Shorter NYT: It’s hard out there for the no longer super-rich, too. Also.
3.
Crusty Dem
I thought I was poor because I had no shoes, but then I met a man who’s net worth had dropped 96% and was worth a mere $4 million. But then I stole his shoes and strangled him with the laces, and I’m doing super, thanks!
4.
GReynoldsCT00
I am SO tired of these ‘poor’ wealthy articles…
5.
Cat Lady
I won’t read the article, but is it really saying this shlub in front of his desert palace is *gasp* down to his last 4 mil? The horror.
6.
SGEW
Me and my four digit checking account really feel for that guy. Yup.
Oh boy! Rice and beans for dinner again! Sure am a lucky ducky, yes I am.
7.
Punchy
Maybe when the greedy fucker was worth $100 million, he should have perhaps gone conservative with his investments and maybe he’d still have at decent chunk of that insane amount.
Glad to see the NYT connecting with the average American.
8.
over_educated
Jesus John, you of all people should have some sympathy for these folks. Where would you be without your billions you rake in from the greater Balloon Juice community. But for the grace of god you too might have to cut back to a single Mazarati and *shudder* domestic caviar.
9.
jwb
Cue the tiny violins and all that. Sometimes, especially after reading articles like this, I wish the NY Times and WaPo would just up and die already.
Continuous lawbreaking by Bush officials was perfectly fine. Passing a health care bill with “only” 50 Senate votes would be a huge scandal.
12.
kay
I saw that article this morning and laughed. I didn’t read it.
I love how ominous that headline is: “rise of the super-rich hits sobering WALL”. Oh. my. GOD.
It has “sobering” in it, but I had the reverse reaction.
13.
MikeJ
Maybe when the greedy fucker was worth $100 million, he should have perhaps gone conservative with his investments and maybe he’d still have at decent chunk of that insane amount.
Yeah, it’s hard to see how you could lose that much that quickly. He said he had split his assets between stocks and real estate. So ok, $50 mill in real estate. Market tanks and he decides he needs cash. Even if his stocks were completely wiped out *and* he was only able to get half of what he paid on every real estate investment, he would still have $25 million. He must have been leveraged up to his eyeballs. I can understand taking a chunk of that $100 million and swinging for the fences, but wouldn’t a sane person make sure that some large piece of it was basically un-loseable?
14.
KevinNYC
The article is very informative and could be used as the basis of sound economic and tax policy. It’s not asking for sympathy for the super-rich, it’s discussing the phenomenon of them. That the past three decades have been an aberration.
“In 2007, the top one ten-thousandth of households took home 6 percent of the nation’s income, up from 0.9 percent in 1977. It was the highest such level since at least 1913, the first year for which the I.R.S. has data.
The top 1 percent of earners took home 23.5 percent of income, up from 9 percent three decades earlier. “
anything less than unanimity is the nuclear option
16.
Hunter Gathers
Shorter NYT – the plight of the slightly less richer than before is why Obama would be a socialmalist if he dared raise their taxes. Who will think of the priviledged children!
17.
jibeaux
Well, far be it from me to keep things in perspective, but I took it as a less of a tiny violins for the super rich piece and more of reporting on a trend and raising the question of whether the decline of the super-wealthy is a plus for the less well off, a neutral, or a negative. Granted, it did a pretty poor job of this in that they spent a lot more time talking about McAfee’s plane-flying pad then they did soliciting the opinions of experts on the broader implications for the economy, but I don’t think an article on the trend of the wealthiest losing their wealth necessarily has to read like a sob story. It’s actually a pretty interesting question, the extent to which wealth is a zero-sum game, and it could have been an interesting analysis.
18.
Punchy
Wait. Hold on.
The guy’s got FOUR MILLION DOLLARS and yet he needs to sell his house to pay his bills? WTF? Just how fucking expensive is water in Arizona?
wouldn’t a sane person make sure that some large piece of it was basically un-loseable?
Yes, but we are probably not talking about a sane person.
Most of the people I’ve met who make a lot of money either stumble onto it, as in being an artist whose stuff catches on… or they only care about money.
And the thing about money is how addictive it is. When that’s all there is in your life… there’s never enough. Never.
23.
Crusty Dem
You all mock but how many of you would come out looking so good if you lost $96 million?
I’m still trying to figure out how you lose that large a % of your money without leveraging to the hilt. I know real estate has been bad, but I don’t think anyone in the US has bought a property and seen it lose 90% of value. That requires a special brand of stupid. Plus, any money in his old company is doing quite well (http://tinyurl.com/ltemk9), which is the big mistake most entrepreneurs make. I can’t help but think something suspicious is going on here.
24.
Ash Can
@Comrade Mary: Yikes, what a mess. Hope you and yours are OK.
I would agree that just possibly, maybe, it’s not asking for sympathy for the rich except for the fucking title of the piece. Any time something is described as hitting a “sobering wall”, they writer is expecting you to ooze sympathy.
We wouldn’t say that the rise in troop deaths in Iraq has hit a sobering wall.
26.
beltane
The solution is simple. What these not-quite-as-obscenely-rich-as-before millionaires need is another tax cut. Problem solved.
The article says he is “worth” four million. He could have $1000 in cash and assets with a net value of $3.999 million. Many so-called rich people don’t always have a lot of cash. Actually you might be surprised at how many of these people are fairly close to being broke if things go south too quickly. Having your money tied up in real estate is a very poor option if you don’t have enough cash in the bank to ride out a year or two of rough going.
28.
MikeJ
Holy shit, 109-6! Engerland may actually know something about this game after all.
Nothing new… the Veneerings go from being the newest nouveau riche who give the best parties to buying a Parliament seat to being THE folks to know to get ahead to bankruptcy in the course of the story. Meanwhile their clueless friends [sic] stay clueless, with a couple of exceptions who take their wakeup calls to heart.
Oh, and an old lady who worked hard all her life dies in a ditch because she refuses to go to a workhouse when she loses everything through no fault of her own.
That Gilded Age sure was great for some folks, though! Everything should be just like it was then!
30.
Comrade Mary
@Ash Can: Toronto proper experienced a very bad storm and some associated property damage, fallen trees and some scattered power outages, but most of us are fine. However, an 11 year old boy was killed in a small town two hours from here, and 120 houses in Vaughan (part of Toronto’s northern suburbs) were damaged and evacuated, and a state of emergency has been declared there.
Toronto doesn’t get tornadoes, but last night was pretty intense nonetheless once we were told that we were under an official warning. I was seriously considering going to my basement at one point last night, getting my radio, flashlight and heavy comforter ready. I can’t imagine how midwesterners deal with repeated warnings and some real tornadoes several times a year.
31.
Punchy
@MikeJ: I’m assuming by that score that you’re watching an Iowa football game, and we only have 2 field goals. Groan.
32.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Shittiest anti-software protection ever.
I’ll cry for the fuck when he’s worth $4. Until then, fuck him.
33.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
LOL, that should say “anti-virus,” but “anti-software” actually sounds better. A better description of what McAfee has done to my computers.
34.
ronin122
Uh oh, Krugman has another Op-Ed. Unfortunately I have to actually say I not only agree with what he said but with the tone (the latter usually comes harder). Pretty much slams him for thinking progressives would be pissed at getting rid of the public option for some (unsuitable) alternative, and for looking like a jack-ass for saying he’ll still work with Grassley after he said he’s gonna pull the plug on grandma, amongst other things.
35.
MikeJ
I’m assuming by that score that you’re watching an Iowa football game, and we only have 2 field goals.
Listening to the Ashes match (Australia-England cricket.) Australia ow have 112 runs, with 7 “outs”. 3 outs left in their first innings, they trail England by 220.
Australia went into this game only needing a draw to retain the Ashes. Most people didn’t hold out much hope for England, but brilliant bowling today may have done it.
“you’re watching an Iowa football game…”
… might as well be.
117/7… Ouch.
37.
polkcountydude
I apologize if someone above mentioned what I am about to say but I don’t have time to read comments today. This article glosses over what really caused Mr. McAfee to lose his millions: reckless risk-taking. I may only be a 24 year-old who just graduated with a Master’s in Accounting, but I damn well know that leveraging up to earn higher returns is stupid, unless you are selling treasuries short, lol. It sounds like this guy, as bright as he is, took excessive risks so he could earn a bigger return. This situation is emblematic of our country’s entire upper class. America’s now regressive tax structure encourages excessive risk taking among the upper classes and corporations because they have money “just to play with”. It’s generally no skin off their backs if they lose $20m here or there. Learn to live within your means like everyone else jackasses.
38.
Zifnab
@The Grand Panjandrum: Maybe the Grand Old Party need to get reacquainted with John Yoo’s opus magnum, the “Unitary Executive Theory”?
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: The only reason anyone uses that crap is because it’s been marketed the fuck out. Damn thing just locks down your computer so hard you can’t create a freak’n notepad document without disabling half the “security” settings.
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: It doesn’t do anything that Windows didn’t do to your computer first. Talk about crap software.
41.
Hunter Gathers
@ronin122: Obama HAS to keep the door open on bipartisanship. That means having to deal with GrassleyAss. There is a decent chance that both Kennedy and Byrd will die before there is a vote. That is very harsh, but it’s the truth. If one or both pass in the immediate future, their seats will be vacant for many months. It would be a hell of a thing for HCR to die in the Senate by a vote of 58-40 because there are 2 empty seats. He needs to have Snowe and Collins vote for this thing to ensure it’s passage, and that means talking the bipartisan talk for as long as he has to, even if 99
% of the GOP opposes it, GrassleyAss included. Whatever comes out of the Senate is not going to look like the final product. He just needs the Senate to pass something, anything, and then we will get a clearer picture of what the end product will be.
42.
Zifnab
@Hunter Gathers: Or he could just roll it through Reconciliation with 50 votes plus Biden.
