On Mar 23, 9:52 am, Tommy News <tommysn...@gmail.com> wrote:
> 10 Most Obscene Lifestyles Choices of America's 1% Elite
> Complaining about having to do their own dishes, or bragging about
> $800,000 car garages, the 1 percenters are all but screaming "let them
> eat cake" from the ramparts.
> March 21, 2012 |
>
> As the unemployment rate still sits above 8 percent, and one
> in three Americans struggles to afford medical bills, even the
> filthiest of filthy rich presidential candidates is at least
> pretending to empathize with the average American. Granted, they
> sometimes slip up and expose just how wealthy they are — but at least
> they are trying.
>
> The same cannot be said of some of these candidates' cronies in the 1
> percent. Whether complaining about having to do their own dishes, or
> bragging about their car garages costing more than the average
> American makes in a lifetime, the 1 percenters are all but screaming
> "let them eat cake" from the ramparts. Here are 10 particularly
> egregious examples from the last few months.
>
> 1. Bankers Struggle at Washing Dishes
>
> Most of us probably think a $75,000 annual salary is a pretty good
> deal in a nation where the average household income is far below that.
> Most of us also probably think that doing one's own dishes is not a
> form of economic persecution. But, then, most of us don't work on Wall
> Street.
>
> In a pair of must-reads, New York magazine and Bloomberg News
> sympathetically quoted financial industry workers complaining about
> the crushing pain of life on Wall Street in the era of the slightly
> smaller bonuses.
>
> The former article quotes an investment banker lamenting that the
> average $125,000 bonus – which comes on top of an annual salary – is
> "only," after taxes, about "what, $75,000?"
>
> "My girlfriend likes to eat good food," he complained. "It all adds up
> really quick. A taxi here, another taxi there. I just bought an
> apartment, so now I have a big old mortgage bill."
>
> In the Bloomberg piece, Andrew Schiff, who makes $350,000 a year,
> complains that after renting a second Connecticut vacation house for a
> full month every year and shelling out $32,000 a year on his child's
> elite private school, he now "only" gets to "bring home less than
> $200,000 after taxes, health-insurance and 401(k) contributions."
>
> "I can't imagine what I'm going to do," he says. "I'm crammed into
> 1,200 square feet. I don't have a dishwasher. We do all our dishes by
> hand."
>
> 2. Penthouse Parking
>
> The price of a regular, nondescript parking spot in New York City can
> be more than a monthly mortgage payment in many parts of America. But
> simply having a car in a subway-connected city is apparently not
> enough for some of the super-rich. As the New York Times reports, some
> of them need to have their car parked on the same floor as their
> lavish penthouse apartments.
>
> In the apartment building the Times profiles, domiciles go for $7
> million a year, including a 300-square-foot "en suite sky garage" that
> "would be valued at more than $800,000 if priced at the same rate per
> square foot as the rest of the apartment." No doubt, the view from the
> garage is so good, the car's owner can see the vast swaths of the
> city's outer boroughs — the places where people are lucky to make
> $800,000 in their entire lifetimes.
>
> 3. Wanted: More Influence in Washington
>
> By any honest measure — size of taxpayer bailouts, amount of campaign
> contributions, number of lobbyists, record of policymaking successes —
> the financial industry is all-powerful in American politics. When the
> Street says jump, politicians in both parties ask "how high," and then
> typically send a river of taxpayer dollars toward lower Manhattan.
>
> Somehow, though, this isn't enough.
>
> In January, Bloomberg/Businessweek breathlessly touted Wall Street
> analyst Brad Hintz who insisted that Wall Street isn't "very powerful
> at all" in Washington. That was followed up in March, when billionaire
> hedge fund manager Ken Griffin told the Chicago Tribune that the
> super-wealthy "have an insufficient influence" over politics, and that
> his fellow 1 percenters "have a duty now to step up and protect" their
> power "not for themselves, but for their kids and for their
> grandchildren and for the person down the street that they don't even
> know." (Note: Griffin almost certainly wasn't referring to regular
> middle-class folks. Thanks to gated communities and economically
> segregated housing patterns, the people "down the street" whom 1
> percenters like him "don't even know" are all but guaranteed to be
> fellow 1 percenters.)
>
> Pretending Wall Street is a victim rather than a conqueror is a smart
> political move: It justifies continued pillaging by America's
> financial conquistadors. But implicitly, this particular rhetorical
> device is a stealthy form of "let them eat cake" trash talk – it rubs
> the elite's breathtaking dominance in everyone else's face. After all,
> if the financial Masters of the Universe aren't "very powerful at all"
> and have "insufficient influence" over politics, what does that say
> about the sheer powerlessness of us lowly peons?
>
> 4. The 3-Day, 94-Room Aspen Bat Mitzvah
>
> There's something more than a little gross about renting out an entire
> Aspen hotel for your kid's three-day bat mitzvah extravaganza.
> Especially if you also happen to be a Goldman Sachs executive whose
> schemes ripped off thousands of people and destroyed Bear Stearns.
>
> That's what happened, of course, back in January when Jeffrey
> Verschleiser rented out Aspen's Hotel Jerome. As Rolling Stone's Matt
> Taibbi notes, Verschleiser "is one of the biggest assholes in the
> entire world," having once run Bear's mortgage-backed securities
> division.
>
> "At a time when one in four Americans has zero or negative net worth,
> renting a 94-room hotel for three days for a tweenager party might
> already be pushing the edge of the good taste/tact envelope," Taibbi
> says. "Even for the most honest millionaire in Aspen, it would seem a
> little gauche. But for this burglarizing dickhead to do it? It's
> breathtaking. I hope he at least invited his bankrupted investors to
> the pool party."
