Everyone is linking to this John Heilman piece, which contains this quote:
“Today, it’s hard to find anyone on Wall Street who doesn’t speak of Obama as if he were an unholy hybrid of Bernie Sanders and Eldridge Cleaver. One night not long ago, over dinner with ten executives in the finance industry, I heard the president described as ‘hostile to business,’ ‘anti-wealth,’ and ‘anti-capitalism’; as a ‘redistributionist,’ a ‘vilifier,’ and a ‘thug.’ A few days later, I recounted this experience to the same Wall Street CEO who’d called the Volcker Rule a testicular blow, and mentioned I’d been told that one of the most prominent megabank chiefs, who once boasted to friends of voting for Obama, now refers to him privately as a ‘Chicago mob guy.’ Do all your brethren feel this way? I asked. ‘Oh, not everybody—just most of them,’ he replied. ‘Jamie [Dimon]? Lloyd [Blankfein]? They might not say Obama’s a socialist, but they come pretty close.’”
Much like the teabag morons showing up to HCR debates screaming “KEEP GOVERNMENT OUT OF MY MEDICARE,” the CEO’s are on the dole for billions and are then bemoaning socialism. I guess they think those no interest loans that allows them to keep giving themselves huge bonuses is just a special reward for their capitalist genius.
Just hang them all.
The Dangerman
I might not say these fuckers should be lined up against a wall, but I come pretty close.
Maude
Hanging’s too good for them
Point for Obama.
jenniebee
Wall Street has an unfortunately low lamppost/douchebag ratio. So some of them will have to share.
Alan
No doubt they all tune in to Glen Beck each evening.
Tonal Crow
What a bunch of whiners. Will they just Go Galt ™ already and let us adults run the show? If you can’t make big money as a big bank in America, you’re doing it badly wrong. The spread between the rates you pay and the rates you charge guarantees success to all but those on the Everest of incompetence.
TR
@The Dangerman:
They really are clueless, aren’t they?
Seriously, if they keep talking and acting like this, it is only a matter of time before someone tries to kill one of them. I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet, frankly.
Starfish
Wait, aren’t you the person who was calling out people for wanting to hang some BP execs the other day?
Starfish
@TR: The people who want to kill them are waiting for 2011 so the estate tax is no longer repealed.
Jim C.
Hmm. Sometimes you know somebody is doing something right when they have the right enemies.
If Wall Street wasn’t ticked at this point then I’d be ticked at Obama.
Anne Laurie
Just so’s you know, Mr. Cole — I already linked to Heilemann’s article late Sunday/early Monday. So “we” were near the front of the pack, at least. (Ya gotta start skimming your own site, dude.)
Violet
They should count themselves lucky that people armed with pitchforks and torches haven’t overrun their secured fortresses.
Is there any way to charge retroactive interest on those loans? Like, for any bonus granted to one of these scum suckers their bank has to pay interest of 10% on all the money the government loaned them. So it would be fine if they wanted to increase their pay or pay themselves a bonus. They’d just have to be willing to let their bank pay interest on that interest free soshulist loan.
Alan
@Tonal Crow: They could go Galt but none of them would fit Rand’s profile–none of them create anything. They all forewent the creator requisite and went straight for the money. All they are is money sucking leeches.
John Cole
@Anne Laurie: I suck.
Keith G
In my view, the really weird thing is how those feeling are echoed in various groups in all social economic levels from the jet set to the double-widers; coastal bankers to laid off carpenters.
Thankfully these trans-status groups are not vary large, just amazing in their diversity.
Anne Laurie
@John Cole: But as long as you can get John Heilemann to write your bio, you’ll be on the record as a blog-omniscent superjeenyus. Just a suggestion.
Derelict
Not hanging. Not shooting. No bodily harm.
Just take away all their money. Put them AND their families out on the street and let them rely on the same services and safety nets that the average laid-off Joe or Jane has.
That should be the punishment, since it surely fits the crime.
TR
@Starfish:
Heh. Well played.
FormerSwingVoter
I can’t believe how tone-deaf the Wall Street bigwigs are. Do they not understand that every time they talk, they remind us all how much we wish they were in a rocket headed for the center of the sun?
The Dangerman
Here’s an idea for a new reality TV show; make these fuckers live out in the street for a while (with apologies to the Mel Brooks film with this basic premise). It should be called:
“Dude, Where’s My Caviar?”
Derelict: Jinx, owe you a Coke.