The real problem isn’t the Senate so much as the House, where Pelosi will have to twist a lot of Blue Dog arms to bring the caucus in line with the will of the party. And that’ll be harder to do without a 60 Senator majority since guys like Democrat Rick Boucher (VA) who don’t like the public option because could become too popular will have guys like Nelson and Bayh to hide behind.
43.
The Moar You Know
LOL, that should say “anti-virus,” but “anti-software” actually sounds better.
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: You got it right the first time. McAfee is the only software I’ve ever used that has rendered computers unbootable.
No wonder the guy has taken a 96% hit to his wealth; his product is such crap that I know I’m not the only sysadmin to forbid its use in our shop.
Ugh, I hate the rich. They get extremely wealthy and maybe it helps me if it’s because of something awesome happening in the economy, but probably it doesn’t because they’re getting rich gaming the stock market and bribing politicians not to raise their taxes. But if they get poorer, it’s probably because I’m taking it in the shorts as well…only they have $4 million a year to get by on.
45.
Dracula
@Hunter Gathers: Not a chance a single Republican votes for this. Not even the 2 chicks from Maine.
However, I read somewhere (538?) that the filibuster is broken not with 60 votes, but 60%. 60% of 98 Senators is 58.8, and they always round down. So we’d be fine, if what I read was correct. Which it might not be.
46.
jenniebee
I, for one would like to send a donation to Mr. McAfee. Not because I feel sorry for him (I don’t) but because if he goes back to “working” for a living it’s probably just going to mean more long-distance calls from my mother asking me to diagnose over the phone why her computer doesn’t work anymore.
Maybe when the greedy fucker was worth $100 million, he should have perhaps gone conservative with his investments and maybe he’d still have at decent chunk of that insane amount.
An almost annoyingly worthless article, but the reactions to it are interesting. I don’t understand why anyone would assert that John McAfee was greedy or avaricious, or that his investments were outrageously speculative.
And I’ve found that some people have this odd personal thing about the rich and celebrities. The failures of the rich cause fear and anxiety in these people because it upsets a weird fantasy they have that if you get great wealth you don’t really deserve it or probably stole it, but paradoxically once you have it you should never lose it and all your problems should simply evaporate.
They’ll say something like, “Well, if I had $5 million, I would be set for life.”
If only.
I’m also getting tired of articles that falsely imply that there is some sort of rigidly permanent group of folk who can be identified as “The Rich,” and that there is supposed to be some relatively egalitarian distribution of incomes.
“We had a period of roughly 50 years, from 1929 to 1979, when the income distribution tended to flatten,” said Neal Soss, the chief economist at Credit Suisse. “Since the early ’80s, incomes have tended to get less equal. And I think we’ve entered a phase now where society will move to a more equal distribution.”
Trickle down is stupid, whether someone expects “the wealthy” to selflessly create jobs for everyone else, or whether some lame ass economist believes that fluctuations in the net worth of “the wealthy” directly or even indirectly affects the middle class.
Krugman over-estimates the importance of progressives, both to Obama’s election and to the health care debate.
He also sounds as if the purpose of health care reform is not to improve the lives of millions of Americans, but to satisfy smug self-centered progressives by vindicating their dreams.
God, I need some coffee.
51.
PeakVT
@djork: Good news. Now if we could just get this idiotic country to do the same…
52.
TheFountainHead
Cricket is not a sport I hope to ever understand.
Also, Michelle Bachmann continues to be dumber than a bag of hammers. Also.
Dis is an open thread, right? Well, then I just want to say that I want another trenchant post by admin. That was the best thread all day yesterday.
54.
ricky
I am enjoying the Villager reaction to Tom Ridge hinting the terror alert levels were as big a lie as WMD.
Short version of Marc Armbinder: “I mighta been right if I wasn’t wrong about the people who were right. “
55.
Glen
Among them is whether harder times for the rich will ultimately benefit the middle class and the poor, given that the huge recent increase in top incomes coincided with slow income growth for almost every other group. In blunter terms, the question is whether the better metaphor for the economy is a rising tide that can lift all boats — or a zero-sum game.
If this is the “why should I give a $hit” tie-in, I’m just amazed. This guy’s worried about his last $4M, the rest of us are worried about keeping a roof over our head, and our jobs. I can tell you how this worked out already – the middle class are broke and hanging in there by their pinkys, somewhat stunned that our new progressive President gave away the store to the guys that caused this mess, and the poor, well, honestly, that’s what we become if we lose our jobs or have a medical emergency.
56.
Zifnab
@Xanthippas: In all fairness, that’s not how people “get rich” at all. As a guy coming up in a wealthy neighborhood, I can tell you I was surrounded by lawyers and doctors and businessmen and industry executives who did, in fact, contribute to the community.
Take the classic good/bad example of Exxon. Here we’ve got a huge corporation with deep black marks all over it’s environmental record and it’s ethical history and it’s historical legacy. However, if I want to fill up my car, I can get quality gasoline that doesn’t fuck up my car from any of hundreds of conveniently located pumping stations that are refilled every day by armies of gas trucks which are in turn filled at thousands of depots that received their own oil from thousands of refineries that processed oil brought in by hundreds of massive tankers importing oil from thousands of rigs spanning multiple continents around the globe.
People made a lot of money designing those plants and piloting those tankers and running those gas stations and maintaining those rigs. And many of them invested that money in a fairly ethical manner, turning a reasonable 8-12% annual return. Over a decade or two, they grew themselves into millionaires.
It wasn’t “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” nonsense, but it did take hard work and commitment and sacrifice worth noting. And the wages of the labor of these tens of thousands of employees has been a reliable flow of energy necessary to run the transportation infrastructure of the country.
So it’s not all gaming and bribing and snookering. Some people provide seriously valuable tools to the economy. If they’re lucky and they’re savvy, they can even make a serious amount of money out of it – your Bill Gates and your Warren Buffet for instance – without degenerating into evil douchebags.
You just tend to be overexposed to the mega-douche rich guys that get lots of tv face time. And, unfortunately, the more mega-douchey you are, the more likely it is you can get in front of a camera. :-p
57.
KevinNYC
Lee,
“Any time something is described as hitting a “sobering wall”, they writer is expecting you to ooze sympathy.”
Or it could mean you were drunk and crashed into a wall.
The guy’s got FOUR MILLION DOLLARS and yet he needs to sell his house to pay his bills? WTF? Just how fucking expensive is water in Arizona?
At least he can still pack heat anywhere he goes. That’s gotta count for something.
cain
59.
Hunter Gathers
@Dracula: I think they will. They are known for bucking the party, and Maine is fairly liberal. Those two have been awfully quiet lately. I can’t recall any statements made by either one of them for at least a month. I don’t believe that either one of them wants anything to do with teh crazy.
60.
harlana pepper
I don’t have anything against rich people per se. But I don’t want to be hit over the head with, “aw, you’re just jealous and insecure because you’re poor.” Do not want. Greed is what I have a problem with.
I noticed TV Land (I think that’s the channel) is airing this new show starring Joan Rivers called “How’d You Get So Rich?” It’s basically where Joan walks around people’s houses, gets in their yachts, etc.
It’s almost unbelievable. In the worst economy in decades, with millions of people struggling, a channel actually begain airing a show about people showing off their conspicuous consumption and opulent wealth, hosted by perhaps the most annoying person on Earth.
I can’t imagine the person who greenlit this still has a job. Which actually makes me pretty sad.
63.
Cat Lady
OT, but DougJ, Cilizza tells us that McCain is “must see TV” this Sunday.
We’ve noticed that you haven’t edited or deleted your first post, or started blogging! Did we do something wrong? It’s the missing edit function, isn’t it? Or the random and slightly zen error messages? Or that BoB bot we can’t seem to get rid of. Anyhoo, sorry about that. Hope Tunch and Lily are well.
Make sure you edit or delete your first post, and start blogging!
Posted in Uncategorized
65.
R. Porrofatto
We’ve all heard of John Paulson, right? (No relation to Hank). In 2008, this hedge fund manager “earned” $1.8 million dollars…. an hour. That’s $3.7 Billion in cash for the year, on which he payed no more than a 15% federal tax rate, lower than that of anyone reading this, I’m sure. On his first workday of this one year, he made more than the lifetime income of the average heart surgeon.
Right now the very people who created this worldwide pre-depression (it an’t over yet, folks) are about to pay themselves yet another record level of obscene bonuses. Until this kind of insane transfer of capital to Wall Street is stopped, the rest of us are going to have to settle for an entirely different standard of living. Wall Street used to be hailed as the engine of capitalism, now it’s just the siphon draining the gas tank.
Listening to the Ashes match (Australia-England cricket.)
I would pay good money to anyone who could explain cricket to me.
And what’s a test match? What are they testing? And what if the results of the test are negative? Does everyone then end up with a sticky wicket? And if a wicket gets sticky, why doesn’t someone wipe it off?
But I don’t want to be hit over the head with, “aw, you’re just jealous and insecure because you’re poor.”
But what if we are jealous and [financially] insecure because we’re poor? After all, it’s totally reasonable to be jealous of someone who has, you know, a house and a car and health insurance and who doesn’t need to work out a detailed monthly food budget or sacrifice their newspaper subscription in order to buy school supplies or have to back out of seeing films with their friends because they can’t afford the movie ticket. I am fucking jealous. Is that so wrong?
On the other hand, I quit smoking cigarettes because it costs too goddamn much: if I was rich I’d totally smoke hoity-toity elitist French tobacco (O! Gauloises, how I miss thee!), so I guess there’s some benefit to bein’ broke ass.
I’ll happily take your point. The enduring attraction of wealth is that, truly, you can rise from nowhere to the top and live it up. What irks the living shit out of me about these NYT puppet shows is that I have zero sympathy for guys like Mcaffee. Your net worth is “down” to several millions? Cry me a frakking river, and be glad you don’t have to spend the winter huddled under a bridge.
