Disclaimer!
I barely skimmed this article. But one statement stands out.
"Billionaires don’t live in the same world most of us live in".
So why do we take their pontificates so seriously? Of course they
will tell us they don't understand why we are discontented. For them,
the World is an Oyster containing rare pearls. But even so, they
should take seriously the ultimate fate of every Empire's hierarchy.
The Rise and Fall of the Roman Empire.
The French Revolution.
The Russian Revolution.
The Fall of the British Empire...still on-going.
The Rise and soon to Fall American Empire.
When the common working folks finally declare that they have had
enough, it is too late for the Fat Drones to back off. They are
driven out of the hives and even butchered.
And all the while they proclaim, "I don't understand why they are
dissatisfied."
Carl Jarvis
On 2/3/16, Miriam Vieni <miriamvieni@xxxxxxxxxxxxx> wrote:
Boardman writes: "Multi-billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman says he's puzzled
by the amount of discontent apparently felt by other Americans these days.
Steve Schwarzman is a bland-looking, somewhat paunchy, not unattractive,
balding man of benign demeanor who will be 69 on Valentine's Day 2016. He's
worth $12 billion, give or take a few hundred million. He is a poster boy
for Wall Street success and self-esteem and cluelessness."
Steve Schwarzman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone. (photo: Natalie White)
Wall Street Worldview: Why Are People Upset?
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
02 February 16
Multi-billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman says he’s puzzled by the amount of
discontent apparently felt by other Americans these days.
Steve Schwarzman is a bland-looking, somewhat paunchy, not unattractive,
balding man of benign demeanor who will be 69 on Valentine’s Day 2016. He’s
worth $12 billion, give or take a few hundred million. He is a poster boy
for Wall Street success and self-esteem and cluelessness. He’s the
co-founder, chairman, and CEO of the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s
largest financial firms, specializing in private equity, hedge funds, and
mergers. He’s a Republican, and his life has been going pretty well for him
lately, as it has for decades.
But he freely admits (or pretends to admit) that he doesn’t understand why
the rest of America isn’t just as content as he is. On January 21, at the
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Schwarzman spoke to a gathering
of his peers who run the world about his perception of the US presidential
election campaign:
“I find the whole thing astonishing and what’s remarkable is the amount of
anger whether it’s on the Republican side or the Democratic side…. Bernie
Sanders, to me, is almost more stunning than some of what’s going on in the
Republican side. How is that happening, why is that happening?”
One clue to “why is that happening,” a clue Schwarzman presumably noticed
last October, was the $39 million fine Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group
advisors had to pay for bilking customers. Blackstone entered into a
“consent agreement” with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
finding that “it breached its fiduciary duty” to its customers. The consent
agreement, admitting no guilt, is a tactic often used by corporate shysters
to cut their losses when caught with their hands in other people’s pockets.
Blackstone’s “cooperation” with the SEC was cited as a reason the SEC fined
the company only $10 million. Or, as the SEC press release put it:
“Blackstone consented to the entry of the SEC’s order…. Without admitting
or
denying the findings, Blackstone agreed to cease and desist from further
violations, to disgorge $26.2 million of ill-gotten gains plus prejudgment
interest of $2.6 million, and to pay a $10 million civil penalty.... The
settlement reflects Blackstone’s remedial acts and its voluntary and prompt
cooperation with the Division of Enforcement’s investigation.” [Note: with
revenue of $7.484 billion, Blackstone’s $10 million fine represents
10/7484th – or .1336% – of its income.]
Blackstone steals millions, pays fine, no one goes to jail
Steve Schwarzman is a smart guy. He went to Yale with George Bush, and like
Bush he was in the Yale senior society Skull and Bones. Also like Bush,
Schwarzman went to Harvard for his MBA. And then he made billions in an
industry that has become a largely deregulated financial racket that
brought
the country to its economic knees in 2008, under President Bush. So Steve
Schwarzman is no dummy. But he wants you to believe he’s not smart enough
to
figure out a system that made him a billionaire while directly and
indirectly impoverishing millions. People resent that system, lots of
people
resent it deeply for the way it’s treated them. Steve Schwarzman is
“astonished” by their anger. And he acts as if he expects people to believe
in his pose of naiveté, telling a Bloomberg interviewer:
“What is the vein that is being tapped into across parties, that has made
people so unhappy?... That is something you should spend some time on.”
