Psychologist To The Rich Says His Clients Are Feeling Really Persecuted Right Now Steven Perlberg businessinsider.com January 30, 2014
The co-founder of one the nation’s oldest venture capital firms fears a possible genocide against the wealthy. Residents of Manhattan’s tony Upper East Side say the progressive mayor didn’t plow their streets as a form of frosty revenge. And the co-founder of Home Depot recently warned the Pope to pipe down about economic inequality. The nation’s wealthiest, denizens of the loftiest slice of the 1 percent, appear to be having a collective meltdown. Economists, advisers to the wealthy and the wealthy themselves describe a deep-seated anxiety that the national — and even global — mood is turning against the super-rich in ways that ultimately could prove dangerous and hard to control. President Barack Obama and the Democrats have pivoted to income inequality ahead of the midterm elections. Pope Francis has strongly warned against the dangers of wealth concentration. And all of this follows the rise of the Occupy movement in 2011 and a bout of bank-bashing populism in the tea party. The collective result, according to one member of the 1 percent, is a fear that the rich are in deep, deep trouble. Maybe not today but soon. “You have a bunch of people who see conspiracies everywhere and believe that this inequality issue will quickly turn into serious class warfare,” said this person, who asked not to be identified by name so as not to anger any wealthy friends. “They don’t believe inequality is bad and believe the only way to deal with it is to allow entrepreneurs to have even fewer shackles.” And so the rich are lashing out. In the latest example, Thomas Perkins, co-founder of legendary Silicon Valley venture capital firm Kleiner Perkins, wrote a letter to The Wall Street Journal over the weekend comparing Nazi Germany’s persecution and mass murder of Jews to “the progressive war on the American one percent, namely the ‘rich.’”
He went on to say he feared a progressive “Kristallnacht,” referring to the 1938 German pogrom in which nearly 100 Jews were killed and more than 30,000 arrested, a dark omen of the murder of 6 million that would follow. People, to put it mildly, went nuts. Even Perkins’s old firm disavowed him and his comments and said he no longer has anything to do with the company. Perkins then went on Bloomberg television, ostensibly to apologize for the remark. But instead he doubled down on the analogy, saying “when you start to use hatred against a minority, it can get out of control.” Perkins was not the first wealthy investor to invoke Nazi Germany as a warning over current attitudes toward the wealthy. In 2010, when Obama suggested raising the tax on “carried interest” earned by private equity executives, Blackstone CEO Stephen Schwarzman said, “It’s a war. It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.” Obama still hasn’t managed to persuade Congress to hike the 20 percent rate on carried interest even though most on Wall Street expect to lose the perk at some point. Schwarzman eventually apologized for his Hitler remark. More recently, the New York Post dedicated considerable ink to complaints from residents of the Upper East Side that newly elected progressive mayor Bill de Blasio directed plows to avoid the neighborhood as some kind of revenge for their wealth and support of de Blasio’s opponent. “He is trying to get us back. He is very divisive and political,” Upper East Side resident Molly Jong Fast told the Post. “By not plowing the Upper East Side, he is saying, ‘I’m not one of them.’” The mayor dutifully trundled up to the neighborhood to admit mistakes in plowing but strongly denied any ulterior motive. It doesn’t end there. Ken Langone, a wealthy investor and co-founder of Home Depot, recently told CNBC that the Catholic Church in New York might see a decline in donations if Pope Francis did not tone down his comments about the dangers of economic inequality. “You want to be careful about generalities. Rich people in one country don’t act the same as rich people in another country,” Langone said. New York Times columnist Paul Krugman this week wrote that even plutocrats who manage not to invoke Nazi Germany “nonetheless hold, and loudly express, political and economic views that combine paranoia and megalomania in equal measure.” The phenomenon is not limited to the U.S. Bankers across the globe who gathered for the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland, last week complained publicly and privately that in their view vilification of the rich, particularly in the financial industry, has gone far enough. “Life is hard enough, and I think this constant lecturing on ethics and on integrity by many stakeholders is probably the most frustrating part of the equation. Because I don’t think there are many people who are perfect,” Sergio Ermotti, chief executive of UBS AG, told The Wall Street Journal. “We are far from being perfect … but it’s not going to be very helpful to be constantly bashing banks.” But perhaps nowhere is the collective freakout more pronounced than the financial capital of the world. Here in New York, even wealthy donors who tend to favor Democrats are deeply concerned about the current political discourse at the city level in which de Blasio wants to increase taxes on the rich, and the national level, in which Democrats have pledged to make the 2014 midterm elections about addressing economic inequality. “I think this is going to be disastrous for the city,” one top executive at a large Wall Street bank said on