The other irksome part is that the deck is increasingly stacked against the “commoner” from making it big anymore. The Gates and Mcaffees and Brins stand to become as rare as the circumstances that enabled their individual successes. Perhaps that’s my simplistic perception colored by the prevalence of the “mega-douchey*” and my personal suspicion that future success will be measured by the ability of the “commoner” to conduct subsistence farming.
But you can still take risks and get educated and work hard and maybe even get rich doing it. So, I need a Seabiscuit story, not attempts to elicit sympathy or empathy for millionaires who’s net worth is “down” to the equivalent of decades of my net income.
* Awesome.
69.
tripletee
The Obama administration has not proposed completely rewriting the rules for Wall Street or raising the top income-tax rate to anywhere near 70 percent, its level as recently as 1980.
I’d hereby like to invite people like Church Lady (who was clutching his/her pearls in a thread last night at the thought of the top marginal rate returning to 39.6%) to write the above down on a piece of paper, fold it into razor corners, and shove it right up their ass.
Meh, more pearl clutching, this time from Krugman. Let’s see: White House floats the idea of dropping the public option. Liberals rise up in protest. Meanwhile, Obama continues to hold out a hand to Grassley and other Republicans so the entire nation can watch it be repeatedly slapped away. End result: progressives are suddenly as engaged in the debate as the teabaggers (thereby stealing media oxygen from them), and Obama appears bi-partisan but also has cover to push for a public option because of pressure from the left.
I’m not pushing the “Obama playing multi-dimensional chess” BS, but I do think the administration has been pretty deft in steering the debate in the last week, which is why things are looking a lot more favorable for a decent bill.
70.
Dreggas
when do we just say fuck it and eat these motherfuckers?
I have nothing against vicarious lives. I grew up climbing mountains and exploring the Amazon, even though I have a tricky knee and humidity makes me have killer heat rash.
But when you screw up your actual life because you are only living vicariously… that’s not going to end well.
What’s in it for Snowe and Collins to stay with the Repub party line? Neither is frankly threatened at all by any challengers, and the wingnuts could try and crazy them in a primary, but I highly doubt it.
People in Maine want healthcare reform. Period. I assure you they do not want their Senators to merely follow party line because that’s what the Southerners want. So, why wouldn’t Snowe and/or Collins play ball with Obama? He’s popular in Maine.
74.
Zach
Anyone else catch Betsy McCaughy on The Daily Show last night talking death panels? Was ready for one of Stewart’s somewhat-unenlightened-but-still-entertaining teardowns except there was nothing to tear down. She was all about winking at the camera and trying to win via starbursts. That and knowingly lying through her teeth about provisions of the bill – http://alchemytoday.com/2009/08/21/betsy-mccaugheys-big-lie/
75.
Comrade Dread
I think the percentage of truly wealthy people is still quite small.
Most of the millionaires of the last 10 years especially are millionaires on paper only. They don’t truly own anything and are in debt or illiquid to the point where when calamity strikes everything they’ve build up on that sandy foundation comes crashing down.
We should, if we were sane, start teaching more about finances in schools and make sure our kids understand the difference between true wealth and paper wealth.
Of course, given that this would probably cut into the bank’s profits too much, I don’t see that happening.
The shift in the debate since last weekend with the one mention of the public option by Obama has been remarkable. It reminds me of his toss off comment about Republicans listening to Rush. How much pearl clutching was there from the left about how he shouldn’t have mentioned Rush, and look how that worked out. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that his comment was deliberate to get the reform supporters to finally come out of the blocks. He has said that he would prefer to be made to do things, and not be unilateral.
I would pay good money to anyone who could explain cricket to me.
Here is my very limited expat understanding of the game:
In cricket, you have a team batting and a team fielding. You score runs (by running between two wickets instead of around four bases, or by getting the ball to certain parts of the field without being caught) when you’re batting. You try to get the other side out when you’re fielding (all eleven of them, not just three) by knocking down the wicket behind them, or catching a fly ball, and about eight million other infractions. So far, so familiar.
The scores get ridiculously high because it’s easier to run between wickets than around bases, and there are also rules that award four or six runs for, say, hitting your ball clean out of the boundary without a bounce.
Obviously it is a lot more complicated than that, since it’s a 250 year old game. For more nuance, the BBC has some useful pages about it.
I noticed TV Land (I think that’s the channel) is airing this new show starring Joan Rivers called “How’d You Get So Rich?” It’s basically where Joan walks around people’s houses, gets in their yachts, etc.
It’s almost unbelievable. In the worst economy in decades, with millions of people struggling, a channel actually begain airing a show about people showing off their conspicuous consumption and opulent wealth, hosted by perhaps the most annoying person on Earth.
I can’t imagine the person who greenlit this still has a job. Which actually makes me pretty sad.
I caught an episode of this too and I was pretty shocked at how tacky it was. Add to that the fact that Joan Rivers could be the most hideous person on earth and it’s sure to be a hit. The only occasionally redeeming thing about the show is Joan’s sometimes brilliant quick wit but even that wasn’t enough to keep her husband here among the living.
@asiangrrlMN: What you said. That thread is about the only thing that got me through the day.
80.
Martin
Most of the millionaires of the last 10 years especially are millionaires on paper only.
But that’s their decision to have it that way. If they are millionaires on paper only, then they have the means to convert that to cash, but have chosen against it. It might come at a penalty or eliminate their ability to grow their wealth, but the mere fact that they can value their assets means that there is a market for the asset at that price.
I was a millionaire for about a year when the price of my house topped out, but it’s lost about half the value. So what? I had the chance to sell at the top and I didn’t take it. That’s my fault. Nobody should feel bad for me being stupid or choosing the way I did.
The scores get ridiculously high because it’s easier to run between wickets than around bases, and there are also rules that award four or six runs for, say, hitting your ball clean out of the boundary without a bounce.
See, this is where it starts to get strange to me.
The rules of the game, Mornington Crescent, make more sense.
For more nuance, the BBC has some useful pages about it.
I tried these once. Made my head hurt. For example,
White balls are used in one-day matches that usually require the team batting second to play their innings under floodlights. Under these conditions a white ball is easier to see than a red one.
However, if I want to fill up my car, I can get quality gasoline that doesn’t fuck up my car from any of hundreds of conveniently located pumping stations that are refilled every day by armies of gas trucks which are in turn filled at thousands of depots that received their own oil from thousands of refineries that processed oil brought in by hundreds of massive tankers importing oil from thousands of rigs spanning multiple continents around the globe.
People made a lot of money designing those plants and piloting those tankers and running those gas stations and maintaining those rigs. And many of them invested that money in a fairly ethical manner, turning a reasonable 8-12% annual return. Over a decade or two, they grew themselves into millionaires.
Nonsense. They made a lot of money off economic rent from a natural resource named “oil.”
The problem isn’t people making 8-12% annually from actual investments of capital. The problem rather is people getting rich off of economic rents, whether monopoly rents or natural resource rents.
And rent collection is indeed how most people get “rich,” where “rich” is not a doc making a few thou a year but way north of that.
I’d hereby like to invite people like Church Lady (who was clutching his/her pearls in a thread last night at the thought of the top marginal rate returning to 39.6%) to write the above down on a piece of paper, fold it into razor corners, and shove it right up their ass.
I’m not going to carry any water for Church Lady; I just called (her?) an idiot in another thread.
However, talking about marginal rates alone is pretty meaningless without talking about the tax base, viz, the definition of income. For example, if you exclude “capital gains” from “income”…
Furthermore, it’s not at all clear that the truly rich really pay that much income tax. AFAICT upper middle/lower upper class people pay most of it. The truly filthy rich seem to pay very little.
Not to mention that “rich” is defined by assets, not income.
87.
bedtimeforbonzo
Krugman speaks for me when he says: “I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing.”
I lost faith in President Obama’s ability to reform anything when, instead of reforming the banking and investment industries, instead of getting tough with Wall Street, he played footsy with the likes of Goldman and AIG.
The Obama administration continues to preside over the death of the middle class that began under Bush and has no understanding of how many of us are living paycheck to paycheck and paying the mortgage late every month (thankful that we can pay it all).
Meanwhile, the stock market continues to rebound. I do not understand the disconnect.
88.
Just Some Fuckhead
@R-Jud: I think it all flows from talking with a prissy accent. Nothing good can come from that.
89.
scav
ah, cricket. Imagine a grand man with a fine Scouse accent trying to explain using silverware on a linen tablecloth where a silly man off was to a 14-year-old me. I fear I disgraced the atmosphere.
It’s almost unbelievable. In the worst economy in decades, with millions of people struggling, a channel actually begain airing a show about people showing off their conspicuous consumption and opulent wealth, hosted by perhaps the most annoying person on Earth.
Ain’t got nuthin’ on the Bradley-Martin Ball, from the Gilded Age:
The Bradley-Martin Ball was a lavish costume ball at the Waldorf Hotel in New York City on the night of February 10, 1897. Mrs. Cornelia Bradley-Martin organized the ball, with the intention of making it “the greatest party in the history of the city”. Eight hundred socialites spent about $400,000 imitating kings and queens. Mrs. Bradley-Martin’s stated intention was to create an economic stimulus for New York City, which was at the end of the Long Depression which began in 1873 and included the Panic of 1893. Across the country, preachers and editorial writers argued over the propriety of a party that would cost hundreds of thousands of dollars. In the end, the ball was a social triumph but created negative publicity.
After spending one whole tedious day in Sydney watching a cricket match, with an Ozzie trying to explain all the rules to me, I can only conclude: it is the British Empire version of Calvinball.
95.
Punchy
I don’t understand why anyone would assert that John McAfee was greedy or avaricious, or that his investments were outrageously speculative.
Really, you dont understand? If I win $100million, there’s ZERO percent chance I lose it if I stick into a checking account (or enough of them). Very little I lose anything if I stay in gov’t bonds, as well. But those have very little upside, very little pizzaz, and are boring. But I cannot lose 96 million fucking dollars if I’m in T-bills or gold or in a Swiss bank.