Schwarzman might have gotten a clue when his president at Blackstone Group
(Tony James) hosted a multi-million-dollar fundraiser for Democrat Hillary
Clinton at which she denounced corporate crime (wink-wink, nod-nod).
Clinton
omitted denunciation of Blackstone for its then-recent fine by the SEC,
even
though the Blackstone victims included public pension systems in
California,
Florida, and New Jersey (for teachers, firefighters, police, and other
government workers). And if that didn’t seem like enough of a source for
anger, Schwarzman might have listened to fellow Blackstone billionaire
Byron
Wien, who was kicking those public sector workers back in 2010:
“The retirement benefits for state workers, really not only in New York,
California and New Jersey, but throughout the country, are very generous.
Too generous. And it is very hard to change that.... But I think we have to
be more realistic. We literally can't afford the benefits we have given our
retirees in state and local governments. Andwe have to change that.”
[emphasis added]
So Blackstone tried stealing from those pension funds, which may not have
been Wien’s intent. Either way, when you set about to reduce the retirement
income of people who have earned it by contract, why wouldn’t you expect
them to get angry? And especially why wouldn’t you expect them to get angry
when their pension “problems” stem from the fiscal deceit of politicians
you
support? Billionaires attack the life savings of $19,000-a-year workers and
expect to be loved? Yes, they do.
Billionaires don’t live in the same world most of us live in
Five years later in 2015, Wien was as tone deaf to the situation of most
Americans as his baffled Blackstone buddy Schwarzman wondering where all
the
anger comes from. With no trace of empathy, or irony, Wien wrote in early
2015 about the depleted savings of “many” households:
“Among those who had savings prior to 2008, 57% said they’d used up some or
all of their savings in the Great Recession and its aftermath. What’s more,
only 39% of respondents reported having a ‘rainy day’ fund adequate to
cover
three months of expenses and only 48% of respondents said that they could
not completely cover a hypothetical emergency expense costing $400 without
selling something or borrowing money.
“Of course, for those in the top-10% of wage earners – ‘it’s all good.’”
[emphasis in original]
One of the things you don’t hear the Blackstone boys or others like them
fretting much about is wealth inequality. At the Davos conference, where
Schwarzman was expressing his bewilderment, Oxfam had just released a
report
that 62 peopleown half of the wealth in the world: 62 people own as much as
3.6 billion people own. The scales of wealth are balanced, 62 and 3.6
billion. But Schwarzman would like you to believe that he doesn’t see that
as a possible source of irritation, never mind anger, even though the trend
is startling: in 2010 it took 388 people to own half the world’s wealth.
Schwarzman took no note of this reality in his interview at Davos. How bad
can the world look to a guy who spends $5 million on his own 60th birthday
party in February 2007 at the New York Armory on Park Avenue, featuring
rock
star Rod Stewart (for $1 million) and a gaggle of guests from the Let Them
Eat Cake crowd? At the time, in all apparent insincerity, when his net
worth
was maybe only $7 billion, Schwarzman told the New Yorker, “I don’t feel
like a wealthy person.”
Wealthy people pay the highest tax rates, except when they don’t
One reason Schwarzman may not feel like a wealthy person is because he and
others like him are not taxed like wealthy people. Schwarzman, like Mitt
Romney before him, has his income taxed at 15%, the second lowest rate in
the tax code (poor people pay a 10% tax rate). The 15% rate is mostly for
people earning less than $38,000 a year (or $76,000 for a couple).
Schwarzman’s income runs into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a
year, but is is taxed as if it’s less than $38,000. It’s not magic, and
it’s
not a crime, it’s a dishonest tax code that Congress consistently refuses
to
make fair. Surprise!
The tax gimmick here is called “carried interest” and allows Schwarzman,
Romney, and the rest of the private equity gang to have their income taxed
as if it’s “capital gains,” for which the (also corruptly low) tax rate is
15%. Because the equity fundsters get this tax break, that means in effect
that every other tax paying household has to pay another $400 or more a
year
to subsidize billionaires. Schwarzman is surely smart enough to understand
how nurses or truckers or teachers or even most doctors and lawyers might
be
annoyed at having to pay taxes at a higher rate than a billionaire. But he
doesn’t seem to get it.
