Let’s say you’re a pampered CEO making millions, and you create the most toxic debt known to mankind, debt so poisonous it blows up and crashes the entire US economy, throwing millions of taxpayers like me into the snapping jaws of unemployment and misery. Then tax payers like me bail your rich ass out to the tune of a trillion bucks securing your multi-million dollar bonuses and luxurious retirement. How would you reward those taxpayers? If you’re a Wall Street investment banker, you scold us over the national debt and tell us we must sacrifice more:
HuffPo — The hypocrisy of Lloyd Blankfein, a Wall Street banker, and other corporate leaders who have inserted themselves into the debate over major tax and spending decisions under consideration in Congress is nothing short of repugnant. Blankfein’s Goldman Sachs got billions from the federal government during the Wall Street bailouts, enabling him to hold a job that paid him $16.1 million in 2011, and now he wants the rest of us to take a pay cut … Blankfein is one of many Fortune 500 CEOs who joined together under the name “Fix the Debt,” a campaign to cut Social Security, Medicare and Medicaid to address the federal deficit during the fiscal showdown. This group of more than 90 CEOs is pushing cuts to middle-class programs while shielding millionaires, billionaires and big corporations from tax increases.
But wait there’s more, so much more! For a limited time, CEOs with millions in retirement benefits we taxpayers also saved have now mostly finished raiding our pension funds, and out now offering to rip off the Social Security and Medicare we paid into for decades:
In a Nov. 25 appearance on NBC’s Meet the Press, a charter member of Fix the Debt, Honeywell CEO David Cote, said, “We have a significant problem with entitlements, Medicare and Medicaid in particular.” This from a guy with retirement assets of more than $78 million. And, IPS points out, his company’s employee pension plan is underfunded by $2.8 billion.
These assholes probably see nothing the least bit unethical or immoral in what they are doing. They cannot be reasoned with, they can ony be defeated.
Don’t rule out a good slaughtering.
Don’t rule out a good slaughtering.
And remember, you can’t spell ‘slaughter’ without ‘laughter’.
They taste horrible. We could always boil them for glue.
I’ve come to believe that’s because people like this now actually believe, deep down to their cores, that they are the ones who make the world run. That it is literally by their financial shenanigans that the harvest gets brought in, that homes get heated, that roofs get fixed, that garbage gets taken away, etc. Therefore they deserve to be paid on par with hundreds of farmhands, factory workers, or garbagemen put together.
I think you’re partially correct in that I agree they believe this, but I think you’re missing something additional.
The the the part you’re missing is that they just don’t care about the others.
It’s not just that someone like Blankfein sees himself as an objectivist superman, personally guiding a multi-billion dollar corporation, and through his personal skill keeping a large portion of the economy functioning.
It’s that as a twin to that believe he believes that as such a person it is his right, and if you get really randian a moral imperative, to act in his own self interest.
It’s not just that he thinks he’s entitled to this because he’s better than everyone, it’s that he thinks he’s entitled to anything he can get because under objectivism, self-serving activity is a moral good. If I can legally steal $100 million from the tax payers and get away with it, it is good because it benefits me. I feel no shame about it because it has been good for me. If all those other schmucks out there could do the same thing they would, but I’m better than them at this, so I get it.
It’s Mitt Romney and gifts to the 47% all over again.
I’d like to see somebody plant a large-scale mockup of a guillotine in the Wall St. area.
If you’re going to fuck over the peasants, you’d do well to remember what happens when they eventually have enough of it.
And they didn’t resume normal business (esp. the banks) like they were supposed to after getting bailed out. (Except the “business as usual” sort of business. That never stops.) We could have just not bailed them out, and the effects wouldn’t necessarily be particularly worse.
He should be treated the way King Shapur of Persia is reputed to have treated the captive Roman Emperor Valerian.
My solution would not have bailed out the banks. I would have confiscated every penny, every asset from the individuals in charge. Took thier homes,everything in them, thier possesions, cars, Rolexes and pension funds and in some cases a kidney or two. And then looked at wether they should fail or not.