The only way to lose that much scratch is to risk it. I understand that some of that 100 mill was not liquid, and when his company sucked, he lost worth that way. But not 96% of his value. He invested in shit that clearly had a downside–becuase of greed–and got burned.
96.
Bag of Hammers
Also, Michelle Bachmann continues to be dumber than a bag of hammers. Also.
Oh go fuck off.
97.
ericblair
Getting back to Poor Little Almost Ex-Rich Boy and the attendant handwringing about the super-rich getting pantsed and its effect on the rest of the economy, here. I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that a few years after wealth in the US started to get seriously concentrated in the hands of a small minority, we got bubble after bubble and crash after crash.
Since the uber-rich didn’t have to spend a lot of this money, it started to build up in investments, and the rich started chasing returns. Besides taking tech companies public that never made a dime of profit, Wall Street needed to construct a lot of new investment vehicles for them to buy so they didn’t need to pile into boring Treasuries, so out come the CDOs, CDSs, and other increasingly abstract and poorly-understood securities. Add a pile of system-gaming, herd behavior, and greed-fueled optimism, and you get the greatest misallocation of capital in the history of the country. If concentrating the wealth in a few hands was an economic and social experiment (trickle-down economics), it failed. Time to shut it down.
98.
Chad N Freude
Rather late to this party, but …
I, too, think it mischaracterizes the article to imply that it’s sympathetic to the tribulations of the obscenely rich. It’s reasonably analytic and discusses possible social effects of loss of wealth by the wealthy. I do, however, think the presentation of poor McAfee’s plight is more sympathetic than it needs to be to get the point across and is more positive than he deserves. It’s hard impossible to feel any sympathy for this financial genius who mismanaged his assets so badly.
99.
Dogbert's Tech Support
@Brachiator: If possible, I recommend watching “Lagaan” in the company of a Brit or Aussie and having them explain as the climactic cricket match is played. The movie (unlike an actual cricket match) is terrifically entertaining and the match moves slowly enough that there’s plenty of time for discussion of the rules, but not so slowly that you start thinking that methodically slamming a cricket bat against your shins for six hours would be more entertaining by comparison (again, unlike an actual cricket match).
100.
Colette
@Brachiator: If possible, I recommend that you watch “Lagaan” in the company of a Brit or Aussie and having them explain as the climactic cricket match is played. The movie (unlike an actual cricket match) is terrifically entertaining and the match moves slowly enough that there’s plenty of time for discussion of the rules, but not so slowly that you start thinking that methodically slamming a cricket bat against your shins for six hours would be more entertaining by comparison (again, unlike an actual cricket match).
101.
Colette
Fracking lacking edit button. Also, alas, my secret identity has been revealed!
Eight hundred socialites spent about $400,000 imitating kings and queens. Mrs. Bradley-Martin’s
800? That must of chapped Mrs. Astor’s patootie. She’d put all that effort into making NY society exclusive to ‘The 400.’
105.
Demo Woman
@arguingwithsignposts: Thanks for linking to this. Did you buy his I’m really not a bad person post?
106.
Cain
Has anybody heard of the “Cook Report”? They have an analysis that shows that Dems have lost control of the political atmosphere and that tehy are heading for losses in 2010. I’m very frustrated by this analysis. I can’t believe these guys have fucked it up by being so careful.
My fury with this sort of thing is that every single rich person, and most every middle-class person, has gotten that way by exploiting people like me who do the work for them at below living wages, with no health ins or junk ins., and getting discarded like trash the minute the economy goes south so that they can keep on with their house payments and Aruba vacations and private schools for their kids and new SUVs and Harleys and so on.
Doesn’t matter if they’re conservatives or liberals or libertarians, all small business owners I have ever worked for have been exploitative predators calling themselves “self-made” when it’s come from gouging those of us who cannot get out from under. (Same experience of everyone I know, too.) Ditto the doctors and architects and so forth who don’t ever think how their profits stay so high based on cheap labour – which has to stay cheap somehow! I’m not even going into the ones who have argued to my face that women deserve to be paid less for the same work, ‘cause that’s what Jesus would do. (Srsly.)
Yeah, I came to understand why the bourgeoisie goes up against the wall with the aristos (and the clergy!) after working customer service for just a couple years… the boss may charge $60 an hour for my work but I only see < 10 of it AND I have to eat shit with a smile, too. But that’s capitalism for you, as well as Feudalism. Aux barricades, citoyennes!
In short, capitalism depends on there being a permanent, and large, underclass kept in near-poverty as well as a group in dire poverty pour encourages les autres to keep our heads down and not demand any more, and this is not a bug but a feature, the system is not broke this is the system, and this is not wild conspiracy but what I long ago to my shock heard respected economists admitting on NPR Marketplace when they explained why low unemployment was “bad for the economy”…
It’s a mug’s game, and the handful of little turtles held up to us as proof that it’s possible to succeed if you just work hard™ American Dream Land of Opportunity blah blah blah don’t prove a thing except that someone wins the lottery, sure…
Working for Republicans started to turn me into a flaming liberal, and working for a liberal-tarian media outlet whose owner laughed at me and those like me before our faces for being “really f~cking poor” completed the job.
RE: Eight hundred socialites spent about $400,000 imitating kings and queens. Mrs. Bradley-Martin’s
800? That must of chapped Mrs. Astor’s patootie. She’d put all that effort into making NY society exclusive to ‘The 400.’
Hah! You’re right. The party crashers were high society freeloaders.
By the way, the 400 grand spent on the party in 1897 would be roughly equivalent to about $10,700,000 in 2008 dollars. It would also be roughly equal to about $51 million when compared to the wage value of unskilled labor.
I gotta say I feel somewhat sorry for the guy. He might actually have to work for a living, which must be a bit of a shock. I hate to admit that I always had suspicions that these companies actually paid for some of the virus development back before people figured out how to make money off of malware.
112.
Tongue of Groucho Marx
@62:
That show featured the guy who created Billy-Bob teeth, and he was worth about $330 million. To ‘relieve stress’, what he does is buy $4000 clunkers, and crush them with a tractor.
Of course, I’m going to be branded as a Communist who hates imperatives for people to succeed when I suggest that people with his amount of wealth ought to be taxed more. Never mind the fact that this guy only got rich because of the government-run U.S. Patent Office.
@91: It’s kind of funny how sincere he sounds in the first four paragraphs, then turns around and says that he’s not remotely disturbed by any of his losses.
@32: My university (the University of Tennessee, Knoxville) requires that we have McAfee in order to access the Internet. The piece of shit keeps turning its features off on its own. I had TWO hard drive crashes within the last year, and I can’t help but suspect that something got through McAfee.
@102: I’m going to have to stick with Greenwald on this one. Obama seems to be more interested in letting the apple cart be corroded by nature than he does in investing in repairmen to fix it.
You can’t call it ‘political astuteness’ when about the ONLY thing he’s done to upset the apple cart is to pass a stimulus. And I have a hunch that McCain could be pressured to pass one, albeit a shittier one, since the stimulus was supported by a large amount of economists. While I do think he’ll get somewhere on wind energy (considering that General Electric is a huge Obama supporter), that’ll be about it.
113.
Libertini
@shelley matheis: Snarky, yes, but your logic is off. The “400” is families (with male heads of household) – hence total attendance is 800 when spouses are included.
114.
Face
@Cain: who cares? We have Dems control the House/Sen/WH, we get nothing of substance legislatively. We get the Repubs to own the House, we get nothing of substance from Congress.
So what’s the difference? I’m serious.
115.
Cain
@Face:
@Cain: who cares? We have Dems control the House/Sen/WH, we get nothing of substance legislatively. We get the Repubs to own the House, we get nothing of substance from Congress.
True enough, but at least we have some chance. I mean what kind of bill do you think we would have if Republicans in charge? I mean they wouldn’t even touch health care, they’d be off looking to see if they can gin up another war on something. So at least we’d have status quo.
cain
116.
Robertdsc-iphone
Memo to the President:
Your emo whining about one term is ridiculously unbecoming. Stop it. Show some spine and forcefully reject the obstructionists.
117.
David Hunt
Time for the cookie gathering post
118.
HyperIon
@jwb: Cue the tiny violins and all that. Sometimes, especially after reading articles like this, I wish the NY Times and WaPo would just up and die already.
Don’t worry; be happy. They are in the process of dying right before your eyes.
I can’t judge his heart, honestly, but I do think it was a classy move of him to accept some responsibility and respond in the comments. Hell, that’s one of the few articles I’ve actually seen comments on for the times. must be a new thing.
120.
HyperIon
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: YES! I will cry no tears for the guy responsible for that piece of crap.
I, too, think it mischaracterizes the article to imply that it’s sympathetic to the tribulations of the obscenely rich. It’s reasonably analytic and discusses possible social effects of loss of wealth by the wealthy.
I noted before how the article elicited odd variations of fantasy conventional wisdom about wealth and the wealthy. I found one comment at the NY Times site similar to a sentiment that I’ve heard many times.
I always wondered, as some write above, why one has to get more than, say $5M. I have a small fraction of it diminshed by the the Great Recession but I am happy as a clam. Of course, I do not have houses all over the world, no private jet and a 200 feet yacht. With $5M you can probably have most of these things and be happy on a ‘higher level’.
When I see this kind of thing, I don’t know if people are supposed to work until they’ve earned $5 million and then stop or (more likely) that people should work as hard as they want, but expect the government to take every dollar in excess of $5 million and use it for some supposedly worthy purpose.
I do, however, think the presentation of poor McAfee’s plight is more sympathetic than it needs to be to get the point across and is more positive than he deserves. It’s impossible to feel any sympathy for this financial genius who mismanaged his assets so badly.
While some of McAfee’s losses may be related to mismanagement of his finances, a portion of his wealth was lost because of the financial markets mess.
Again, it’s interesting to note the attitude that at some level of wealth, people are “supposed to” be able to maintain it.