RSR
They really believe they are the catalyst; that this economic engine cannot run without their financial innovations. And in a sense, they’re right: almost the entire last decade was financed by their recycling the same money over and over again through different instruments to keep the peons flush enough to keep purchasing.
The fact that a lot of that money probably couldn’t be paid back? Nobodycoddanode! (or however you spell that).
schrodinger's cat
I say we feed them to Tunch, instead. Or perhaps not, he might get food poisoning.
BTW How is our favorite kitteh?
Citizen Alan
@Starfish:
Why, yes. I do believe he was. I guess what’s acceptable discourse depends on whose ox is getting gored on a particular day.
Tony Hayward and Lloyd Blankfein are both oligarchs, John, and they act the way they do because that is the way oligarchs act. They will continue to act this way as long as our society remains an oligarchy. So what do you propose to do about the fact that we live in an oligarchy, John? Other than write scathing blog posts, of course.
Bruce (formerly Steve S.)
That would be a waste of rope.
My suggestion for capping the oil leak is to sail a supertanker directly over it, then sink it. We’ll need some ballast, of course. Let’s see, what do we have far too much of that has no redeeming social value. Hmm. Can’t quite think of it but it rhymes with Ball Fleet Wankers. Also something that rhymes with Boil Consecutives. Somebody help me out.
Kryptik
Why is it that the ones who act the most entitled are the ones that decry ‘Entitlement Programs’ for people who actually could USE them?
scav
@Bruce (formerly Steve S.): well, mentally they’re dense but physically they’re a little pudgy and fat floats.
El Cid
They’re pretty used to getting what they want by shouting loud and demanding it and whining, and hiring right wing minions & fart tanks to go out and scream for it, so, why not?
jl
‘Just hang them all.’
Cole is shrill yet? That sounds more like Tunch has taken over Cole’s computer and hijacked the blog again, except the natural Tunch conclusion of ‘and eat them’ was left out.
edit: I second schrodinger’s cat, let’s have a pic of Tunch, eating some bank. That would work and the idea should be submitted to the WH, for, nothing but nothing is too big for Tunch!
schrodinger's cat
@scav: Well, they can be on the Biggest Loser, first!
Kryptik
@jl:
Nah, Tunch has better taste than to eat other fatcats.
schrodinger's cat
@Kryptik: Are you calling Tunch, fat? Blasphemy!
El Cid
@Kryptik: Because that’s not money going to them, and also it suggests that one of the proper functions of government is to use money and institutional service to improve the lives of ordinary citizens, which is completely not the view of the role of government by the capitalist class (and, yes, there really is one, and they themselves identify as a social group, it isn’t just ‘Marxist’ critics).
jenniebee
Speaking of BP, is anybody else following @BPGlobalPR on Twitter?
Geeno
There MAY be enough piano wire, but I doubt there’s enough lampposts on Wall St. Seriously, these fuckers need to be killed for the good of society.
hal
Meanwhile, some Liberal/Progressives accuse Obama of being BFF’s with Wallstreet.
Why the dichotomy in perception from left to right?
Lurking Canadian
To me, this is the money quote of the article:
If you didn’t read that far, “do it without them” means “get reelected without Wall Street’s money”.
I can’t imagine a clearer example of the role of money in politics. Wall Street is pissed off because they aren’t getting what they thought they paid for. The president is “arrogant” for the “dangerous” thought that he doesn’t need their money. They really, honestly think the country belongs to them.
Or, shorter: How many divisions has Goldman Sachs?
bobbo
It’s a good thing everyone’s linking to it, because for some reason I can’t fathom, Obama doesn’t seem to want people to know.
mcd410x
Digby describes the White House as flaccid. Sounds correct.
PeakVT
Just
hangtax them all like Eisenhower.Legalized. Until the competition to have the largest number of zeros in one’s salary becomes pointless, these guys won’t stop their antics.
Yutsano
@hal: Mostly because he didn’t instantly and unilaterally nationalize Wall Street and re-distribute the seized wealth to the
firebaggershuddled masses of hard working Americans. It’s really all about blog hits, they keep up the poutrage they get more hits.jl
I will add a positive note, since Cole seems to at his gloomy pole today.
I read an article about financial reform during the Great Depression. Took seven years of partial fixes, followed by set-backs, before final system was put into law that worked so well for 50 years or so. And in the face of similar opposition from Wall Street.
The Pecora Commission was designed to be an ineffective whitewash. But a combination of an educable leader in Pecora, and cricumstance, made it effective.
