But my cat hates rich food.
I really hope to Og that there is no relation to the great Hall of Fame baseball player of the same name.
If so, that is definitely devolution.
please… i don’t deserve a fate like that.
Um yeah I sorta do. The oligarchy is incompetent, pampered and ungrateful. Witness the pointless downgrade of US debt, following the default debacle. Our corporate bigwigs should have made phone calls to their Republican minions in Washington and told them to knock it off. It’s bad for business. We need a better collection of overlords: maybe we should relax immigration requirements from relatively socially responsible regions like Sicily.
I call BS. It’s not impossible. But are you saying that you know engineers who a) have personally invented devices, b) manage companies that sell them and c) are at a scale enabling them to pull down $1 million+ per year? Remember we’re talking about the “1%”, not the 1%. And I’m not just being pendantic. HP has had a parade of bumbling CEOs. HP’s R&D department invented the memristor, which may or may not be a huge contribution to humanity. But whether it’s a boon or a flop will only be tangentially related to the temporary manager holding the CEO’s seat at the time.
There is little or no evidence or rigorous theory that places all the wonderment of capitalism within the boardroom, the CEO enclave or various other highly remunerated clown cars. This urban myth has to end.
To the OP: Hank Greenberg was kicked out of AIG in 2005. Here’s the Wiki quote and I’m sure you can search on the event itself.
“In 1962, Greenberg was named by AIG’s founder, Cornelius Vander Starr, as the head of AIG’s failing North American holdings. In 1968, Starr picked Greenberg as his successor. Greenberg held the position until 2005, when he stepped down amid a major leadership scandal and was replaced by Martin J. Sullivan. He was subsequently the subject of New York State civil charges which are still unresolved.[2]”
Hank should be pilloried but the bailout didn’t happen on his watch.
That is a modest proposal you have got there.
My sister and her husband make enough to qualify as being part of the 1%. She is a doctor and he owns a successful green energy company. This company helps large businesses use less energy by improving the efficiency of the heating, cooling, refrigeration, etc. He started off with just him and his partner putting in their own savings to start their dream business. Now he employs over 70 people.
Why should they be made into cat food? How did they “destroy the economy for their own personal gain”?
Are they fighting against paying more taxes? And how much of their money is redistributed to the poor? Or are they tacitly responsible for people going hungry in a country with plenty of food? It’s honestly hard to get that rich without being a greedy bastard. If your sister has pulled it off, more power to her.
Are people here fucking stupid?
The thread title was clearly intended as hyperbole. Read the first fucking line of his actual post:
Emphasis mine. The OP makes very clear which specific people among the 1% that he’s talking about.
“Oooh, my sister’s rich and she’s not evil. Why should she be made into cat food? Waaaaaaaaaaaaaah!!!”
Cry me a fucking river, douchebag.
In his brilliant book, *God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater *Kurt Vonnegut explored a most interesting question: do the rich own the money, or does the money own them?
Yes, the OP references the “1%”, not the 1%.
Let me be more explicit. The economist Paul Krugman points out that it’s the stats of the 0.1% or (1/1000th of the US) that are really striking:
Now there are 0.1% heroes. Gates is one, not for his god-awful operating system but for his creative philanthropic work. Buffet is another. Steve Jobs was a third, and I’m typing on a PC. Heck, I’d even cut some slack to true CEO innovators like Jack Welch, even if he also did a fair amount of earnings massage. But most of these clowns are hired hands with good friends within the web of interlocking directorships. Hilariously, most CEOs are put in charge of their own oversight: they are given the dual role of operating the company and heading the Board of Directors. Our oligarchs don’t even try to avoid the appearance of impropriety.
So which firms are the big job creators? Contrary to what you’ve read it’s not small business per se. No the big job creators are young businesses – which tend to be small. But not all small businesses are young or growing.
Cite.
What a crock of shit. How much of your money do you redistribute to the poor?
I didn’t say anything related to B) and C), where did you get that from? But I know several engineers who have founded successful companies based on their inventions, and are most definitely in the “1%” in terms of net worth as a result. They are not famous and I’m fairly certain you’ve never heard their names. But they are some of the smartest, most talented, hardest-working people I know, and they made their money honestly, literally by making the world a better place.
I don’t want to name anyone I know, because someone could probably figure out who I am. But as an example of such a person, though I don’t know him personally, take Austin Meyer, the developer of a specialty flight simulator called X-Plane. He is probably the biggest nerd you’d ever meet, and has been working on X-Plane single-handedly for almost 20 years (happily, he’s finally hired a few employees recently). His software is probably the most accurate, general-purpose flight simulator available today, and is used for flight training, aircraft design and other purposes by hundreds of companies and organizations, including NASA.