In an odd way, this is the flip side to the sentiment expressed by Rush Limbaugh and others that if a person is poor in free market America, he or she is a failure or a loser.
122.
HyperIon
@Just Some Fuckhead: (and Joshua) Recall that lush Hollywood musicals and dramas about people with loads of money were the rage during the depression. It was considered escapism. It seems like the same thing now. Is it more tacky than “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”? (I’m doing basic cable now and so am mired in public access and CSPAN programming now. Strangely I don’t miss the incessant L&O re-runs. But I do like paying $14 a month for cable.)
123.
HyperIon
@arguingwithsignposts: Thanks for linking. I read some comments this am but did not see his. I agreed with this:
But we have over time equated entrepreneurism with the drive to accumulate wealth, which is a perversion of this spirit.
Currenly valued at 4 million, all this guy has to do is lose 3.97 million, and the Wall Street Journal will be bitching about how much of a Lucky Ducky he is.
In other news, I took the day off to pick up my friend Sharon from the Airport. She’s coming into town for a wedding over the weekend. Due to an airline catastrofuck, she is being bounced around the American West like a pinball.
Portland to Boise to Vegas (currently here) to Chicago to Omaha.
Most wasted day off ever.
I think I’ll clean up and go do something that doesn’t reinforce this notion that we’re completely fucked as a species and we are not going to make it.
125.
HyperIon
@arguingwithsignposts: The Times has comments on many articles and columns. But not all, which I don’t understand. I have pretty much given up reading WaPo comments–lots of snark and name-calling. The NYT comments are much better these days IMO.
Really, you dont understand? If I win $100million, there’s ZERO percent chance I lose it if I stick into a checking account (or enough of them). Very little I lose anything if I stay in gov’t bonds, as well. But those have very little upside, very little pizzaz, and are boring. But I cannot lose 96 million fucking dollars if I’m in T-bills or gold or in a Swiss bank.
OK. You put your $100 million in the bank. Maybe you spread it to a few banks, but not so many that you forget where you’ve stashed it. All your banks fail as a result of the financial meltdown.
The FDIC sends you your insured savings of $250,000 (or small multiple based on how you spread it out) including a card saying “So sorry. Have a nice day.”
Yeah, you could roll it all into a 1 yr T bill earning .48%, and while the $480,000 you earn is actually pretty good, you also settle for having inflation eat away at the real value of your stash.
And even Swiss banks are not always what they are cracked up to be.
But I got the message: the rich deserve our scorn if they don’t automatically settle for the most conservative investment strategy after they get their big ol’ pile of money.
I agree about the quality of comments at NYT vs. WaPo, although, like I said, I’ve only ever seen them on blogs before. The Times also has someone pre-screen their comments, which may explain the higher level of discussion.
And I should also say that both WaPo and NYT are light-years above the comments at ESPN.
“I would pay good money to anyone who could explain cricket to me.”
Cricket is an excuse to sit and drink for seven hours a day for three days with your friends, with no reason to do anything other than drink for seven hours a day for three days, because the game is carefully designed so that NOTHING EVER HAPPENS that might distract you from your drinking.
That is all.
129.
SiubhanDuinne
The great Anna Russell (I’m doing this from memory so it may be a little bit off for you purists):
We are the Great Four Hundred
If you want to know who we are.
We put on airs
‘Cause our forefathairs
Came over on the Mayflower.
And it’s very very snappy
When your mammy and your pappy
Are descended from the Mayflower.
We are in the Social Register.
All lower-class types we shun.
And to keep our niche
We must stay very rich
Or we’ll be thrown out when we’ve none.
And it’s very very funny
When you’ve lots and lots of money
To be horrible to those with none,
To be hor-ri-ble to those with NONE.
130.
Kilkee
@Redshirt: Re Snowe and Collins. As a Mainer, I can tell you that they are both (somewhat mysteriously, to me) virtually unbeatable here. That said, if and when the count comes down to the wire, and the press begins the ‘it all depends on Snowe and Collins’ line, they must fall in line to support HCR. There are lots of libs and poor folk in Maine (and not as much overlap between ’em as some would think), and they want HRC, and now. It would be a tough sell for either to stand in the way insisting that there was something not quite right about whatever proposal was being voted on.
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MikeJ
Fourth wicket down!
The Grand Panjandrum
Shorter NYT: It’s hard out there for the no longer super-rich, too. Also.
Crusty Dem
I thought I was poor because I had no shoes, but then I met a man who’s net worth had dropped 96% and was worth a mere $4 million. But then I stole his shoes and strangled him with the laces, and I’m doing super, thanks!
GReynoldsCT00
I am SO tired of these ‘poor’ wealthy articles…
Cat Lady
I won’t read the article, but is it really saying this shlub in front of his desert palace is *gasp* down to his last 4 mil? The horror.
SGEW
Me and my four digit checking account really feel for that guy. Yup.
Oh boy! Rice and beans for dinner again! Sure am a lucky ducky, yes I am.
Punchy
Maybe when the greedy fucker was worth $100 million, he should have perhaps gone conservative with his investments and maybe he’d still have at decent chunk of that insane amount.
Glad to see the NYT connecting with the average American.
over_educated
Jesus John, you of all people should have some sympathy for these folks. Where would you be without your billions you rake in from the greater Balloon Juice community. But for the grace of god you too might have to cut back to a single Mazarati and *shudder* domestic caviar.
jwb
Cue the tiny violins and all that. Sometimes, especially after reading articles like this, I wish the NY Times and WaPo would just up and die already.
Comrade Mary
Things got exciting in Southern Ontario last night.
The Grand Panjandrum
Glenn Greenwald:
kay
I saw that article this morning and laughed. I didn’t read it.
I love how ominous that headline is: “rise of the super-rich hits sobering WALL”. Oh. my. GOD.
It has “sobering” in it, but I had the reverse reaction.
MikeJ
Yeah, it’s hard to see how you could lose that much that quickly. He said he had split his assets between stocks and real estate. So ok, $50 mill in real estate. Market tanks and he decides he needs cash. Even if his stocks were completely wiped out *and* he was only able to get half of what he paid on every real estate investment, he would still have $25 million. He must have been leveraged up to his eyeballs. I can understand taking a chunk of that $100 million and swinging for the fences, but wouldn’t a sane person make sure that some large piece of it was basically un-loseable?
KevinNYC
The article is very informative and could be used as the basis of sound economic and tax policy. It’s not asking for sympathy for the super-rich, it’s discussing the phenomenon of them. That the past three decades have been an aberration.
“In 2007, the top one ten-thousandth of households took home 6 percent of the nation’s income, up from 0.9 percent in 1977. It was the highest such level since at least 1913, the first year for which the I.R.S. has data.
The top 1 percent of earners took home 23.5 percent of income, up from 9 percent three decades earlier. “
The Grand Panjandrum
Atrios with the weapons grade snark:
Hunter Gathers
Shorter NYT – the plight of the slightly less richer than before is why Obama would be a socialmalist if he dared raise their taxes. Who will think of the priviledged children!
jibeaux
Well, far be it from me to keep things in perspective, but I took it as a less of a tiny violins for the super rich piece and more of reporting on a trend and raising the question of whether the decline of the super-wealthy is a plus for the less well off, a neutral, or a negative. Granted, it did a pretty poor job of this in that they spent a lot more time talking about McAfee’s plane-flying pad then they did soliciting the opinions of experts on the broader implications for the economy, but I don’t think an article on the trend of the wealthiest losing their wealth necessarily has to read like a sob story. It’s actually a pretty interesting question, the extent to which wealth is a zero-sum game, and it could have been an interesting analysis.
Punchy
Wait. Hold on.
The guy’s got FOUR MILLION DOLLARS and yet he needs to sell his house to pay his bills? WTF? Just how fucking expensive is water in Arizona?
Crashman06
From the article:
Um, can I borrow 6K to pay off the rest of my student loans? You’ll still have $3,99,400 left.
djork
So, Mexico decriminalized drug possession yesterday.
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/world/americas/21mexico.html
MikeJ
LBW! 108-5
WereBear
Yes, but we are probably not talking about a sane person.
Most of the people I’ve met who make a lot of money either stumble onto it, as in being an artist whose stuff catches on… or they only care about money.
And the thing about money is how addictive it is. When that’s all there is in your life… there’s never enough. Never.
Crusty Dem
You all mock but how many of you would come out looking so good if you lost $96 million?
I’m still trying to figure out how you lose that large a % of your money without leveraging to the hilt. I know real estate has been bad, but I don’t think anyone in the US has bought a property and seen it lose 90% of value. That requires a special brand of stupid. Plus, any money in his old company is doing quite well (http://tinyurl.com/ltemk9), which is the big mistake most entrepreneurs make. I can’t help but think something suspicious is going on here.
Ash Can
@Comrade Mary: Yikes, what a mess. Hope you and yours are OK.
Lee from NC
@KevinNYC:
I would agree that just possibly, maybe, it’s not asking for sympathy for the rich except for the fucking title of the piece. Any time something is described as hitting a “sobering wall”, they writer is expecting you to ooze sympathy.
We wouldn’t say that the rise in troop deaths in Iraq has hit a sobering wall.
beltane
The solution is simple. What these not-quite-as-obscenely-rich-as-before millionaires need is another tax cut. Problem solved.
The Grand Panjandrum
The article says he is “worth” four million. He could have $1000 in cash and assets with a net value of $3.999 million. Many so-called rich people don’t always have a lot of cash. Actually you might be surprised at how many of these people are fairly close to being broke if things go south too quickly. Having your money tied up in real estate is a very poor option if you don’t have enough cash in the bank to ride out a year or two of rough going.
MikeJ
Holy shit, 109-6! Engerland may actually know something about this game after all.
bellatrys
Nothing new… the Veneerings go from being the newest nouveau riche who give the best parties to buying a Parliament seat to being THE folks to know to get ahead to bankruptcy in the course of the story. Meanwhile their clueless friends [sic] stay clueless, with a couple of exceptions who take their wakeup calls to heart.
