One Percent To 99: Stop Picking On Us

[marmar]

from HuffPost:



According to Bloomberg today, what the major banks and the gentlemen who run them want for Christmas is for everyone to stop persecuting them with all this talk of "the 1 percent," and to stop reminding them of the fact that they've profited while the rest of the country has suffered through an epic crisis of unemployment and home foreclosures as a direct result of their cosmic incompetence.

They're quite sick of it, and they want it to stop! So they whined at length to a Bloomberg reporter and, as Choire Sicha characterizes the end result, "It's an incredibly hot, defensive mess up in there."

To wit:

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."

And sometimes, you know, "the whole" turns out to be entirely rotted through with "apples" that were not adequately capitalized against the crazy bets they were making with each other, forcing teachers and firefighters and mail-carriers and, I don't know -- stevedores? -- to give them $4.7 trillion so that they can pretend to be solvent. But that money was donated with the explicit expectation that it would be lent productively. What happened instead is that all the banks posted record profits and spent that money on an army of lobbyists, dispatched to Washington, D.C., to ensure that whatever financial regulation comes out of the just-averted disaster doesn't actually prevent the casino-derivatives game from ramping up all over again. .............(more)

The complete piece is at: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2011/12/20/bankers-still-whining-abo_n_1160938.html

[musette_sf]

1. Someone call...

[mbperrin]

2. I will when they do.

Thanks to gawd we have had no dealings with banks since 1978, when we decided we'd be better of without them. Or credit unions, credit or debit cards or the whole awful mess that basically charges you for using your own money.

[bluerum]

3. Member of the 99% to the 1% - bite me. I have no pity for your greedy asses.

[MichiganVote]

4. Whiners