To hear a few zillionaires lament on how mean the world is, you’d think they were being worked to death in Cambodian killing fields. But endless bleating from the coddled conservative rich is standard procedure these days in luxury estates and aboard corporate jets. Leading the pack of rich whiners is Tim Armstrong, CEO of AOL, who tried vainly to justify cutting 401-k benefits with this drivel:
Reuters — During the meeting, Armstrong singled out two unidentified employees who had babies with health issues in 2012 and their impact on AOL health costs, which he said had also increased because of “Obamacare” health reforms. “We had two AOL-ers that had distressed babies that were born that we paid a million dollars each to make sure those babies were OK in general,” Armstrong said, according to the Capital New York, which first reported the details.
Gosh Tim, maybe if you hadn’t personally lost the company a $100 million in your botched takeover and subsequent frantic sale of Patch.com, or apparently signed a self-funded healthcare deal that insured AOL would have to step in and fork over two mill for neonatal costs instead of the insurance company and policy you could have chosen, those loses wouldn’t have been so catastrophic. Given that you failed utterly at both those tasks, maybe forgoing a fraction of the $12 million you paid yourself would have sheltered shareholders and employees alike from your incompetence, you sorry ass, sleazy piece of shit.
TPM — Real estate investor Sam Zell echoed his fellow one percenter’s lament earlier this week. “The one percent are getting pummeled because it’s politically convenient to do so,” Zell said, adding that the one percent simply “work harder” than everyone else.
Oh, sugar pie, you haven’t even begun to be pummeled. Bow down and thank whatever deity you believe in that I’m not king, because if I were, after that self-absorbed boast about how you work harder than anyone else, you’d be locked in stocks in the town square right now being pummeled for real with rotten cabbage and rancid tomatoes.
WSJ — Writing from the epicenter of progressive thought, San Francisco, I would call attention to the parallels of fascist Nazi Germany to its war on its “one percent,” namely its Jews, to the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the “rich.”
Nothing would make me happier right now than whisking this creep away in a time machine to World War II Poland, so he can personally learn that pointing out growing income inequality in the US is not quite on par with his entire neighborhood being slowly starved into living skeletons, or forced to watch wives and daughters being gang raped by Nazi thugs, before entire families are marched naked at gunpoint into frozen ditches and buried alive.
The contempt shown by these useless, spoiled imbeciles is breath-taking. Normal, decent rich people would be well advised to distance themselves: these clowns may not have been hated and despised before, but they are now, and they are not the guys anyone should want representing any demographic in any way.
The richest man in 1930s Germany was Gustav Krupp von Bohlen und Halbach, a Catholic.
Large companies, and government institutions, frequently fund their insurance plans with their own money. They pay someone else to do stuff like manage claims, determine reserves etc but all the funding comes from the company. So AOL might well be out 2 millions dollars directly. But then that’s the risk of funding the plan yourself.
Furthermore I doubt Mr Armstrong would be bitching if he needed that million for his own healthcare.
Mike
Who thinks dumping the CEOs of all the Fortune 500 companies in the East River could save the country at least $5B per year with no drop in productivity.
I get a chuckle out of the simply working harder nonsense. Let’s say they work 120 hours / week (I’ll grant them their time on the golf course and dinner dates as “work”), and let’s also say they work three times as efficiently as their average worker. On that merit, they should only be making 9x as much as the average worker and not 380x as much as the average worker. Yeah, total BS on that front.
What he really meant is that simply work harder at ignoring basic human compassion, empathy and morals. That is the true secret to CEO success. Their mantra is “Rape the customer as much as possible, and screw the employees as much as possible”. When they can demonstrate behavior differently from that mantra for even one year, then they can start having thoughts about how they are picked on. Since that hasn’t happened in many decades now, I think we can safely ignore their BS.
The companies would just hire new assholes. Personally, I favor a legal cap on the ratio of pay between the highest compensated employee and lowest. 100:1, say. You wanna pay yourself 12 million bucks a year, Mr. CEO? Fine with me, as long as you’re paying your typists and janitors at least 120K/year.