Oh, and an old lady who worked hard all her life dies in a ditch because she refuses to go to a workhouse when she loses everything through no fault of her own.
That Gilded Age sure was great for some folks, though! Everything should be just like it was then!
Comrade Mary
@Ash Can: Toronto proper experienced a very bad storm and some associated property damage, fallen trees and some scattered power outages, but most of us are fine. However, an 11 year old boy was killed in a small town two hours from here, and 120 houses in Vaughan (part of Toronto’s northern suburbs) were damaged and evacuated, and a state of emergency has been declared there.
Toronto doesn’t get tornadoes, but last night was pretty intense nonetheless once we were told that we were under an official warning. I was seriously considering going to my basement at one point last night, getting my radio, flashlight and heavy comforter ready. I can’t imagine how midwesterners deal with repeated warnings and some real tornadoes several times a year.
Punchy
@MikeJ: I’m assuming by that score that you’re watching an Iowa football game, and we only have 2 field goals. Groan.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
Shittiest anti-software protection ever.
I’ll cry for the fuck when he’s worth $4. Until then, fuck him.
Scruffy McSnufflepuss
LOL, that should say “anti-virus,” but “anti-software” actually sounds better. A better description of what McAfee has done to my computers.
ronin122
Uh oh, Krugman has another Op-Ed. Unfortunately I have to actually say I not only agree with what he said but with the tone (the latter usually comes harder). Pretty much slams him for thinking progressives would be pissed at getting rid of the public option for some (unsuitable) alternative, and for looking like a jack-ass for saying he’ll still work with Grassley after he said he’s gonna pull the plug on grandma, amongst other things.
MikeJ
Listening to the Ashes match (Australia-England cricket.) Australia ow have 112 runs, with 7 “outs”. 3 outs left in their first innings, they trail England by 220.
Australia went into this game only needing a draw to retain the Ashes. Most people didn’t hold out much hope for England, but brilliant bowling today may have done it.
Tattoosydney
@Punchy:
“you’re watching an Iowa football game…”
… might as well be.
117/7… Ouch.
polkcountydude
I apologize if someone above mentioned what I am about to say but I don’t have time to read comments today. This article glosses over what really caused Mr. McAfee to lose his millions: reckless risk-taking. I may only be a 24 year-old who just graduated with a Master’s in Accounting, but I damn well know that leveraging up to earn higher returns is stupid, unless you are selling treasuries short, lol. It sounds like this guy, as bright as he is, took excessive risks so he could earn a bigger return. This situation is emblematic of our country’s entire upper class. America’s now regressive tax structure encourages excessive risk taking among the upper classes and corporations because they have money “just to play with”. It’s generally no skin off their backs if they lose $20m here or there. Learn to live within your means like everyone else jackasses.
Zifnab
@The Grand Panjandrum: Maybe the Grand Old Party need to get reacquainted with John Yoo’s opus magnum, the “Unitary Executive Theory”?
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: The only reason anyone uses that crap is because it’s been marketed the fuck out. Damn thing just locks down your computer so hard you can’t create a freak’n notepad document without disabling half the “security” settings.
Lee from NC
@ronin122:
And every word of it is pure truth to power.
rachel
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: It doesn’t do anything that Windows didn’t do to your computer first. Talk about crap software.
Hunter Gathers
@ronin122: Obama HAS to keep the door open on bipartisanship. That means having to deal with GrassleyAss. There is a decent chance that both Kennedy and Byrd will die before there is a vote. That is very harsh, but it’s the truth. If one or both pass in the immediate future, their seats will be vacant for many months. It would be a hell of a thing for HCR to die in the Senate by a vote of 58-40 because there are 2 empty seats. He needs to have Snowe and Collins vote for this thing to ensure it’s passage, and that means talking the bipartisan talk for as long as he has to, even if 99
% of the GOP opposes it, GrassleyAss included. Whatever comes out of the Senate is not going to look like the final product. He just needs the Senate to pass something, anything, and then we will get a clearer picture of what the end product will be.
Zifnab
@Hunter Gathers: Or he could just roll it through Reconciliation with 50 votes plus Biden.
The real problem isn’t the Senate so much as the House, where Pelosi will have to twist a lot of Blue Dog arms to bring the caucus in line with the will of the party. And that’ll be harder to do without a 60 Senator majority since guys like Democrat Rick Boucher (VA) who don’t like the public option because could become too popular will have guys like Nelson and Bayh to hide behind.
The Moar You Know
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: You got it right the first time. McAfee is the only software I’ve ever used that has rendered computers unbootable.
No wonder the guy has taken a 96% hit to his wealth; his product is such crap that I know I’m not the only sysadmin to forbid its use in our shop.
Xanthippas
Ugh, I hate the rich. They get extremely wealthy and maybe it helps me if it’s because of something awesome happening in the economy, but probably it doesn’t because they’re getting rich gaming the stock market and bribing politicians not to raise their taxes. But if they get poorer, it’s probably because I’m taking it in the shorts as well…only they have $4 million a year to get by on.
Dracula
@Hunter Gathers: Not a chance a single Republican votes for this. Not even the 2 chicks from Maine.
However, I read somewhere (538?) that the filibuster is broken not with 60 votes, but 60%. 60% of 98 Senators is 58.8, and they always round down. So we’d be fine, if what I read was correct. Which it might not be.
jenniebee
I, for one would like to send a donation to Mr. McAfee. Not because I feel sorry for him (I don’t) but because if he goes back to “working” for a living it’s probably just going to mean more long-distance calls from my mother asking me to diagnose over the phone why her computer doesn’t work anymore.
R-Jud
@MikeJ:
I read that and thought, “Really? I can’t hear them…” but then realized they are playing in London and not at Edgbaston, which is quite close to me.
gnomedad
The title sucked, but I didn’t see the article as particularly sympathetic or flattering. I’d be surprised to see teabaggers distributing it.
gypsy howell
I guess we mere serfs can congratulate ourselves that at least we didn’t lose as much money as this dirtbag McAfee.
Brachiator
@Punchy:
An almost annoyingly worthless article, but the reactions to it are interesting. I don’t understand why anyone would assert that John McAfee was greedy or avaricious, or that his investments were outrageously speculative.
And I’ve found that some people have this odd personal thing about the rich and celebrities. The failures of the rich cause fear and anxiety in these people because it upsets a weird fantasy they have that if you get great wealth you don’t really deserve it or probably stole it, but paradoxically once you have it you should never lose it and all your problems should simply evaporate.
They’ll say something like, “Well, if I had $5 million, I would be set for life.”
If only.
I’m also getting tired of articles that falsely imply that there is some sort of rigidly permanent group of folk who can be identified as “The Rich,” and that there is supposed to be some relatively egalitarian distribution of incomes.
Trickle down is stupid, whether someone expects “the wealthy” to selflessly create jobs for everyone else, or whether some lame ass economist believes that fluctuations in the net worth of “the wealthy” directly or even indirectly affects the middle class.
Krugman over-estimates the importance of progressives, both to Obama’s election and to the health care debate.
He also sounds as if the purpose of health care reform is not to improve the lives of millions of Americans, but to satisfy smug self-centered progressives by vindicating their dreams.
God, I need some coffee.
PeakVT
@djork: Good news. Now if we could just get this idiotic country to do the same…
TheFountainHead
Cricket is not a sport I hope to ever understand.
Also, Michelle Bachmann continues to be dumber than a bag of hammers. Also.
asiangrrlMN
Dis is an open thread, right? Well, then I just want to say that I want another trenchant post by admin. That was the best thread all day yesterday.
ricky
I am enjoying the Villager reaction to Tom Ridge hinting the terror alert levels were as big a lie as WMD.
Short version of Marc Armbinder: “I mighta been right if I wasn’t wrong about the people who were right. “
Glen
If this is the “why should I give a $hit” tie-in, I’m just amazed. This guy’s worried about his last $4M, the rest of us are worried about keeping a roof over our head, and our jobs. I can tell you how this worked out already – the middle class are broke and hanging in there by their pinkys, somewhat stunned that our new progressive President gave away the store to the guys that caused this mess, and the poor, well, honestly, that’s what we become if we lose our jobs or have a medical emergency.
Zifnab
@Xanthippas: In all fairness, that’s not how people “get rich” at all. As a guy coming up in a wealthy neighborhood, I can tell you I was surrounded by lawyers and doctors and businessmen and industry executives who did, in fact, contribute to the community.
Take the classic good/bad example of Exxon. Here we’ve got a huge corporation with deep black marks all over it’s environmental record and it’s ethical history and it’s historical legacy. However, if I want to fill up my car, I can get quality gasoline that doesn’t fuck up my car from any of hundreds of conveniently located pumping stations that are refilled every day by armies of gas trucks which are in turn filled at thousands of depots that received their own oil from thousands of refineries that processed oil brought in by hundreds of massive tankers importing oil from thousands of rigs spanning multiple continents around the globe.
People made a lot of money designing those plants and piloting those tankers and running those gas stations and maintaining those rigs. And many of them invested that money in a fairly ethical manner, turning a reasonable 8-12% annual return. Over a decade or two, they grew themselves into millionaires.
It wasn’t “pull yourself up by your own bootstraps” nonsense, but it did take hard work and commitment and sacrifice worth noting. And the wages of the labor of these tens of thousands of employees has been a reliable flow of energy necessary to run the transportation infrastructure of the country.
So it’s not all gaming and bribing and snookering. Some people provide seriously valuable tools to the economy. If they’re lucky and they’re savvy, they can even make a serious amount of money out of it – your Bill Gates and your Warren Buffet for instance – without degenerating into evil douchebags.
You just tend to be overexposed to the mega-douche rich guys that get lots of tv face time. And, unfortunately, the more mega-douchey you are, the more likely it is you can get in front of a camera. :-p
KevinNYC
Lee,
“Any time something is described as hitting a “sobering wall”, they writer is expecting you to ooze sympathy.”