He is currently chronicling the construction of his “homebuilt”, $1,000,000 Lancair Evolution turbine-powered airplane, so I think it is fair to consider him part of the “1%” (Evo)
You can buy a license of his software for home use for about $30, last I checked. Please explain to me how he is a greedy bastard and should be turned into cat food.
Don’t get me wrong - I despise incompetent CEO’s who drive companies into the ground and then walk away with 8-figure “retirement” packages, and I despise reckless financiers who take risks with other people’s money and torpedo the world economy, and certainly the “1%” is partially made up of these people.
But as I write this post, I’m getting more and more angry. I’m an engineer, and I went to a very high-end science and engineering school, and so I know a lot of successful engineers and scientists. So maybe my view is skewed. But I get infuriated when I hear ignorant people like Fear Itself and BigT rail against “the rich”, as if being successful is itself a sin, because I know many successful people who unquestionably deserve their wealth, having actually produced something valuable and contributed to society.
Absolute - first of all, thank you for not invading anyone’s privacy in a fit of pique. Not that you would.
The top 1% (all 3,000,000 of them) make perhaps $500,000+ per year. But the OP was referring to the “1%”, which is a rather smaller number. See mhendo’s post. That’s where I grabbed the $1,000,000* figure from: we’re talking about pampered plutocratic incompetents jabbering about free markets while suckling on the government’s teat, largely by chasing tax breaks, but occasionally by being bailed out when their bets go south.
The guy you linked to may very well not be in the top 1%, as it happens: you could pull down $300,000 per year and build a $1,000,000 plane. Regardless, I’m guessing that he’s not in $1,000,000+/yr range - he may be in the 1%, but I doubt whether he resides in 0.1% land. And we’re really discussing a subset of the latter. Thus the quotation marks.
The fact is things have changed in the past 30 years. Inflation adjusted CEO pay packets used to be much smaller.
Ok, but when you linki to Mr. Coolplane, you just enable these creeps. The funny thing about a lot of Republican tax plans is that the upper middle class and professional classes get surprisingly thin gruel from them.
You think Mr. Coolplane is in the same circumstance as Mr. AIG. No. Very much not.
Did Mr. Coolplane “Destroy the economy for his own personal gain” even remotely? No? Because Mr. AIG sure did, through gross negligence of his fiduciary duties. Admittedly, it’s more difficult to defend BigT’s comments.
- ETA: To be clear, I don’t know what the cutoff for 0.1% is. I made up the $1,000,000 cutoff.
Interesting. So what’s his angle here? Did he still have a shit load of stock that he feels got destroyed because the board’s acceptance of the bailout plan? Or is this an attempt to get an out of court settlement to make him go away?
Not so much direct at you, but whoever can shed some light on this.
I also recall some stories suggesting that AIG wasn’t plannign to take the bailout, but had it shoved ont hem. There were good reasons not to accept. Sure, the company would have gone away. But it wouldn’t have vanished from existence - other companies would have bought it out, or peices of it.
Second, there is a real question as to wheterh the bailout was fully legal.
Third, what Fear Itself misses, as always, is that the financial industry didn’t change things. It have been overleveraged, but either way bubbles will be avenged. You can’t have a bubble unless people really think things are worth the price, and the mortgages crisis was only a symptom. People overleveeraged because they thought it was a good idea; the only real problem was that some thought they were buying safer investments than they really were. But that is nothing new.
Relevant link:
And to the OP, he was out of the CEO role since 2005.
I’m still baffled that you can be talking about the top 1% and get upset that people think you mean, well… the top 1%. In fact you mean the “1%” which is somehow different and actually means (depending) the top .1% or .01% or .001%.
It’s not only plausible that most of those with incomes over $500K aren’t exploitative bastards, I’d argue that most probably aren’t. But I mean, how could you ever measure such a thing?
Tens of thousands? You shot low. One percent equals 3.5 million Americans.
No, it’s not. People do it all the time. Quit thinking that having money makes you evil.
I was misinformed. But it doesn’t change the substance of my pitting; if anything, it enhances it. Stockholders have no standing to sue; they ceded that when they elected the board of directors to act on their behalf. The board approved the terms of the bailout; if the stockholders object, they have only themselves to blame for electing board members who lack the courage to stay in a burning building. Or they could vote with their wallet and sell their stock. Where is the invisible hand of the market now? Why do staunch capitalists like AIG stockholders suddenly think their losses should be socialized? Catfood I say!