The 1%ers of 1935 – IBM, Coca-Cola, western banks – did business with the Nazis.
Comparing themselves to jews when they took part in profiting from the mass murder of jews is beyond egregious. Someone should be calling it blood libel.
@ ^ left0ver1under : Yep. Henry Ford apparently was a big Hitler fan too.
@ 4. Robert B. :
Good idea.
I think the CEO’s and 1%er fans spewing that “we work harder” thing almost certainly don’t have even the foggiest clue as to how hard most people working at low-income jobs work and would be unable and unwilling to do what many low income people do.
Re Sam Zell
One should not forget that Zell was responsible for sending the Chicago Tribune and the Los Angeles Times into bankruptcy. Now that they have emerged from Chapter 11, they may be purchased by the even bigger assholes, the Koch brothers.
I still think that the solution to most people’s problems would be to execute the 50 richest people each year and distribute their wealth. And think of the fun and games as they all desperately strive to be the 51st richest person…
richardelguru @ 8
No need for such violence; just raise the tax on the upper brackets of income (including capital gains and estates) until the national debt is paid off. Tax them until their shoes squeak!
I still think that the solution to most people’s problems would be to execute the 50 richest people each year and distribute their wealth. And think of the fun and games as they all desperately strive to be the 51st richest person…
Brilliant!!
Though I think it’d maybe work better if there was some framing – like – as long as the top 1% of wealthy have more than the bottom 50%, we just cull the whole lot.
Well, to be fair, it is hard to be the world’s biggest asshole. So many other CEOs keep trying to one-up you to take the title…
In ancient Athens they had the ostrakon vote. Any rich person who became a threat to democracy and could not bribe his way out of it was exiled for a few years. Those exiled were given a cash stipend to live on paid out of revenue generated from their properties which were managed by a committee.
Since corporations are people now, I think we need to bring back the ostrakon. Down here on the Gulf Coast BP would get a lot of votes. But maybe it would be better to exile the Walton heirs.
But getting back to Germany: Who did the 1% support? Quite often the Nazis because they were thought to be the best force to fight the Communists. And it all worked so well the first year with Hitler as Chancellor. . But then came the constitutional referendum vote that gave the Nazis total power. And it was hardly an open vote.
Inequitable distribution of wealth, and the manipulation of the political and regulatory system through the use of wealth, which magnifies the inequality, is clearly a problem. IMHO one way around this is to set up laws to levy fines denominated in terms common to all humans. All legal penalties would be denominated in time, months and years, or percentages of income. A serious speeding ticket would be 1% of a year, four days, or 1% of your yearly income, which would include the value of stocks, equities, etc.
If you make $20,000 a year we are talking $200. If you make $20,000,000 it is $200,000. Or you can spend 96 hours picking up litter on the side of the highway. As it is now poor people must observe laws, and fear law enforcement, because a $200 ticket means struggling to pay rent. Whereas $200 to a wealthy person is insignificant.
Whereas $200 to a wealthy person is insignificant.
If you’re making $20,000,000 a year, $200,000 isn’t significant, either. It just feels that way because – presumably – at some point that seemed like a great deal of money to the person.
If you like the tenor of this thread, you’ll probably love the alto of Anne Feeney.
I think these assholes forget that the 1% doesn’t just refer to a minority of the population, it specifically refers to the wealthiest, most powerful part of the population. Do they really think the Jews in 1930s Germany were the ones controlling the politics?
Nope. Too easy.
His punishment would be that he would need to spend some time working minimum wage paying service jobs and he can see how hard he has to work to survive. He can spend his life arguing with his supervisor about why the supervisor is cuts him off continuously from full-time hours while he tries to hold down the required three 20-hour-per-week jobs needed to pay rent and feed himself, or decide which of those two options he doesn’t need this week.
I’d give him a life sentence, with time off for good behavior. Nobody whiny with that much money would want me to the Emperor of the World.
Wylann,
Probably.
Funny, he should mention Nazi Germany since politics and economic interests were very much intertwined there. It seems like the biggest corporations profited a lot from free or nearly free slave labor.