Or it could mean you were drunk and crashed into a wall.
Cain
@Punchy:
Wait. Hold on.
The guy’s got FOUR MILLION DOLLARS and yet he needs to sell his house to pay his bills? WTF? Just how fucking expensive is water in Arizona?
At least he can still pack heat anywhere he goes. That’s gotta count for something.
cain
Hunter Gathers
@Dracula: I think they will. They are known for bucking the party, and Maine is fairly liberal. Those two have been awfully quiet lately. I can’t recall any statements made by either one of them for at least a month. I don’t believe that either one of them wants anything to do with teh crazy.
harlana pepper
I don’t have anything against rich people per se. But I don’t want to be hit over the head with, “aw, you’re just jealous and insecure because you’re poor.” Do not want. Greed is what I have a problem with.
J.
That NYT article is the #1 story on the site today, and is a good read, though I still feel poor.
However, the best story I’ve so far today is the one about the Officer and the Gentleman’s Club (though technically it was a restaurant, albeit with scantily clad waitresses)… http://jtwoo.blogspot.com/2009/08/which-is-why-cops-should-stick-to-donut.html. Hysterical.
Joshua
I noticed TV Land (I think that’s the channel) is airing this new show starring Joan Rivers called “How’d You Get So Rich?” It’s basically where Joan walks around people’s houses, gets in their yachts, etc.
It’s almost unbelievable. In the worst economy in decades, with millions of people struggling, a channel actually begain airing a show about people showing off their conspicuous consumption and opulent wealth, hosted by perhaps the most annoying person on Earth.
I can’t imagine the person who greenlit this still has a job. Which actually makes me pretty sad.
Cat Lady
OT, but DougJ, Cilizza tells us that McCain is “must see TV” this Sunday.
Tattoosydney
@asiangrrlMN:
Hello John!
by admin
We’ve noticed that you haven’t edited or deleted your first post, or started blogging! Did we do something wrong? It’s the missing edit function, isn’t it? Or the random and slightly zen error messages? Or that BoB bot we can’t seem to get rid of. Anyhoo, sorry about that. Hope Tunch and Lily are well.
Make sure you edit or delete your first post, and start blogging!
Posted in Uncategorized
R. Porrofatto
We’ve all heard of John Paulson, right? (No relation to Hank). In 2008, this hedge fund manager “earned” $1.8 million dollars…. an hour. That’s $3.7 Billion in cash for the year, on which he payed no more than a 15% federal tax rate, lower than that of anyone reading this, I’m sure. On his first workday of this one year, he made more than the lifetime income of the average heart surgeon.
Right now the very people who created this worldwide pre-depression (it an’t over yet, folks) are about to pay themselves yet another record level of obscene bonuses. Until this kind of insane transfer of capital to Wall Street is stopped, the rest of us are going to have to settle for an entirely different standard of living. Wall Street used to be hailed as the engine of capitalism, now it’s just the siphon draining the gas tank.
Brachiator
@MikeJ:
I would pay good money to anyone who could explain cricket to me.
And what’s a test match? What are they testing? And what if the results of the test are negative? Does everyone then end up with a sticky wicket? And if a wicket gets sticky, why doesn’t someone wipe it off?
SGEW
@harlana pepper:
But what if we are jealous and [financially] insecure because we’re poor? After all, it’s totally reasonable to be jealous of someone who has, you know, a house and a car and health insurance and who doesn’t need to work out a detailed monthly food budget or sacrifice their newspaper subscription in order to buy school supplies or have to back out of seeing films with their friends because they can’t afford the movie ticket. I am fucking jealous. Is that so wrong?
On the other hand, I quit smoking cigarettes because it costs too goddamn much: if I was rich I’d totally smoke hoity-toity elitist French tobacco (O! Gauloises, how I miss thee!), so I guess there’s some benefit to bein’ broke ass.
BruceFromOhio
@Zifnab:
I’ll happily take your point. The enduring attraction of wealth is that, truly, you can rise from nowhere to the top and live it up. What irks the living shit out of me about these NYT puppet shows is that I have zero sympathy for guys like Mcaffee. Your net worth is “down” to several millions? Cry me a frakking river, and be glad you don’t have to spend the winter huddled under a bridge.
The other irksome part is that the deck is increasingly stacked against the “commoner” from making it big anymore. The Gates and Mcaffees and Brins stand to become as rare as the circumstances that enabled their individual successes. Perhaps that’s my simplistic perception colored by the prevalence of the “mega-douchey*” and my personal suspicion that future success will be measured by the ability of the “commoner” to conduct subsistence farming.
But you can still take risks and get educated and work hard and maybe even get rich doing it. So, I need a Seabiscuit story, not attempts to elicit sympathy or empathy for millionaires who’s net worth is “down” to the equivalent of decades of my net income.
* Awesome.
tripletee
I’d hereby like to invite people like Church Lady (who was clutching his/her pearls in a thread last night at the thought of the top marginal rate returning to 39.6%) to write the above down on a piece of paper, fold it into razor corners, and shove it right up their ass.
@ronin122:
Meh, more pearl clutching, this time from Krugman. Let’s see: White House floats the idea of dropping the public option. Liberals rise up in protest. Meanwhile, Obama continues to hold out a hand to Grassley and other Republicans so the entire nation can watch it be repeatedly slapped away. End result: progressives are suddenly as engaged in the debate as the teabaggers (thereby stealing media oxygen from them), and Obama appears bi-partisan but also has cover to push for a public option because of pressure from the left.
I’m not pushing the “Obama playing multi-dimensional chess” BS, but I do think the administration has been pretty deft in steering the debate in the last week, which is why things are looking a lot more favorable for a decent bill.
Dreggas
when do we just say fuck it and eat these motherfuckers?
Bill H
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss:
Well, Norton would come close.
WereBear
I have nothing against vicarious lives. I grew up climbing mountains and exploring the Amazon, even though I have a tricky knee and humidity makes me have killer heat rash.
But when you screw up your actual life because you are only living vicariously… that’s not going to end well.
Redshirt
What’s in it for Snowe and Collins to stay with the Repub party line? Neither is frankly threatened at all by any challengers, and the wingnuts could try and crazy them in a primary, but I highly doubt it.
People in Maine want healthcare reform. Period. I assure you they do not want their Senators to merely follow party line because that’s what the Southerners want. So, why wouldn’t Snowe and/or Collins play ball with Obama? He’s popular in Maine.
Zach
Anyone else catch Betsy McCaughy on The Daily Show last night talking death panels? Was ready for one of Stewart’s somewhat-unenlightened-but-still-entertaining teardowns except there was nothing to tear down. She was all about winking at the camera and trying to win via starbursts. That and knowingly lying through her teeth about provisions of the bill – http://alchemytoday.com/2009/08/21/betsy-mccaugheys-big-lie/
Comrade Dread
I think the percentage of truly wealthy people is still quite small.
Most of the millionaires of the last 10 years especially are millionaires on paper only. They don’t truly own anything and are in debt or illiquid to the point where when calamity strikes everything they’ve build up on that sandy foundation comes crashing down.
We should, if we were sane, start teaching more about finances in schools and make sure our kids understand the difference between true wealth and paper wealth.
Of course, given that this would probably cut into the bank’s profits too much, I don’t see that happening.
Cat Lady
@tripletee:
The shift in the debate since last weekend with the one mention of the public option by Obama has been remarkable. It reminds me of his toss off comment about Republicans listening to Rush. How much pearl clutching was there from the left about how he shouldn’t have mentioned Rush, and look how that worked out. It wouldn’t surprise me at all to find out that his comment was deliberate to get the reform supporters to finally come out of the blocks. He has said that he would prefer to be made to do things, and not be unilateral.
R-Jud
@Brachiator:
Here is my very limited expat understanding of the game:
In cricket, you have a team batting and a team fielding. You score runs (by running between two wickets instead of around four bases, or by getting the ball to certain parts of the field without being caught) when you’re batting. You try to get the other side out when you’re fielding (all eleven of them, not just three) by knocking down the wicket behind them, or catching a fly ball, and about eight million other infractions. So far, so familiar.
The scores get ridiculously high because it’s easier to run between wickets than around bases, and there are also rules that award four or six runs for, say, hitting your ball clean out of the boundary without a bounce.
Obviously it is a lot more complicated than that, since it’s a 250 year old game. For more nuance, the BBC has some useful pages about it.
I’ll send you an invoice.
Just Some Fuckhead
@Joshua:
I caught an episode of this too and I was pretty shocked at how tacky it was. Add to that the fact that Joan Rivers could be the most hideous person on earth and it’s sure to be a hit. The only occasionally redeeming thing about the show is Joan’s sometimes brilliant quick wit but even that wasn’t enough to keep her husband here among the living.
Bad Horse's Filly
@asiangrrlMN: What you said. That thread is about the only thing that got me through the day.
Martin
But that’s their decision to have it that way. If they are millionaires on paper only, then they have the means to convert that to cash, but have chosen against it. It might come at a penalty or eliminate their ability to grow their wealth, but the mere fact that they can value their assets means that there is a market for the asset at that price.
I was a millionaire for about a year when the price of my house topped out, but it’s lost about half the value. So what? I had the chance to sell at the top and I didn’t take it. That’s my fault. Nobody should feel bad for me being stupid or choosing the way I did.
Brachiator
@R-Jud:
See, this is where it starts to get strange to me.
The rules of the game, Mornington Crescent, make more sense.
I tried these once. Made my head hurt. For example,
Actually, the BBC site link is quite good.
liberal
@Zifnab:
LOL! The POS disappeared my VNC client this morning.
Shawn in ShowMe
Why not? Looks like a pretty accurate description of what he’s been doing to his opponents the last 18 months.
liberal
@Zifnab:
Nonsense. They made a lot of money off economic rent from a natural resource named “oil.”
The problem isn’t people making 8-12% annually from actual investments of capital. The problem rather is people getting rich off of economic rents, whether monopoly rents or natural resource rents.
