America has seen two generations of great billionaires. The first was exemplified by Andrew Carnegie and the robber barons of the post civil war era. They were avaricious, imperious and dictatorial but they created a great industrial machine on which the dominance of America was predicated.
Our present crop of over the top billionaires is exemplified by Stephen Schwartzman, the Blackstone Group leader whose financial “products” have created a blacklist of billionaire predators and sent the nation careening down the slope to the worst financial shape since the Great Depression.
Schwartzman and his ilk are not like Carnegie and his, in that they create nothing from which the nation can glean support. Carnegie and his robber baron friends, for all their wiles, were actually the cause of employment. They built a consumer class and the industries to supply the wants of those consumers. Schwartzman and his cronies discovered a nation full built and thriving and with the help of the Bush administration drove it into the ground for their own venal ends.
Schwartzman is a degenerate who once called Obama, Hitler because the administration dared propose that the government tax private equity firm’s share of their clients profits at a rate higher than 15%. That’s a real good reason to make that statement, especially for a Jew.
But the real problem is the stunning lack of accountability for the criminal acts that have dragged America down into this fractured economy. There has been no legal or financial reckoning for any of the criminally accountable billionaires whose companies caused the crash.
After the Depression we added the SEC And the Public Utility Holding Company Act, as well as the Glass-Stegall Act in an attempt to keep the great quasi-legal thieves honest and thereby to avoid a second Depression. They were working fine until they were gutted by the Bush Administration, thereby allowing our current robber barons to steal with both hands, using our now neutered financial system to enhance their personal fortunes and destroy the nation’s economy.
After the Savings and Loan mess of the eighties, 800 felons went to jail. During our current administration 393,000 illegal immigrants have been rounded up while not a single banker has been charged with trying to ruin our great nation. While Attorney’s General across the country are trying to nail Bank of America for its part in the mortgage scandal, administration flunkies are trying to help Bank of America to slide out free. This isn’t what we elected Obama to do and if he and his advisors don’t realize that then they will be very disappointed in the results of the democratic primary in 2012.
But Schwartzman isn’t alone in his tower of greed. Jamie Dimon of J.P. Morgan is screaming about the unbearable burden of potential regulation even as Morgan sees a 67% surge in its first quarter profits and Dimon himself, sees a 1500% rise in his personal compensation. How much do you need Jamie? Isn’t too much enough?