Reuters

This picture of the Occupy Wall Street crowd shows a picture of Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein with his head on a stick.

Where is the call for civility from our leaders?  How would such a display have been covered had it appeared at a Tea Party rally?

Right wing radio talk shows were blamed for physical violence.  Why is the administration’s rhetoric on class warfare not held to similar accountability?

If you were a foreign investor, or a domestic investor for that matter,  how would such a display affect your decision to deploy capital in this country?

tips to Bluegrass Pundit

It is just when you hear the words that “this is not a war on the wealthy” that you can expect exactly that.

During the Clinton years they put a cap on the wages of corporate executives. Only the first million dollars would be deductible.  Did this cap apply to athletes or movie stars?  The irony was that to avoid the consequences of the limit,  stock options  became popular and after the boom of the 1990’s many of the wealthy became much more wealthy as a result of the attempt to make them less so.

Ralph Nader

I heard Ralph Nader on the radio criticizing Apple computer and other corporations for sitting on so much cash.  If we forced them to dividend their cash it would be a stimulus that would make everybody wealthier.  So it is not the profligate waste of government, 99 weeks of unemployment  and wasted delayed stimulus of the government that has us mired.  It is the greedy corporations sitting on their ill gotten cash from all those iPhones and iPads  that poor consumers were duped into buying.

What product has Ralph Nader ever invented that we want?  What innovation has he ever offered  that any consumer would pay for?  What company has he ever managed?  What recession has he ever had to face with the demand of thousands of employees, shareholders and customers to consider?  What fool would heed financial management advice from such inexperienced arrogance?

Why is the fortune of Al Gore made from his increasingly unfounded climate theories not suspect, yet the fortunes made by those who provide products we actually want and need criticized as greedy gains?

How can Hollywood celebrities who make millions criticize those in the financial sector who do the same?  Where do they think the capital came from to make and distribute the movies that made them rich?

This war on the wealthy, from the lips of Paul Krugman, Elizabeth Warren, Michael Moore and all the rest is a distraction from the failure of their dream candidate.  The ‘Blame Bush’ song is getting stale,  so they sought another scapegoat; anything rather than the failure of their own actions and ideas.

The Occupy Wall Street crowd is boring ignorant theatre.  This picture of  Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein at the OCW rally is incredibly violent and offensive.  If this was seen at a Tea Party rally it would have been proof that the Tea Party was anti-Semitic, vilifying a Jew in the tradition of the worst European tradition. Where is the media call for civility?

These protesters and their supporters are not against all wealthy people; just those who make more money  than them or make it  in an industry other than their own or one that they approve of.    It is hard to take them seriously and I imagine that few outside of the media hucksters do.

While the players and regulators were struggling to get investors to commit capital to the major banks to avoid a meltdown, Warren Buffet was called upon several times.  He consistently turned them down because the assets were too complicated to understand, and he did not trust most players on Wall Street. But he was finally offered a deal he could not refuse.

Warren was offered $5 billion worth of preferred stock in Goldman Sachs, the Cadillac of the Wall Street firms, with a 10% yield ($500 million annually), convertible into Goldman stock at $115 a share, 8% below the then current price.

That is why cash is king

Info from Too Big To Fail by Andrew Ross Sorkin

David Broder writes a great piece in the New York Times, The Populist Addiction

excerpt:

It’s easy to see why politicians would be drawn to the populist pose. First, it makes everything so simple. The economic crisis was caused by a complex web of factors, including global imbalances caused by the rise of China. But with the populist narrative, you can just blame Goldman Sachs.

Second, it absolves voters of responsibility for their problems. Over the past few years, many investment bankers behaved like idiots, but so did average Americans, racking up unprecedented levels of personal debt. With the populist narrative, you can accuse the former and absolve the latter.

Third, populism is popular with the ruling class. Ever since I started covering politics, the Democratic ruling class has been driven by one fantasy: that voters will get so furious at people with M.B.A.’s that they will hand power to people with Ph.D.’s. The Republican ruling class has been driven by the fantasy that voters will get so furious at people with Ph.D.’s that they will hand power to people with M.B.A.’s. Members of the ruling class love populism because they think it will help their section of the elite gain power.

So it’s easy to see the seductiveness of populism. Nonetheless, it nearly always fails. The history of populism, going back to William Jennings Bryan, is generally a history of defeat.

That’s because voters aren’t as stupid as the populists imagine. Voters are capable of holding two ideas in their heads at one time: First, that the rich and the powerful do rig the game in their own favor; and second, that simply bashing the rich and the powerful will still not solve the country’s problems.