A great big barrel of rotten apples blowing off steam
by digby
I did not know that there was literally a fraternity for the .001%. But there is. And a reporter snuck in to their annual bash and recorded what they said and did. Here’s a little taste:
• Paul Queally, a private-equity executive with Welsh, Carson, Anderson, & Stowe, told off-color jokes to Ted Virtue, another private-equity bigwig with MidOcean Partners. The jokes ranged from unfunny and sexist (Q: “What’s the biggest difference between Hillary Clinton and a catfish?” A: “One has whiskers and stinks, and the other is a fish”) to unfunny and homophobic (Q: “What’s the biggest difference between Barney Frank and a Fenway Frank?” A: “Barney Frank comes in different-size buns”).
• Bill Mulrow, a top executive at the Blackstone Group (who was later appointed chairman of the New York State Housing Finance Agency), and Emil Henry, a hedge fund manager with Tiger Infrastructure Partners and former assistant secretary of the Treasury, performed a bizarre two-man comedy skit. Mulrow was dressed in raggedy, tie-dye clothes to play the part of a liberal radical, and Henry was playing the part of a wealthy baron. They exchanged lines as if staging a debate between the 99 percent and the 1 percent. (“Bill, look at you! You’re pathetic, you liberal! You need a bath!” Henry shouted. “My God, you callow, insensitive Republican! Don’t you know what we need to do? We need to create jobs,” Mulrow shot back.)
• David Moore, Marc Lasry, and Keith Meister — respectively, a holding company CEO, a billionaire hedge-fund manager, and an activist investor — sang a few seconds of a finance-themed parody of “YMCA” before getting the hook.
• Warren Stephens, an investment banking CEO, took the stage in a Confederate flag hat and sang a song about the financial crisis, set to the tune of “Dixie.” (“In Wall Street land we’ll take our stand, said Morgan and Goldman. But first we better get some loans, so quick, get to the Fed, man.”)
A few more acts followed, during which the veteran Kappas continued to gorge themselves on racks of lamb, throw petits fours at the stage, and laugh uproariously. Michael Novogratz, a former Army helicopter pilot with a shaved head and a stocky build whose firm, Fortress Investment Group, had made him a billionaire, was sitting next to me, drinking liberally and annotating each performance with jokes and insults.
“Can you fuckin’ believe Lasry up there?” Novogratz asked me. I nodded. He added, “He just gave me a ride in his jet a month ago.”
There’s more, so much more. And it’s all on tape.
The author points out that this hideous display just shows the social distance and fear that pervades this society of millionaires and billionaires. And that is, of course, true. They are no longer in touch, if they ever were, with the way most people live.
But what they really remind me the most of is these guys:
At the time of Abu Ghraib people rationalized it by saying these people were under pressure and needed to blow off some steam:
“This is no different than what happens at the Skull and Bones initiation, and we’re going to ruin people’s lives over it, and we’re going to hamper our military effort, and then we are going to really hammer them because they had a good time. I’m talking about people having a good time, these people, you ever heard of emotional release? You [ever] heard of need to blow some steam off?”
And no, the Masters of the Universe didn’t literally torture naked prisoners (at least not at this event.) But they act out similar rituals and humiliation rites for fun and entertainment. Homophobia and weird sexual allusions abound. The casual cruelty and grinning sadism is quite similar. (And just as with Abu Ghraib, women have now been included in the group, so I guess that’s “progress.”) In the end these wealthy, educated elites are just as crude, just as dumb and just as embarrassingly primitive as those “bad apples”. They take joy in the pain of others and demand that they be respected and revered for doing it.
I suppose this ultimately means that the human species, regardless of class, is fatally flawed. Which it is. But it also means that the one thing that gives people the most freedom to be cruel is an accepting environment, social isolation and power over others. These are situations which a decent society would try to mitigate.
Lyndie England has no remorse for what she did either, by the way:
“Their lives are better. They got the better end of the deal.They’re trying to kill us, and you want me to apologise to them? It’s like saying sorry to the enemy.
Of course, the US Government sent her to jail for her cruel deeds. The MOUs all got big bonuses.
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