In 2010, when there was some talk of closing the carried interest loophole,
Steve Schwarzman strongly objected, as if Wall Street was actually being
invaded: “It’s a war…. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
In his other public remarks, Schwarzman doesn’t seem to have much interest
in war, metaphorical or real. On the record, it seems to be war only when
it’s against him more or less personally. He’s smart enough to understand
that war can make people angry, but he remains publicly oblivious to
politicians who support illegal wars and call for more, to Americans who
fight and die in illegal wars that also promote terrorist responses, or to
the way America treats its veterans, whether wounded, homeless, or damaged
in invisible ways (like the country).
Three big dangers: economic crisis, international crisis, and Bernie
In a bizarre four-minute video for the Wall Street Journal on January 21,
Schwarzman calmly and smoothly explained what he sees as the three broad
reasons for the unsteady state of the world, and especially for shaky
market
conditions:
• First, the economic slowdown in the US and China, although he called
reactions to China “overdone.”
• Second, the geo-political situation, which is “concerning … there
are too many unusual things happening in the world now.” In a rather
random,
imprecise blur he mentioned immigration, ISIS, Pakistan, Iran, Korea’s
hydrogen bomb, “and there are lots of other issues going on in the world….
It’s happening with such a frequency, it’s actually de-stabilizing and
gives
the appearance that the world is out of control.”
• Third, unsettled markets, “because Bernie Sanders has become a
viable candidate, at least in Iowa and New Hampshire…. He’s really on the
far left.” He added that the Republicans don’t seem to have anyone who
inspires confidence to handle the job of president. “And really a key to
this market collapse is Bernie rising as a viable candidate….”
There you have it, the three pillars of the Schwarzman world view: the
world’s largest economies, geo-political conflict, and Bernie Sanders.
Democracy is an unspoken enemy of the established order. Schwarzman doesn’t
say here which he would tackle first – economic, international, or Bernie
issues – but it’s hard to believe he cares most about war or peace or
inequality of any sort. With nothing to say at Davos about war or torture
or
drone executions or the predatory American military presence in more than
100 countries around the world, Schwarzman suggested that the country is in
“some kind of odd protest moment.” He offered, simplistically, that the US
needs a president who can bring people together:
"The question is, what is everyone protesting about? There are a lot of
things that I guess you could, but what's needed actually is a cohesive,
healing presidency, not one that's lurching either to the right or to the
left….”
Having said that, Schwarzman expressed support for Donald Trump.
________________________________________
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
Error! Hyperlink reference not valid. Error! Hyperlink reference not
valid.
Steve Schwarzman, CEO and co-founder of Blackstone. (photo: Natalie White)
http://readersupportednews.org/http://readersupportednews.org/
Wall Street Worldview: Why Are People Upset?
By William Boardman, Reader Supported News
02 February 16
ulti-billionaire Stephen A. Schwarzman says he’s puzzled by the amount of
discontent apparently felt by other Americans these days.
Steve Schwarzman is a bland-looking, somewhat paunchy, not unattractive,
balding man of benign demeanor who will be 69 on Valentine’s Day 2016. He’s
worth $12 billion, give or take a few hundred million. He is a poster boy
for Wall Street success and self-esteem and cluelessness. He’s the
co-founder, chairman, and CEO of the Blackstone Group, one of the world’s
largest financial firms, specializing in private equity, hedge funds, and
mergers. He’s a Republican, and his life has been going pretty well for him
lately, as it has for decades.
But he freely admits (or pretends to admit) that he doesn’t understand why
the rest of America isn’t just as content as he is. On January 21, at the
World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, Schwarzman spoke to a gathering
of his peers who run the world about his perception of the US presidential
election campaign:
“I find the whole thing astonishing and what’s remarkable is the amount of
anger whether it’s on the Republican side or the Democratic side…. Bernie
Sanders, to me, is almost more stunning than some of what’s going on in the
Republican side. How is that happening, why is that happening?”
One clue to “why is that happening,” a clue Schwarzman presumably noticed
last October, was the $39 million fine Schwarzman’s Blackstone Group
advisors had to pay for bilking customers. Blackstone entered into a
“consent agreement” with the US Securities and Exchange Commission (SEC)
finding that “it breached its fiduciary duty” to its customers. The consent
agreement, admitting no guilt, is a tactic often used by corporate shysters
to cut their losses when caught with their hands in other people’s pockets.