So, we are going down that same road again. Complete with deluded fiscal hawks doing their best to mess up the slow, weak, and partial recovery.
OK to get mad, OK to (in a responsible way, of course) get even.
But, it has only been about two years since the crisis, and we are still at the beginning of what is likely to be a five to ten year struggle to fix the system.
Unless things move so much quicker now, that another crisis will blow us out of the water in three to four years. But I will not think about that right now.
Emma
Derelict: Yeah. Perfect.
El Cid
I don’t imagine this being the focus of much coverage here:
Peres of course denies the information in the declassified documents, but I don’t really comprehend what he’s supposedly saying:
Clearly if the documents are found from another nation and not the words of the state of Israel, they don’t exist and are not facts. The proper way to investigate is, of course, to ask the Israeli government what they think you should write and how you should characterize official declassified documents from non-Israeli nations which are presumably not portraying fictional meetings and negotiations.
Geeno
@jl: Sorry – I won;t feel complete without a few rotting bodies dangling in the wind.
frankdawg
I have to believe that the current crop of capitalists are going to cause an resurgence of communist success. Once the teabagger crowd wakes up to find they are living a company town, being paid in company script and end the month deeper in dept to the company Marxism is going to sound pretty good.
I just don’t think these assholes have thought out the end game for their relentless greed and abuse of power.
Allison W.
@bobbo:
Obama doesn’t want people to know? How do you figure that?
PeakVT
I don’t really comprehend what he’s supposedly saying
Peres is calling you an anti-Semite for talking about the issue.
JMG
I wonder what would happen if unknown terrorists took one or two Wall Street CEOs off the count. My guess is martial law and the indefinite suspension of the Constitution. But it might be worth it.
Allison W.
@mcd410x:
How do you want the WH to behave? Oh never mind……just like Bush.
Doctor Science
Is the article worth clicking through all those damn pages for?
El Cid
@hal: In Roosevelt’s moves to rein in the death spiral of capitalism of the 1920s, he was backed by a portion of the capitalist class which saw their stability at risk both domestically and internationally (i.e., Rockefellers). However, the standard Liberty League nuts and certain industries (for example, as represented by the National Association of Manufacturers) decried the reforms as soshullist, red, commonist, etc.
Simultaneously, actual soshullists were often pushing for the reforms (many of which resembled earlier planks of the Soshullist Party election platforms of the 10s and 20s), while those hoping for a soshullist revolution rightly recognized that reforms would likely maintain a system they hated while blocking what they felt would be a possible and needed transformation away from the capitalism which had brought the crisis about.
Backing away from applying this the current President and his policies, there really would be no contradiction and no innovation to suggest that American policymakers were objectively quite close to and assisting of the capitalist class while that same class and/or its hired spokestongues denounced any attempts to limit or tax them as Bolshevik heresy.
Sure, you might characterize such a relationship as the best possible for the moment and/or much needed changes, but there’s no fundamental contradiction to suggest that the American nation-state in reality acts to buttress the fortunes and well-being of the super-rich while that class or its minions scream about their ill-treatment by their lessers in government.
DonkeyKong
Pump Montrachet 1978 from Domaine de la Romanée-Conti using a colonic hose until they explode a la Mr. Creosote.
At $23,000 a bottle thats worth every dime.
Citizen Alan
The thing about Obama that breaks my heart is that he’s a brilliant politician, but I increasingly think he’s just the wrong man for the times. The problems which are tearing this country apart cry out for an FDR or a Lincoln. I’d settle for an Eisenhower. We appear to be stuck with Neville Chamberlain.
Mike Kay
HOW CAN THIS BE!
The firebaggers tell us obama is a corporatist and a puppet of wall street.
Robert Waldmann
Am I defending bankers ?!?!? Fraid so. The loans are not no interest loans. I think the Treasury made an annualized return of 20% off its loans to Goldman Sachs. The Tarp loans were in exchange for preferred shares with interest payments of 5% per year (preferred shares means if they banks prefer not to pay that interest they aren’t bankrupt but they all have paid so far). Plus warrants (warrents ?) them thingies. The Treasury got them thar thingies too.
I think it is reasonably likely that the Federal government will make a profit bailing the banks out (counting of course the interest it pays on the bonds it sold to raise the money to bail out the banks). The current guess of the cost of the whole shebang is $ 87 billion and that includes GM, Chrystler, Fannie and Freddie (and AIG but since the money to AIG went straight on to banks I call that a bank bailout). The just banks part is around zero give or take ten or twenty billion.
