a bank that had suddenly become more humane or lenient toward underwater homeowners.

On the contrary, the bank had simply stopped imploring homeowners to pay up, and instead just started throwing teetering homeowners out of their homes as soon as possible ~ all while lobbying against federal legislation that would have forced banks to renegotiate their loan terms so as to prevent such foreclosures.

When all of this started coming out, Dimon couldn't restrain his Let Them Eat Cake impulses any longer. And so he pioneered a previously unthinkable line of spin, asking people forcibly removed from their homes to see his bank's moves as altruistic acts of benevolence.

He told CNBC: "Giving debt relief to people that really need it, that's what foreclosure is."

NUMBER 2: THE PALACES THAT TAXPAYERS BUILT

In Louisville, Ky., as the city struggles with high unemployment, Goldman Sachs engineered a scheme to construct a huge new sports arena that is now siphoning millions of dollars of public money into the investment bank's coffers.

In Jefferson County, Ala., Goldman orchestrated the construction of what's been called "the Taj Mahal of sewer-treatment plants" ~ a massive boondoggle that has bankrupted the county and, once again, made Goldman huge money.

And in New York, where public budgets are being gutted, Goldman just opened a monstrous $2 billion headquarters, financed by what Bloomberg News calls "unprecedented" aid from taxpayers.

Recent news out of Colorado suggests that Goldman and other companies are likely to profit even more off municipal finance. Despite Denver, Aurora and the state of Colorado facing crushing annual deficits, lawmakers at both the municipal and state level are now putting together what could become the largest package of corporate welfare in the state's history in order to get a private hotel corporation to build a new convention center. And not just any new convention center ~ one that's just a few miles from a newly renovated convention center that already exists in downtown Denver.

Incredibly, as part of the deal, Denver policymakers who have been for years slashing municipal services are now floating the idea of asking Denver voters to approve a bond initiative that would spend $150 million on a plan to move the National Western Stock show out of Denver entirely.

That's right, taxpayers may be asked to pay to move a revenue-generating event out of their city for the sake of enriching a corporation, rather than, say, spending that revenue on rebuilding the tattered social safety net.

NUMBER 1: "SUCK IT UP AND COPE"

"Let them eat cake"is a phrase composed of four simple, easy to remember words, which is probably why it became so emblematic of a larger set of ideals.  "Suck it up and cope" is a phrase of five similarly simple and memorable words, which is why it may well replace "Let them eat cake" in the annals of history

 Yes, "Suck it up and cope" ~ that is what billionaire Charlie Munger said that the unemployed, the homeless and the impoverished should do as their lives are torn apart by the recession.

Of course, had he said the same thing about bailed-out banks, his now-infamous line might have just seemed like the innocuous rant of a crotchety geezer who might be a little too zealous about old-school principles.

But no, Munger made the remark during a 2010 speech to University of Michigan students in which he first lauded bankers as people who "saved your civilization" and then urged all Americans to bow down and "thank god" that the bailouts preserved the financial industry's profits.

And so we end this feature with a worthy successor to "Let them eat cake":

"Suck it up and cope."

David Sirota is a best-selling author of the new book "Back to Our Future: How the 1980s Explain the World We Live In Now." He hosts the morning show on AM760 in Colorado. E-mail him at ds@davidsirota.com, follow him on Twitter @davidsirota or visit his website at www.davidsirota.com. More: David Sirota