The Oligarchy is striking back. First we have John Paulson who made his billions by actively helping the housing market to collapse, bringing the larger economy crashing down around it in a massive wave of job losses, tell us what an upstanding citizen he is because he pays a preferential low tax rate on his ill gotten hoard. Paulson made about $5 billion last year.
Bankers Join Billionaires to Debunk ‘Imbecile’ Attack on Top 1%
December 26, 2011
By Max Abelson
Paulson, the New York hedge-fund manager who became a billionaire by betting against the U.S. housing market, has also said the rich benefit society.
“The top 1 percent of New Yorkers pay over 40 percent of all income taxes,” Paulson & Co. said in an e-mailed statement on Oct. 11, the day Occupy Wall Street protesters left a mock tax-refund check at its president’s Upper East Side townhouse.
‘Going to Vomit’
Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer Paychex Inc. and a former New York gubernatorial candidate, said in an interview this month that while there are examples of excess, it’s “ridiculous” to blame everyone who is rich.
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam singles titles.
Then another billionaire Tom Golisano chimes in with his comment belittling anyone who thinks the pampered oligarchs should provide a little more toward their nation's well being. Its Tom Golisano's limitless sense of entitlement should make the 99% gag in disgust.
Matt Taibbi says it best.
A Christmas Message From America's Rich
Matt Taibbi
DECEMBER 22
But citizens of the stateless archipelago where people like Schwarzman live spend millions a year lobbying and donating to political campaigns so that they can jump the line. They don’t need to make sure the government is fulfilling its customer-service obligations, because they buy special access to the government, and get the special service and the metaphorical comped bottle of VIP-room Cristal afforded to select customers.
Want to lower the capital reserve requirements for investment banks? Then-Goldman CEO Hank Paulson takes a meeting with SEC chief Bill Donaldson, and gets it done. Want to kill an attempt to erase the carried interest tax break? Guys like Schwarzman, and Apollo’s Leon Black, and Carlyle’s David Rubenstein, they just show up in Washington at Max Baucus’s doorstep, and they get it killed.
Taibbi writes about how our corporate "citizens" get government ignore the interests of the vast majority of its human citizens, and ignore the long term interests of the nation itself.
What makes people furious is that they have stopped being citizens.
Most of us 99-percenters couldn’t even let our dogs leave a dump on the sidewalk without feeling ashamed before our neighbors. It's called having a conscience: even though there are plenty of things most of us could get away with doing, we just don’t do them, because, well, we live here. Most of us wouldn’t take a million dollars to swindle the local school system, or put our next door neighbors out on the street with a robosigned foreclosure, or steal the life’s savings of some old pensioner down the block by selling him a bunch of worthless securities.
But our Too-Big-To-Fail banks unhesitatingly take billions in bailout money and then turn right around and finance the export of jobs to new locations in China and India. They defraud the pension funds of state workers into buying billions of their crap mortgage assets. They take zero-interest loans from the state and then lend that same money back to us at interest. Or, like Chase, they bribe the politicians serving countries and states and cities and even school boards to take on crippling debt deals.
Americans have the best government money can buy.
Our merchants and master-manufacturers complain much of the bad effects of high wages in raising the price, and thereby lessening the sale of their goods both at home and abroad. They say nothing concerning the bad effects of high profits. They are silent with regard to the pernicious effects of their own gains. They complain only of those of other people. - Adam Smith
The rigged game between the Oligarchy and our political power structure goes on as usual, and the Oligarchs are eager to dismiss the notion that it could ever be otherwise. Occupy Wall Street has been successful in bringing this long ignored issue of equity to the forefront. And the issue of equity is the absolute last thing the Oligarchs want Americans to be focused on in an election year
The Oligarchs are prepared to swamp the mass media with their self serving messages over the coming year. Their money was successful in changing the national conversation in 2010 to the need for government austerity, instead of the urgent need for economic stimulation from the government to create jobs.
If I hear the obscenely wealthy like Tom Golisano or John Paulson cry more crocodile tears about how rough the super rich have it, I'm the one who's going to vomit.