I think the current guess is pessimistic (the estimated cost has been falling like a stone).
Robert Waldmann
Of course the bankers are arrogant idiots who almost destroyed the world economy. Obama has been much too soft on them.
But they didn’t get no interest loans.
asiangrrlMN
@Citizen Alan: What more can Obama himself do? Wrest total control from Congress and declare a fiefdom? Neville Chamberlain? Gah.
@Allison W.: Or, what you said. Obama is not Superman. He cannot fix everything all by his lonesome. No one could.
@Derelict: I actually have been a proposing a variant of this for awhile, but with congress critters. Make them live on an average American household wage and see how they fare. Not well, I bet. What a bunch of WATB these guys are.
Marked Hoosier
This article really needs that “Jump Fuckers” picture.
Jamie
I wonder what the bankers would do if Obama was actually a socialist.
Kyle
Once the teabagger crowd wakes up to find they are living a company town, being paid in company script and end the month deeper in dept to the company Marxism is going to sound pretty good.
I’m surprised it hasn’t happened yet. Most American sheeple conditioned by corporate media still identify with the assholes who are screwing them blind. The Europeans are ahead of us —
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Alfred_Herrhausen
Alfred Herrhausen (30 January 1930 – 30 November 1989) was a German banker and Chairman of Deutsche Bank. Herrhausen fell victim to a sophisticated roadside bomb shortly after leaving his home in Bad Homburg on 30 November 1989.
Gian
@hal:
the right wing has had a good thrity year cycle of it’s policy being thought of as conventional wisdom, deregulate deregulate, deregulate and don’t tax the rich
anything that runs contra to that central thesis is a direct attack on their power and wealth. that they would hate reform is a no-brainer
that the real leftists are upset? most of the real left would keel over in shock if anyone advocated the same tax rates and regulation policies the feds had after JFK passed his tax cut, that the current proposals aren’t there is the problem.
and if I was to get all 1960s-1970s marxist I’d go into “superstructure” gobbledegook but the marxists, the real ones have never given up the idea that capitalism will fail because it plants the seeds of its own destruction, and the modern version where people supposedly have constitutional rights that they learn about in school – when they find out that some citizens, like BP are more equal than they are, the fertilizer will hit the ventilator. meanwhile the right wing has astroturf and think tanks working to direct that anger to mexican peasants looking for work outside a drug war kill zone in their own feudal state.
short answer – from the left – nowhere near enough
from the right, don’t take our toys!!!!! scream kick kick kick
Resident Firebagger
Really hard to process Obama as Wall Street’s sworn enemy with Geithner and Summers in his administration and Goldman as his biggest campaign contributor.
I mean, it isn’t as if Obama — and, yes, Congress — have really done anything to keep the MOTU from bringing down the economy again.
Svensker
My Wall Street friend was moaning to me today about how MEAN Obama is being to BP and how O is just savaging and destroying the capitalist system, case in point the damage he is doing to BP. So I ask, hoping to hear that O IS doing something to BP, “What exactly is Obama doing to BP?” “Well,” says my friend, “his stooge, Salazar, said they will keep a boot on BP’s neck!” “Yeah,” says I, “but what are they actually DOING?” “They are ruining BP’s reputation by denigrating them constantly!” says my friend.
So there you go. Pretty horrendous. But what else can you expect of a sockalist like Obama? (My friend is a Democrat, by the way.)
El Cid
@Gian:
I’ve never been one to enjoy the 8 million articles / essays ending with ‘and this is why the current crisis indicates the end of the system and/or needs to be replaced by a workers-oriented state etc.,’, but, in fairness, we don’t yet know whether or not capitalism has planted the seeds of its own destruction, mostly because it’s 2010, and not 3010 or 4010. A couple hundred years ain’t that long.
Ash
Obama must feel like he lives in the fucking Twilight Zone. The bankers all hate him because apparently he’s a socialist and taking all their money, and the firebaggers all him him because apparently he’s a corporatist and handing them money like mini Kit Kats on Halloween (mmmmm, Kit Kats)
He probably slaps himself each morning.
Bob
@John Cole:
It was worth linking twice. I feel better about that financial reform legisaltion now. When one of these guys goes postal, we will almost be to the point of a good bill.
MaryQ
Much as I love the other Balloon Juice bloggers, I always know a John COle post before I read the byline. Because I read the post and I say “F*&k, yeah!” Every. Single. Time.
