Hedge Fund Hogs sniff around Chris Christie
by digby
So the billionaires are whining again. Yesterday a bunch of hedge fund managers got together to beg Chris Christie to run for president. (He said “not this time.”)Apparently, they can’t vote for Obama becausethey’re feeling very fragile right now:
Several of them said: I’m Republican but I voted for President Obama, because I couldn’t live with Sarah Palin. Many said they were severely disappointed in the president. The biggest complaint was what several called “class warfare.” They said they didn’t understand what they had done to deserve that: If you want to have a conversation about taxation, have a conversation. But a president shouldn’t attack his constituents – he’s not the president of some people, he’s president of all the people. Someone mentioned Huey Long populism.
That’s right. He’s their president too and it just makes them feel all icky an stuff when he says mean things about them. Apparently this isn’t enough to soothe them:
The share of national income going to the top 0.1 percent (the Stinking Rich) increased nearly fourfold during the Great Divergence. “The [inequality] phenomenon is more extreme the further you go up in the distribution,” Saez told me, and it’s “very strong once you pass that threshold of the top 1 percent.” Canada’s and the United Kingdom’s Stinking Rich followed a similar (though less pronounced) trend, but Japan and France did not; in the latter two countries, the Stinking Rich received about the same proportion of national income (about 2 percent) as the Stinking Rich did in all five countries prior to the Great Divergence. In a 2009 paper, Saez and Piketty surveyed several other industrialized nations (Table 5); in none of them did the Stinking Rich come anywhere near the 7.7 percent share of national income found in the United States.
Apparently they believe they should have it all. And we should all say “thank you sir, for taking it.”
The fact is that the markets have been doing very well under President Obama and he’s done next to nothing to change the income distribution. His health care plan was a private industry plan and his alleged “tax hikes” are downright measly. Indeed, if he has his way he’ll be “flattening” the tax code while “closing loopholes” a billionaire’s perfect solution. (Lobbying costs to open them again are chump change. It’s the lower rates they are after. Once lowered, never raised …)
The only thing Obama did to these Masters of the Universe was use the word “fat cat” a couple of times and mouth platitudes like “people like me should pay their fair share” as if it will really hurt any of these hedge fund hogs to give up the tiniest percentage of their ill gotten gains. Other than that, he’s been downright subservient. Certainly nothing in the deficit reduction talks can be seen as particularly threatening.
No, they are the very definition of what Atrios dubbed the WATBs. (You can look it up.) This is purely because they feel they haven’t gotten the public respect and deference they deserve. Even though they screwed everything up royally (pun intended) and the ungrateful little people had to bail them out. As Michele Bachman would say — that’s some major chootspaw.
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