Tag: Wall Street

This Populist Moment

Posted on by Akim Reinhardt

by Akim Reinhardt

Beetle Baily by Mort WalkerLast week, Barack Obama got beaten up on social media and called out by the press for accepting a $400,000 speaking fee from a Wall Street investment firm. It was the day's major kerfuffle, the non-Trump story of the week, and reactions to it by many of my smart, well reasoned friends surprised me somewhat.

They began with the stance that this isn't an issue. Obama's a private citizen now, so who cares? But lots of people did care. When the story picked up steam despite their protestations, my friends then blamed the loony left for fabricating the issue, launching a general assault on fringe elements of the Democratic party and a firm defense of sensible centrist outlooks. Yet it wasn't just the left. The right predictably piled on as well, without any prompting from the left. The story also transcended the partisan divide as the centrist press ran with it. Christ, even the BBC, the vanilla pudding of international news, covered it.

In the end, the defense of Obama that gained the most traction among my friends, and to some degree in the national media, was a racial analysis. Some claimed that this brouhaha was another example of white people shaming a black man for earning a paycheck, the imposition of a racial double standard since white politicians and ex-politicians do this kind of thing all time.

This needs to be reckoned with. Obama was always held to a higher standard, precisely because he was black; he was always subjected to intense racism, and the racist backlash to his presidency as much as anything helps explain Trump's victory. Was this just another example of that racial double standard? It's an important question to ask.

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Monday, May 6, 2013

Why Wall Street Bankers Are The Biggest Dumbasses On Earth

Posted on by Evert Cilliers

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

First off, over 50% of Wall Street bankers suffer from erectile Bankerdysfunction. They can't get it up. So ladies, don't date a Wall Street banker. You won't get fucked, unless he has a chauffeur you can turn to. Your banker can take you to Paris, but he can't ring your bell. Wall Street bankers have floppy winkies. Can you imagine being so stupid as to choose a profession that will compromise your very manhood? Well, that's how dumb Wall Street bankers are.

Furthermore, Wall Street bankers don't do anything remotely socially useful. They don't make things. They don't create. They don't help or heal or advance society, like teachers and nurses and doctors and cops and firefighters and scientists and industrialists. All they do is move money around. That's it. A really dumbass way to spend your life. Imagine this is the epitaph on your gravestone: “I lived for money.” It's got to be the dumbest choice anyone can make about what to do with your blessed one-time-around-only human life. Especially if phrased thusly: “I gave up boners to live for money.”

Because they're so useless at making an honest living, what do Wall Street bankers do? They cheat. They commit fraud. They rig things in their favor. They rip off their clients. They sell stuff to clients that they know they're going to bet against. They despise their clients. They become criminal to make money. They're common thieves, which is certainly another dumb way to make a buck.

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Monday, July 30, 2012

What A Country: After Wall Street Screws Us, 45% Of Americans Want A Wall Street Guy To Be Our Next President

Posted on by Evert Cilliers

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

RomneybainHere comes Mister One Percent. Mitt the Twit Romney. He used to be a leveraged buyout specialist, which was what these private equity guys were called before they got ashamed of the name.

Leveraged buyout means you put a company in debt, and use the money you extract from it to partly buy the company. You also use this debt to pay yourself huge fees and get tax benefits. Basically you're looting the company, which is why many leveraged buyouts end in bankruptcies. The excuse these guys use for what they do is that they bring “efficiency” — one of those meaningless hide-my-hypocrisy phrases like “free market” and “collateral damage.”

So Mitt Romney is a dyed-in-the-wool Wall Streeter, engaged in one of its most egregious practices. He also has money stashed away in the Cayman Islands, may still have a Swiss bank account, has helped export jobs overseas, and is building an elevator for his cars. His wife drives a couple of Cadillacs, and he pays 15% in taxes.

He is what one may safely call a caricature of a Wall Street fraudster. The perfect plutocrat. So obviously slumming among us hoi polloi that he comes off as awkward. And he also happens to be a serious serial liar.

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Monday, July 2, 2012

Obama Is Corrupt, Hillary Isn’t

Posted on by Evert Cilliers

by Evert Cilliers aka Adam Ash

Barack-Obama-Hillary-Clinton_0I heard an amazing story about Hillary Clinton from someone who worked for her. When she was a Senator, and some corporation gave her big campaign money, she wouldn't take the money if she knew she was going to vote against that corporation's interests on a bill that corporation wanted passed. She would tell them straight that she was going to vote against them, and then ask them if they still wanted her to cash their check, because she'd rather not have their money (this guy told me that weirdly enough, 90% of the corporations would tell her, heck, keep the money).

So this is a story about something very unique: an American politician who refuses to be bought.

One wonders if, under a Hillary presidency, with a Hillary Department of Justice … if Wall Street, Jon Corzine, and all the other financial crooks would be walking around free today.

Obama has been totally bought by Wall Street. Not a single CEO from any of the big banks has been in trouble with the law, after the biggest financial meltdown and scandal of our times. Wall Street sold stuff they knew was crap to pension funds and other customers, and even bet against the stuff they sold. This is big-time fraud, to sell stuff you know will blow up, but you don't care, because the stuff will blow up after you've collected your bonus. Too big to fail turns out to be too big to jail. Not a single hand of justice has been laid on them. And no laws have been made to force them to be honest and transparent. Tim Geithner and the SEC are giving Wall Street crooks a free pass. Jon Corzine openly stole a billion bucks from his customer accounts to cover his bad margins, and he is walking free.

Would Hillary have let Wall Street off scot-free? Who knows. But at least now I know she was willing to refuse money from corporations whom she was going to vote against. She was not for sale when she was a Senator. But Obama as president was and is for sale. He sold out to Wall Street when he became president, because his candidacy was backed big-time by Wall Street money.

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