Oh, boy. In another sign that we live in a country of “Two Americas” in which there’s just no way in hell we’re ever going to get on the same page, the CEO of AIG, a man named Robert Benmosche, stated that the widespread irritation over bonuses.
was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses, and all that—sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.
Hilariously, the Wall Street Journal‘s headline for the article that contained this nugget of wisdom is “At AIG, Benmosche Steers a Steady Course.” Ooooookay. Did you guys read the article?
It’s almost useless to get into any details of how shockingly wrong and entitled this is. But let’s start with this: Benmosche is a very powerful person! He’s the boss at one of the largest financial concerns in the United States. It is to be taken for granted that he counts among his friends and acquaintances many powerful people in the worlds of commerce and politics. If Benmosche wants something to happen in order to aid his company, there’s a very good chance that it will happen, because he can exert his will over the social polis far more than other people can.
The true crime here is the unfair playing field that benefits men like Benmosche so lavishly—in a democracy, it is the right of the people to complain about precisely such things. There have been no reports of CEOs being lynched, beaten, denied their civil rights. None of those things ever happened. It wouldn’t take a conspiracy nut to point out that almost all of the people who committed the vast financial crimes of the 2004-2008 period were never dealt with by the courts for the systematic fraud they perpetrated.
How much time studying the civil rights movement would it take before a person realized how wrongheaded this analogy is? Ten minutes? Two minutes? There’s no part of the civil rights story that would strike any reasonable person as being somehow fertile ground for metaphors about how mistreated Wall St. CEOs are. The whole point of the civil rights story is that African Americans in many southern states were systematically oppressed by what amounts to a police state. It wasn’t simply that the Klan was active; it was that the Klan was operating with the approval of the local constabulary.
If you don’t know this, then you are disqualified from making observations about the meaning of the civil rights era. If you do know this and you do venture to compare the lot of highly compesated Wall St. titans to the systematic deprivations African Americans experienced on a daily basis in the South before about 1970—and to some extent still to this day, and not just in the South—well, then you’re a horrible human being, pure and simple.
Ezra Klein’s report in the Washington Post blog Wonkblog does the service of reminding us of a few further outrages uttered by powerful Wall St. figures since the crash of 2008.
For example, widely loathed Gristedes owner and recent NYC mayoral candidate John Catsimatidis said last year, “New York is for everybody; it’s for the poor, it’s for the middle-class, it’s for the wealthy. We can’t punish any one group and chase them away. We–I mean, Hitler punished the Jews. We can’t have punishing the ‘2% group’ right now.”
Or this, from The Daily Beast:
“It’s a war,” [Blackstone Group CEO] Schwarzman said of the struggle with the administration over increasing taxes on private-equity firms. “It’s like when Hitler invaded Poland in 1939.”
Klein had some illuminating insights about how such language makes it into the public sphere:
I was in an off-the-record meeting with top Wall Street folks where similar comparisons to Nazi Germany were tossed around. It really was a meme on Wall Street that the singling out of the wealthy for criticism — and, more to the point, taxation — had a direct historical precedent in Nazi Germany, where the Jews were first demonized, then taxed, and then, well, you know. The sense was that the rich in general, and Wall Street in particular, weren’t just being criticized, but that they were being turned into a dangerously despised minority.
That’s the context of Benmosche’s comment. I would bet he’s made the same point a number of times in private rooms to appreciative nods. When you say and hear that kind of thing often enough, however, you forget how insane and offensive it is — and then you say it to the Wall Street Journal.
The sad thing is, I could almost understand it if such utterances were cold and calculating attempts to sway public opinion (which would be very ill advised, if such they are). No, what’s even more disheartening is that they really seem to believe the bullshit they say.
Previously on Dangerous Minds:
Rep. Eric Cantor: Craven toady of the rich; man on the wrong side of history
We’re all slaves for the wealthy, here’s more proof