Blackstone’s “cooperation” with the SEC was cited as a reason the SEC fined
the company only $10 million. Or, as the SEC press release put it:
“Blackstone consented to the entry of the SEC’s order…. Without admitting
or
denying the findings, Blackstone agreed to cease and desist from further
violations, to disgorge $26.2 million of ill-gotten gains plus prejudgment
interest of $2.6 million, and to pay a $10 million civil penalty.... The
settlement reflects Blackstone’s remedial acts and its voluntary and prompt
cooperation with the Division of Enforcement’s investigation.” [Note: with
revenue of $7.484 billion, Blackstone’s $10 million fine represents
10/7484th – or .1336% – of its income.]
Blackstone steals millions, pays fine, no one goes to jail
Steve Schwarzman is a smart guy. He went to Yale with George Bush, and like
Bush he was in the Yale senior society Skull and Bones. Also like Bush,
Schwarzman went to Harvard for his MBA. And then he made billions in an
industry that has become a largely deregulated financial racket that
brought
the country to its economic knees in 2008, under President Bush. So Steve
Schwarzman is no dummy. But he wants you to believe he’s not smart enough
to
figure out a system that made him a billionaire while directly and
indirectly impoverishing millions. People resent that system, lots of
people
resent it deeply for the way it’s treated them. Steve Schwarzman is
“astonished” by their anger. And he acts as if he expects people to believe
in his pose of naiveté, telling a Bloomberg interviewer:
“What is the vein that is being tapped into across parties, that has made
people so unhappy?... That is something you should spend some time on.”
Schwarzman might have gotten a clue when his president at Blackstone Group
(Tony James) hosted a multi-million-dollar fundraiser for Democrat Hillary
Clinton at which she denounced corporate crime (wink-wink, nod-nod).
Clinton
omitted denunciation of Blackstone for its then-recent fine by the SEC,
even
though the Blackstone victims included public pension systems in
California,
Florida, and New Jersey (for teachers, firefighters, police, and other
government workers). And if that didn’t seem like enough of a source for
anger, Schwarzman might have listened to fellow Blackstone billionaire
Byron
Wien, who was kicking those public sector workers back in 2010:
“The retirement benefits for state workers, really not only in New York,
California and New Jersey, but throughout the country, are very generous.
Too generous. And it is very hard to change that.... But I think we have to
be more realistic. We literally can't afford the benefits we have given our
retirees in state and local governments. Andwe have to change that.”
[emphasis added]
So Blackstone tried stealing from those pension funds, which may not have
been Wien’s intent. Either way, when you set about to reduce the retirement
income of people who have earned it by contract, why wouldn’t you expect
them to get angry? And especially why wouldn’t you expect them to get angry
when their pension “problems” stem from the fiscal deceit of politicians
you
support? Billionaires attack the life savings of $19,000-a-year workers and
expect to be loved? Yes, they do.
Billionaires don’t live in the same world most of us live in
Five years later in 2015, Wien was as tone deaf to the situation of most
Americans as his baffled Blackstone buddy Schwarzman wondering where all
the
anger comes from. With no trace of empathy, or irony, Wien wrote in early
2015 about the depleted savings of “many” households:
“Among those who had savings prior to 2008, 57% said they’d used up some or
all of their savings in the Great Recession and its aftermath. What’s more,
only 39% of respondents reported having a ‘rainy day’ fund adequate to
cover
three months of expenses and only 48% of respondents said that they could
not completely cover a hypothetical emergency expense costing $400 without
selling something or borrowing money.
“Of course, for those in the top-10% of wage earners – ‘it’s all good.’”
[emphasis in original]
One of the things you don’t hear the Blackstone boys or others like them
fretting much about is wealth inequality. At the Davos conference, where
Schwarzman was expressing his bewilderment, Oxfam had just released a
report
that 62 peopleown half of the wealth in the world: 62 people own as much as
3.6 billion people own. The scales of wealth are balanced, 62 and 3.6
billion. But Schwarzman would like you to believe that he doesn’t see that
as a possible source of irritation, never mind anger, even though the trend
is startling: in 2010 it took 388 people to own half the world’s wealth.
Schwarzman took no note of this reality in his interview at Davos. How bad
can the world look to a guy who spends $5 million on his own 60th birthday
party in February 2007 at the New York Armory on Park Avenue, featuring
rock
star Rod Stewart (for $1 million) and a gaggle of guests from the Let Them
Eat Cake crowd? At the time, in all apparent insincerity, when his net
worth
was maybe only $7 billion, Schwarzman told the New Yorker, “I don’t feel
like a wealthy person.”
