(you know what, maybe these guys have a point . . . I'm starting to feel sorry for them cause nobody seems to like them . . . I can't imagine why not. . . NOT! . . . I am not against wealth, generated as a result of fair dealing and the person or entity performing a benefit or service to others, i.e., capitalism, but when it is generated by government bailouts triggered by financial terrorism perpetuated by the banksters themselves, along with rigged markets, i.e., crony capitalism, nope . . .)
By
Max Abelson
December 20, 2011
Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief
executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks,
turned a question at an investors’ conference in New York this
month into an occasion to defend wealth.
“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and
because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the
JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO told an audience member who asked about
hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet
we denigrate the whole.”
Dimon, 55, whose 2010 compensation was $23 million, joined
billionaires including hedge-fund manager
John Paulson and
Home
Depot Inc. (HD) co-founder Bernard Marcus in using speeches, open
letters and television appearances to defend themselves and the
richest 1 percent of the population targeted by Occupy Wall
Street demonstrators.
If successful businesspeople don’t go public to share their
stories and talk about their troubles, “they deserve what
they’re going to get,” said Marcus, 82, a founding member of
Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit that develops
talking points and op-ed pieces aimed at “shaping the national
agenda,” according to the group’s website. He said he isn’t
worried that speaking out might make him a target of protesters.
(he says of the Occupy protesters) >“
Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said.
“Are you kidding me?”
‘Feels Lonely’
The organization assisted John A. Allison IV, a director of
BB&T Corp. (BBT), the ninth-largest U.S. bank, and Staples Inc. co-
founder Thomas Stemberg with media appearances this month.
“It still feels lonely, but the chorus is definitely
increased,” Allison, 63, a former CEO of the Winston-Salem,
North Carolina-based bank and now a professor at Wake Forest
University’s business school, said in an interview.
At a lunch in New York,
Stemberg and Allison shared their
disdain for Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires
public companies to disclose the ratio between the compensation
of their CEOs and employee medians, according to Allison. The
rule, still being fine-tuned by the Securities and Exchange
Commission, is “incredibly wasteful” because it takes up time
and resources, he said. Stemberg called the rule “insane” in
an e-mail to Bloomberg News.
“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an
attack on the very productive,” Allison said. “This attack is
destructive.”
Income Tripled
The top 1 percent of taxpayers in the U.S. made at least
$343,927 in 2009, the last year data is available, according to
the
Internal Revenue Service. While average
household income
increased 62 percent from 1979 through 2007, the top 1 percent’s
more than tripled, an October Congressional Budget Office report
showed. As a result, the U.S. had greater
income inequality in
2007 than China or Iran, according to the Central Intelligence
Agency’s World Factbook.
Not all affluent Americans are on the defensive.
Billionaire
Warren Buffett, 81, chairman and CEO of Berkshire
Hathaway Inc., has called for increasing taxes on the wealthy,
as has Patriotic Millionaires, a group whose supporters include
Ask.com co-founder Garrett Gruener and Peter Norvig, director of
research at Google Inc., according to its website.
“Rich businesspeople like me don’t create jobs,” Nick
Hanauer, co-founder of aQuantive Inc., an online advertising
company he sold to Microsoft Corp. for about $6 billion, wrote
in a Dec. 1 Bloomberg View article. “Let’s tax the rich like we
once did and use that money to spur growth.”
Two out of three Americans support raising taxes on
households with incomes of at least $250,000, according to a
Bloomberg-Washington Post national poll conducted in October.
Schwarzman, Paulson
Asked if he were willing to pay more taxes in a Nov. 30
interview with Bloomberg Television,
Blackstone Group LP (BX) CEO
Stephen Schwarzman spoke about lower-income U.S. families who
pay no income tax.
“You have to have skin in the game,” said Schwarzman, 64.
“I’m not saying how much people should do. But we should all be
part of the system.”
Some of Schwarzman’s capital gains at Blackstone, the
world’s largest private-equity firm, are taxed at 15 percent,
not the 35 percent top marginal income-tax rate. Attacking the
banking system is a mistake because it contributes to “a
healthier economy,” he said in the interview.
Paulson, the New York hedge-fund manager who became a
billionaire by betting against the U.S. housing market, has also
said the rich benefit society.
“The top 1 percent of New Yorkers pay over 40 percent of
all income taxes,” Paulson & Co. said in an e-mailed statement
on Oct. 11, the day Occupy Wall Street protesters left a mock
tax-refund check at its president’s Upper East Side townhouse.
‘Going to Vomit’
Tom Golisano, billionaire founder of payroll processer
Paychex Inc. (PAYX) and a former New York gubernatorial candidate, said
in an interview this month that while there are examples of
excess, it’s “ridiculous” to blame everyone who is rich.
“If I hear a politician use the term ‘paying your fair
share’ one more time, I’m going to vomit,” said Golisano, who
turned 70 last month, celebrating the birthday with girlfriend
Monica Seles, the former tennis star who won nine Grand Slam
singles titles.
Ken Langone, 76, another Home Depot co-founder and chairman
of the NYU Langone Medical Center, said he isn’t embarrassed by
his success.
“I am a fat cat, I’m not ashamed,” he said last week in a
telephone interview from a dressing room in his Upper East Side
home. “If you mean by fat cat that I’ve succeeded, yeah, then
I’m a fat cat. I stand guilty of being a fat cat.”
(if I post any more, I might vomit . . . finish reading here)