Nick
@Citizen Alan:
lay off the Jane Hamsher juice, you’ll feel better.
Gian
@El Cid:
had to read the 60s marxists stuff in undergrad, honestly haven’t tried to keep current. the blind spot that the teachings had to me was rather simple. If this was just plain gonna happen, why had some 4000 years of recorded time failed to see it happen. In some respects the marxists lack the same basic psychological understanding of people the libertarians do. I suppose that goes with utopian thinking they both have.
Mike Kay
@Svensker: there are Democrats and then there are wall st democrats and then there are firebag/naderite democrats.
Here we are with wall street screaming Obama is a commie on one side, and the firebaggers screaming Obama is a corporatist on the other.
Sometimes I just want to line all of them up against the wall.
Boston Yankee
Obama does not look back. Bank robbery by CEO’s, Cheney’s various transgressions, torture, mistaken wars, all are apparently forgiven since Obama does not dwell on the past. Only problem, since none of these cancers have been removed, they continue to grow and poison the future.
Just maybe, we should look back, and then we can understand the present.
someguy
@jl:
Screw that noise. Hang all of them but one, and let the one serve as a warning to future would-be banksters. Chain him to the statue of the bears and bulls and give him enough food to subsist on, so everybody working at that end of Manhattan would have to see him every single day on the way into and out of work.
Oh yeah, and let the little bastard out to go to Yankees games, but make him sit in the bleacher sets.
srv
I have a dream. I stand at the pinnacles of the New York skyline, looking down on Time Square.
And I see all the senior executives of Goldman Sachs, JPMC, Morgan and BofA swinging. Swinging from the gallows. And not comfortably, as the mob is not experienced in the lynch – their inexperience has lead to the noose not being done correctly, so the captains of industry have several minutes to kick as the crowd ponders the complexities of financial innovation.
mnpundit
And these are the guys Obama shit on progressives for?
How could anyone be so stupid. Or maybe he’s just greedy for campaign cash.
Mike Kay
@someguy: I don’t know, I think citigroup are mets fans.
tc125231
mclaren
If we hang them all, others will take their place.
How about this…just get rid of banks. No banks. Zero. None.
Make every financial institution in America into a non-profit. Make ’em all credit unions. Investment banks? Shut down, gone.
Cap the salaries of the CEOs of all the non-profit banks at $40,000 a year. If they don’t like it, they can become doctors.
EriktheRed
Stop calling them “Teabaggers”. And I don’t mean call them “Tea Partiers”, like they would prefer to be called. Call them by what they really are: Corporate America’s Useful Idiots.
El Cid
@Gian: One should always remember that even Marx was just one thinker, and certainly made some very valid analysis of and critiques of capitalism. Remember also that even to the degree people feel like they learned a lot from him, he just didn’t do much serious work on how things ought be afterwards. The Manifesto, after all, was more sloganeering than his estimated plan.
I believe that there are pretty gaping simplicities and vacuums in the arguments of both Marxists, assorted critiques of capitalism, and pro-capitalists themselves.
But neither capitalism nor “soshullism” has nothing to do with ‘4000 years of history’ any more than the current social welfare states do, besides some precedents that could be applied. Trade or mercantilism isn’t capitalism. Most argue that this system began to emerge in the 1700s with industrial production — before that, there just wasn’t an unspecialized wage-paid set of workers producing on an industrial scale.
So as to the question of whether or not more principles of democracy and ecological sustainability can be applied to our modern economies [such that they will be considered fundamentally altered], well, we just don’t know, and the people who argue that the current types of systems are just around the corner from collapsing have no more evidence than the people who imagine that all the basic details have been worked out and we’ll basically be organized this way until, I dunno, we make ourselves into magic energy beings or something.
bobbo
@Allison W.: He should proudly wear the mantle of Wall Street’s enemy and openly criticize them at every opportunity. Bully pulpit and all that.
Remember November
Obviously, forgetting that the mere fact of screwing the middle class unchecked is what makes a lot of pro-capitalists turn to more socialist thinking. Why play their game if the ref is bought off?
That’s the thuggery here. not “Chicago way”, it’s the “Boesky plan” ( and doesn’t that sound like a commie last name eve I heard one /snark)
Greed at all costs starts revolutions, does not keep them at bay. Saying “why punish success”, when that success is predicated on cheating is not punishment, it is justice.
Remember November
@Mike Kay:
sadly, I miss Shea and the day when ballparks were named after people, not corporations and change names ever few years.