the eve of de Blasio’s election. “The people who pay taxes could move out, the businesses could leave. What’s keeping us here?” At one level, the reaction seems dramatically out of proportion to anything any politician is actually proposing. And recent comments from the super-wealthy can seem baffling — and infuriating — to the vast majority of Americans who occupy much less rarefied air and now have myriad social media forums to castigate what they view as deeply out-of-touch whining from the plutocrat class. Nothing Obama proposed in his relatively mild State of the Union address would do much to impact the lives of the nation’s top earners. Raising the minimum wage wouldn’t do it. Nor would extending unemployment benefits or instituting universal pre-kindergarten. Even the president’s toughest lines on the issue of inequality were hardly the kind of fire-and-brimstone condemnation that Franklin D. Roosevelt heaped on bankers’ heads in the 1930s. “After four years of economic growth, corporate profits and stock prices have rarely been higher, and those at the top have never done better,” Obama said. “But average wages have barely budged. Inequality has deepened. Upward mobility has stalled.” That was pretty much it. Obama made no call to raise taxes further on the rich, who still enjoy rates dramatically lower than they were through most of the booming 1980s. He did not summon Occupy Wall Street protesters back to the barricades or threaten new actions to bust up big banks. Meanwhile, de Blasio has no power to raise taxes unilaterally on the rich despite his fiery campaign rhetoric. On a practical level, the wealthy are jumping at shadows. “None of the issues currently on the table would have a large effect on the very rich,” said Justin Wolfers, economics professor at the University of Michigan. “If there is anything driving this rise in rhetoric, it’s that the president pivoted to talking about inequality, which some interpret as taking from the 1 percent and giving to the 99 percent.” People who counsel the wealthy for a living say there is both an unease with growing income disparity and a fear of even greater persecution. “I think that with Occupy Wall Street there was a sense of the heat getting turned up and a feeling of vilification and potential danger,” said Jamie Traeger-Muney, a psychologist whose Wealth Legacy Group focuses on counseling the affluent. “There is a worry among our clients that they are being judged and people are making assumptions about who they are based on their wealth.” Much of the current anxiety is also driven by the precarious nature of the recovery from the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression. The U.S. economy is showing signs of picking up speed with job creation and consumer confidence on the rise. But there is still an enormous sense of national pessimism about the future, as evidenced in the latest NBC News/Wall Street Journal poll that showed 68 percent of Americans believe the country is stagnant or worse off since the president took office in 2009. And the recent stock market swoon, the bad December jobs report and gyrations in emerging market currencies could convince some wealthy Americans that their pessimism is well-founded and that another economic downturn is not far off — and might carry even greater risks for the rich. “People are very anxious about the decline in the stock market and feel that this may be just a hollow shell of a recovery, and we may see in the next few years that things really haven’t changed,” said Louis Hyman, a historian of capitalism at Cornell. “They are afraid the critics are right and that inequality really is a driver of all this, and are afraid of what that means for them.”
Why Are Banking Executives In London Killing Themselves? Michael Snyder Economic Collapse January 29, 2014
Bankers committing suicide by jumping from the rooftops of their own banks is something that we think of when we think of the Great Depression. Well, it just happened in London, England. A vice president at JPMorgan’s European headquarters in London plunged to his death after jumping from the top of the 33rd floor. He fell more than 500 feet, and it is being reported by an eyewitness that “there was quite a lot of blood“. This comes on the heels of news that a former Deutsche Bank executive was found hanged in his home in London on Sunday. So why is this happening? Yes, the markets have gone down a little bit recently but they certainly have not crashed yet. Could there be more to these deaths than meets the eye? You never know. And as I will discuss below, there have been a lot of other really strange things happening around the world lately as well. But before we get to any of that, let’s take a closer look at some of these banker deaths. The JPMorgan executive that jumped to his death on Tuesday was named Gabriel Magee. He was 39 years old, and his suicide has the city of London in shock… A bank executive who died after jumping 500ft from the top of JP Morgan’s European headquarters in London this morning has been named as Gabriel Magee. The American senior manager, 39, fell from the 33-story skyscraper and was found on the ninth floor roof, which surrounds the Canary Wharf skyscraper.