Wealthy people pay the highest tax rates, except when they don’t
One reason Schwarzman may not feel like a wealthy person is because he and
others like him are not taxed like wealthy people. Schwarzman, like Mitt
Romney before him, has his income taxed at 15%, the second lowest rate in
the tax code (poor people pay a 10% tax rate). The 15% rate is mostly for
people earning less than $38,000 a year (or $76,000 for a couple).
Schwarzman’s income runs into the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars a
year, but is is taxed as if it’s less than $38,000. It’s not magic, and
it’s
not a crime, it’s a dishonest tax code that Congress consistently refuses
to
make fair. Surprise!
The tax gimmick here is called “carried interest” and allows Schwarzman,
Romney, and the rest of the private equity gang to have their income taxed
as if it’s “capital gains,” for which the (also corruptly low) tax rate is
15%. Because the equity fundsters get this tax break, that means in effect
that every other tax paying household has to pay another $400 or more a
year
to subsidize billionaires. Schwarzman is surely smart enough to understand
how nurses or truckers or teachers or even most doctors and lawyers might
be
annoyed at having to pay taxes at a higher rate than a billionaire. But he
doesn’t seem to get it.
In 2010, when there was some talk of closing the carried interest loophole,
Steve Schwarzman strongly objected, as if Wall Street was actually being
invaded: “It’s a war…. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
In his other public remarks, Schwarzman doesn’t seem to have much interest
in war, metaphorical or real. On the record, it seems to be war only when
it’s against him more or less personally. He’s smart enough to understand
that war can make people angry, but he remains publicly oblivious to
politicians who support illegal wars and call for more, to Americans who
fight and die in illegal wars that also promote terrorist responses, or to
the way America treats its veterans, whether wounded, homeless, or damaged
in invisible ways (like the country).
Three big dangers: economic crisis, international crisis, and Bernie
In a bizarre four-minute video for the Wall Street Journal on January 21,
Schwarzman calmly and smoothly explained what he sees as the three broad
reasons for the unsteady state of the world, and especially for shaky
market
conditions:
• First, the economic slowdown in the US and China, although he called
reactions to China “overdone.”
• Second, the geo-political situation, which is “concerning … there
are too many unusual things happening in the world now.” In a rather
random,
imprecise blur he mentioned immigration, ISIS, Pakistan, Iran, Korea’s
hydrogen bomb, “and there are lots of other issues going on in the world….
It’s happening with such a frequency, it’s actually de-stabilizing and
gives
the appearance that the world is out of control.”
• Third, unsettled markets, “because Bernie Sanders has become a
viable candidate, at least in Iowa and New Hampshire…. He’s really on the
far left.” He added that the Republicans don’t seem to have anyone who
inspires confidence to handle the job of president. “And really a key to
this market collapse is Bernie rising as a viable candidate….”
There you have it, the three pillars of the Schwarzman world view: the
world’s largest economies, geo-political conflict, and Bernie Sanders.
Democracy is an unspoken enemy of the established order. Schwarzman doesn’t
say here which he would tackle first – economic, international, or Bernie
issues – but it’s hard to believe he cares most about war or peace or
inequality of any sort. With nothing to say at Davos about war or torture
or
drone executions or the predatory American military presence in more than
100 countries around the world, Schwarzman suggested that the country is in
“some kind of odd protest moment.” He offered, simplistically, that the US
needs a president who can bring people together:
"The question is, what is everyone protesting about? There are a lot of
things that I guess you could, but what's needed actually is a cohesive,
healing presidency, not one that's lurching either to the right or to the
left….”
Having said that, Schwarzman expressed support for Donald Trump.
William M. Boardman has over 40 years experience in theatre, radio, TV,
print journalism, and non-fiction, including 20 years in the Vermont
judiciary. He has received honors from Writers Guild of America,
Corporation
for Public Broadcasting, Vermont Life magazine, and an Emmy Award
nomination
from the Academy of Television Arts and Sciences.
Reader Supported News is the Publication of Origin for this work.
Permission
to republish is freely granted with credit and a link back to Reader
Supported News.
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
http://e-max.it/posizionamento-siti-web/socialize