>
> 5. The Oil Baron Who Hiked Tuition
>
> Bruce Benson is a wealthy man. He currently serves as the president of
> Colorado's university system. The state should have known better,
> however, than to put a former oilman and Republican Party chairman in
> charge of its students' well-being. Recently, he tried to quietly pass
> a 15 percent tuition increase in expedited fashion so as to avoid
> media scrutiny. He was in a rush because he knew such attention would
> uncover his decision to use last year's massive tuition hike to
> finance huge bonuses to CU administrators already making big money. He
> gave one administrator making $340,000 a year a one-year raise of
> $49,000. In all, Benson devoted a whopping 29 percent of the tuition
> increase to raises.
>
> When asked about all of this, he declared, "I've never heard a
> complaint from parents that tuition at CU is too high."
>
> 6. Toast of the Country Club
>
> Hedge funder Leon Cooperman recently circulated a screed to his
> friends on Wall Street decrying President Obama's refused to prosecute
> Wall Street crime, supported massive bailouts of Wall Street,
> cutsweetheart deals to immunize Wall Street from litigation, and
> shepherded Bush tax cuts for the wealthy through Congress.
>
> Setting aside Cooperman's glaring omissions, his sheer paternalism is
> something to behold. In his world, the super-rich might deign to
> "help" the "downtrodden" – but only if the downtrodden shut up, get in
> line and understand that "you'll get more out of me if you treat me
> with respect," as he told
>
> 7. Bankers: Heroes of a New Civil Rights Movement?
>
> Back in 2009, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein insisted that in
> foreclosing on homeowners, scamming pensioners and ripping off
> shareholders, bailed-out bankers are "doing God's work." In this
> portrait of the moral crusader, Wall Streeters are righteous fighters
> for all that is Right and Good.
>
> The risk of "God's work," of course, is that you may be martyred – a
> concern deeply felt by J.P. Morgan CEO Jamie Dimon. Appearing on Fox
> Business in January, Dimon said that criticism of Wall Street
> represented "a form of discrimination that should be stopped."
>
> Between Blankfein and Dimon, the twisted picture is now complete: Wall
> Streeters aren't villains – on the contrary, they would have us
> believe they embody the new civil rights movement and that their
> critics are the evil Bull Connors.
>
> 8. The Sears CEO's New Versailles
>
> Any news story that references Versailles in a non-ironic way must be
> included in Salon's regular "let them eat cake" feature. As the
> Huffington Post reports (emphasis added):
>
> While Sears downsizes and lays off employees, company chairman Edward
> Lampert is buying a sprawling estate on a semi-private island.
>
> The billionaire hedge fund manager and chairman of Sears Holdings
> Corp. is reportedly set to close on a $40 million estate with seven
> bedrooms and Versailles-style reflection pools on Indian Creek Island,
> north of Miami. Meanwhile Sears is selling off 1,200 stores and
> closing 100 to 120 for good, with Florida seeing the most closings of
> any state.
>
> In case you were wondering, the Wall Street Journal reports that the
> $40 million price tag will "set a record for a single-family home in
> the (Miami-Dade) county."
>
> 9. Recoup at the Ritz
>
> Hospital bills ruin the financial fortunes of many middle-class
> Americans, but for the rich a trip to the emergency room can
> practically be a vacation. As the New York Times reports under the
> non-ironic headline "Chefs, Butlers, Marble Baths: Hospitals Vie for
> the Affluent":
>
> The bed linens were by Frette, Italian purveyors of high-thread-count
> sheets to popes and princes. The bathroom gleamed with polished
> marble. Huge windows displayed panoramic East River views. And in the
> hush of her $2,400 suite, a man in a black vest and tie proffered an
> elaborate menu and told her, "I'll be your butler."
>
> It was Greenberg 14 South, the elite wing on the new penthouse floor
> of NewYork-Presbyterian/Weill Cornell hospital. Pampering and décor to
> rival a grand hotel, if not a Downton Abbey, have long been the
> hallmark of such "amenities units," often hidden behind closed doors
> at New York's premier hospitals. But the phenomenon is escalating here
> and around the country…"
>
> In other words, as the healthcare crisis gets worse for most people,
> America's healthcare system is focusing on a race to Ritz-Carlton-ize
> hospitals for the richest among us.
>
> 10. 1-Percent Glossy
>
> With poverty and economic inequality on the rise, you might think that
> more journalism resources would be devoted to covering those seminal
> issues. But, of course, you would be wrong. Newspapers, the
> traditional bastion of journalism focused on the 99 percent, are sadly
> planning with his new magazine called Bloomberg Pursuits.
>
> Its first edition features a man with not one but two Ferraris and
> will be "sent to an audience with an average annual household income
> of more than $450,000," according to the Times. That demographic
> represents the "tiny pocket of the print publishing world that is
> thriving, even as its mass-market counterparts face a slump in
> newsstand sales."
>
> For us 99 percenters, the only good news in the announcement of the
> magazine is that it won't be shoved directly in our faces. The
> publication's officials told the Times "[the magazine] wasn't worried
> that the conspicuous consumption celebrated in the magazine might seem
> tone-deaf" because "It's a very closed audience" and won't be on
> newsstands.
>
> Phew.
>
> More:http://www.alternet.org/story/154644/10_most_obscene_lifestyles_choic...
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
>
> --
> Together, we can change the world, one mind at a time.
> Have a great day,
> Tommy
--
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