He was a vice president in the corporate and investment bank technology department having joined in 2004, moving to Britain from the United States in 2007. What would cause a man in his prime working years who is making huge amounts of money to do something like that? The death on Sunday of former Deutsche Bank executive Bill Broeksmit is also a mystery. According to the Daily Mail, police consider his death to be “non-suspicious”, which means that they believe that it was a suicide and not a murder… A former Deutsche Bank executive has been found dead at a house in London, it emerged today. The body of William ‘Bill’ Broeksmit, 58, was discovered at his home in South Kensington on Sunday shortly after midday by police, who had been called to reports of a man found hanging at a house. Mr Broeksmit – who retired last February – was a former senior manager with close ties to co-chief executive Anshu Jain. Metropolitan Police officers said his death was declared as non-suspicious. On top of that, Business Insider is reporting that a communications director at another bank in London was found dead last week… Last week, a U.K.-based communications director at Swiss Re AG died last week. The cause of death has not been made public. Perhaps it is just a coincidence that these deaths have all come so close to one another. After all, people die all the time. And London is rather dreary this time of the year. It is easy for people to get depressed if they are not accustomed to endless gloomy weather. If the stock market was already crashing, it would be easy to blame the suicides on that. The world certainly remembers what happened during the crash of 1929…
Historically, bankers have been stereotyped as the most likely to commit suicide. This has a lot to do with the famous 1929 stock market crash, which resulted in 1,616 banks failing and more than 20,000 businesses going bankrupt. The number of bankers committing suicide directly after the crash is thought to have been only around 20, with another 100 people connected to the financial industry dying at their own hand within the year. But the market isn’t crashing just yet. We definitely appear to be at a “turning point“, but things are still at least somewhat stable. So why are bankers killing themselves? That is a good question. As I mentioned above, there have also been quite a few other strange things that have happened lately that seem to be “out of place”. For example, Matt Drudge of the Drudge Report posted the following cryptic message on Twitter the other day… “Have an exit plan…” What in the world does he mean by that? Maybe that is just a case of Drudge being Drudge. Then again, maybe not. And on Tuesday we learned that a prominent Russian Bank has banned all cash withdrawals until next week… Bloomberg reports that ‘My Bank’ – one of Russia’s top 200 lenders by assets – has introduced a complete ban on cash withdrawals until next week. While the Ruble has been losing ground rapidly recently, we suspect few have been expecting bank runs in Russia. Yes, we have heard some reports of people having difficulty getting money out of their banks around the world lately, but this news out of Russia really surprised me. Yet another story that seemed rather odd was a report in the Wall Street Journal earlier this week that
stated that Germany’s central bank is advocating “a one-time wealth tax” for European nations that need a bailout… Germany’s central bank Monday proposed a one-time wealth tax as an option for euro-zone countries facing bankruptcy, reviving a idea that has circled for years in Europe but has so far gained little traction. Why would they be suggesting such a thing if “economic recovery” was just around the corner? According to that same article, the IMF has recommended a similar thing… The International Monetary Fund in October also floated the idea of a one-time “capital levy,” amid a sharp deterioration of public finances in many countries. A 10% tax would bring the debt levels of a sample of 15 euro-zone member countries back to pre-crisis levels of 2007, the IMF said. So what does all of this mean? I am not exactly sure, but I have got a bad feeling about this – especially considering the financial chaos that we are witnessing in emerging markets all over the globe right now.
The Left “Hates Big Corporations”: Enter Eric Holder Jon Rappoport Infowars.com January 30, 2014
Veteran reporter, Russell Mokhiber, who edits the Corporate Crime Reporter, lays it out in his article, “Holder the Hypocrite.” “…[US Attorney General] Holder has perfected the government’s practice of offering deferred and non prosecution agreements to major corporations to settle major corporate crime cases. “Under a deferred prosecution agreement, the corporation is charged with a crime, but if the company
abides by the agreement for a period of years, then the government drops the criminal charges. “Under a non prosecution agreement, the government just collects a fine. There is no criminal charge. There is no admission of wrongdoing. “Since taking office in February 2009, Holder has dished out deferred and non prosecution agreements to more than 100 large publicly held corporations, including JPMorgan Chase (Madoff Ponzi scheme), Archer Daniels Midland(foreign bribery), Diebold (foreign bribery), UBS (interest rate manipulation),HSBC (money laundering), Pfizer (foreign bribery), Wachovia (money laundering), Tyson Foods (foreign bribery), Barclays Bank (Trading with the Enemies Act), Deutsche Bank (tax shelter fraud).” That’s a tidy sample of Eric Holder’s work. Of course, failing to prosecute Monsanto for fraud, criminal intimidation, poisoning the food supply, and other acts should rank high on the list as well. But the Left hates big corporations, doesn’t it? Well, Virginia, ha-ha, that’s just a convenient myth. The Left loves and promotes big government, so it needs to accuse somebody of criminal behavior. Its favorite fairy-tale target? Corporations. As you can see, that’s just a feel-good con. It attracts liberals and other Lefties, but only on the level of a slogan. Politicians on both the Left and Right love big corporations. “I’ll say love and you say hate, and we’ll argue and create the illusion of difference. Throw in pharmaceutical companies, military contractors, security corporations, banks, media giants… they’re all gladly served by the Left and the Right. Unelected bureaucrats play a major role in carrying water for political administrations of both major Parties. The FDA, for example, enables Big Pharma and its array of killer drugs, no matter whether Democrats or Republicans are ruling the White House and the Congress. Since 2000, it’s been known that medical drugs kill 106,000 Americans a year (a conservative estimate —see Dr. Barbara Starfield, JAMA, July 26, 2000, “Is US health really the best in the world?”) Yet neither political party has forced a deep investigation of the FDA, which routinely certifies those drugs as safe and effective. And no Attorney General has lifted a finger to bring criminal charges against FDA employees or pharmaceutical companies. Yet the myth lives on. Republicans hate big government and Democrats hate big corporations. It’s a Disney production with politicians playing cartoon roles.
INFOWARS.COM BECAUSE THERE'S A WAR ON FOR YOUR MIND