And rent collection is indeed how most people get “rich,” where “rich” is not a doc making a few thou a year but way north of that.
R-Jud
@Brachiator:
Like so many other aspects of British life (morris dancing? baked beans on toast?), cricket makes more sense when one is drunk.
liberal
@tripletee:
I’m not going to carry any water for Church Lady; I just called (her?) an idiot in another thread.
However, talking about marginal rates alone is pretty meaningless without talking about the tax base, viz, the definition of income. For example, if you exclude “capital gains” from “income”…
Furthermore, it’s not at all clear that the truly rich really pay that much income tax. AFAICT upper middle/lower upper class people pay most of it. The truly filthy rich seem to pay very little.
Not to mention that “rich” is defined by assets, not income.
bedtimeforbonzo
Krugman speaks for me when he says: “I don’t know if administration officials realize just how much damage they’ve done themselves with their kid-gloves treatment of the financial industry, just how badly the spectacle of government supported institutions paying giant bonuses is playing.”
I lost faith in President Obama’s ability to reform anything when, instead of reforming the banking and investment industries, instead of getting tough with Wall Street, he played footsy with the likes of Goldman and AIG.
The Obama administration continues to preside over the death of the middle class that began under Bush and has no understanding of how many of us are living paycheck to paycheck and paying the mortgage late every month (thankful that we can pay it all).
Meanwhile, the stock market continues to rebound. I do not understand the disconnect.
Just Some Fuckhead
@R-Jud: I think it all flows from talking with a prissy accent. Nothing good can come from that.
scav
ah, cricket. Imagine a grand man with a fine Scouse accent trying to explain using silverware on a linen tablecloth where a silly man off was to a 14-year-old me. I fear I disgraced the atmosphere.
Brachiator
@Just Some Fuckhead:
Ain’t got nuthin’ on the Bradley-Martin Ball, from the Gilded Age:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bradley-Martin_Ball
Good times.
arguingwithsignposts
worth noting that McAfee responded in the comments.
bedtimeforbonzo
Fuck Exxon.
SGEW
@arguingwithsignposts: Ok, that was pretty classy.
A Ghost To Most
@R-Jud:
After spending one whole tedious day in Sydney watching a cricket match, with an Ozzie trying to explain all the rules to me, I can only conclude: it is the British Empire version of Calvinball.
Punchy
Really, you dont understand? If I win $100million, there’s ZERO percent chance I lose it if I stick into a checking account (or enough of them). Very little I lose anything if I stay in gov’t bonds, as well. But those have very little upside, very little pizzaz, and are boring. But I cannot lose 96 million fucking dollars if I’m in T-bills or gold or in a Swiss bank.
The only way to lose that much scratch is to risk it. I understand that some of that 100 mill was not liquid, and when his company sucked, he lost worth that way. But not 96% of his value. He invested in shit that clearly had a downside–becuase of greed–and got burned.
Bag of Hammers
Also, Michelle Bachmann continues to be dumber than a bag of hammers. Also.
Oh go fuck off.
ericblair
Getting back to Poor Little Almost Ex-Rich Boy and the attendant handwringing about the super-rich getting pantsed and its effect on the rest of the economy, here. I don’t think it’s much of a coincidence that a few years after wealth in the US started to get seriously concentrated in the hands of a small minority, we got bubble after bubble and crash after crash.
Since the uber-rich didn’t have to spend a lot of this money, it started to build up in investments, and the rich started chasing returns. Besides taking tech companies public that never made a dime of profit, Wall Street needed to construct a lot of new investment vehicles for them to buy so they didn’t need to pile into boring Treasuries, so out come the CDOs, CDSs, and other increasingly abstract and poorly-understood securities. Add a pile of system-gaming, herd behavior, and greed-fueled optimism, and you get the greatest misallocation of capital in the history of the country. If concentrating the wealth in a few hands was an economic and social experiment (trickle-down economics), it failed. Time to shut it down.
Chad N Freude
Rather late to this party, but …
I, too, think it mischaracterizes the article to imply that it’s sympathetic to the tribulations of the obscenely rich. It’s reasonably analytic and discusses possible social effects of loss of wealth by the wealthy. I do, however, think the presentation of poor McAfee’s plight is more sympathetic than it needs to be to get the point across and is more positive than he deserves. It’s
hardimpossible to feel any sympathy for this financial genius who mismanaged his assets so badly.Dogbert's Tech Support
@Brachiator: If possible, I recommend watching “Lagaan” in the company of a Brit or Aussie and having them explain as the climactic cricket match is played. The movie (unlike an actual cricket match) is terrifically entertaining and the match moves slowly enough that there’s plenty of time for discussion of the rules, but not so slowly that you start thinking that methodically slamming a cricket bat against your shins for six hours would be more entertaining by comparison (again, unlike an actual cricket match).
Colette
@Brachiator: If possible, I recommend that you watch “Lagaan” in the company of a Brit or Aussie and having them explain as the climactic cricket match is played. The movie (unlike an actual cricket match) is terrifically entertaining and the match moves slowly enough that there’s plenty of time for discussion of the rules, but not so slowly that you start thinking that methodically slamming a cricket bat against your shins for six hours would be more entertaining by comparison (again, unlike an actual cricket match).
Colette
Fracking lacking edit button. Also, alas, my secret identity has been revealed!
Chad N Freude
@arguingwithsignposts:
OK, I’ll amend my comment above. At least he claims to have become socially and financially enlightened. Classic redemption movie material.
Legalize
Gibbs confirming that Barack is willing to be a one-termer to get things done:
http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/livewire/2009/08/gibbs-obama-willing-to-be-one-term-president-to-get-health-care-important-things-done.php?ref=fpblg
shelley matheis
Demo Woman
@arguingwithsignposts: Thanks for linking to this. Did you buy his I’m really not a bad person post?
Cain
Has anybody heard of the “Cook Report”? They have an analysis that shows that Dems have lost control of the political atmosphere and that tehy are heading for losses in 2010. I’m very frustrated by this analysis. I can’t believe these guys have fucked it up by being so careful.
Cook Report from TPM
cain
Just Some Fuckhead
Cook Report = Republican Propaganda
bellatrys
My fury with this sort of thing is that every single rich person, and most every middle-class person, has gotten that way by exploiting people like me who do the work for them at below living wages, with no health ins or junk ins., and getting discarded like trash the minute the economy goes south so that they can keep on with their house payments and Aruba vacations and private schools for their kids and new SUVs and Harleys and so on.
Doesn’t matter if they’re conservatives or liberals or libertarians, all small business owners I have ever worked for have been exploitative predators calling themselves “self-made” when it’s come from gouging those of us who cannot get out from under. (Same experience of everyone I know, too.) Ditto the doctors and architects and so forth who don’t ever think how their profits stay so high based on cheap labour – which has to stay cheap somehow! I’m not even going into the ones who have argued to my face that women deserve to be paid less for the same work, ‘cause that’s what Jesus would do. (Srsly.)
Yeah, I came to understand why the bourgeoisie goes up against the wall with the aristos (and the clergy!) after working customer service for just a couple years… the boss may charge $60 an hour for my work but I only see < 10 of it AND I have to eat shit with a smile, too. But that’s capitalism for you, as well as Feudalism. Aux barricades, citoyennes!
In short, capitalism depends on there being a permanent, and large, underclass kept in near-poverty as well as a group in dire poverty pour encourages les autres to keep our heads down and not demand any more, and this is not a bug but a feature, the system is not broke this is the system, and this is not wild conspiracy but what I long ago to my shock heard respected economists admitting on NPR Marketplace when they explained why low unemployment was “bad for the economy”…
It’s a mug’s game, and the handful of little turtles held up to us as proof that it’s possible to succeed if you just work hard™ American Dream Land of Opportunity blah blah blah don’t prove a thing except that someone wins the lottery, sure…
Working for Republicans started to turn me into a flaming liberal, and working for a liberal-tarian media outlet whose owner laughed at me and those like me before our faces for being “really f~cking poor” completed the job.
Brachiator
@shelley matheis:
RE: Eight hundred socialites spent about $400,000 imitating kings and queens. Mrs. Bradley-Martin’s
Hah! You’re right. The party crashers were high society freeloaders.
By the way, the 400 grand spent on the party in 1897 would be roughly equivalent to about $10,700,000 in 2008 dollars. It would also be roughly equal to about $51 million when compared to the wage value of unskilled labor.
Good times.
Seanly
@Crusty Dem:
EPIC WIN.
Eric U.
I gotta say I feel somewhat sorry for the guy. He might actually have to work for a living, which must be a bit of a shock. I hate to admit that I always had suspicions that these companies actually paid for some of the virus development back before people figured out how to make money off of malware.
Tongue of Groucho Marx
@62:
That show featured the guy who created Billy-Bob teeth, and he was worth about $330 million. To ‘relieve stress’, what he does is buy $4000 clunkers, and crush them with a tractor.
Of course, I’m going to be branded as a Communist who hates imperatives for people to succeed when I suggest that people with his amount of wealth ought to be taxed more. Never mind the fact that this guy only got rich because of the government-run U.S. Patent Office.
@91: It’s kind of funny how sincere he sounds in the first four paragraphs, then turns around and says that he’s not remotely disturbed by any of his losses.
@32: My university (the University of Tennessee, Knoxville) requires that we have McAfee in order to access the Internet. The piece of shit keeps turning its features off on its own. I had TWO hard drive crashes within the last year, and I can’t help but suspect that something got through McAfee.
@102: I’m going to have to stick with Greenwald on this one. Obama seems to be more interested in letting the apple cart be corroded by nature than he does in investing in repairmen to fix it.
You can’t call it ‘political astuteness’ when about the ONLY thing he’s done to upset the apple cart is to pass a stimulus. And I have a hunch that McCain could be pressured to pass one, albeit a shittier one, since the stimulus was supported by a large amount of economists. While I do think he’ll get somewhere on wind energy (considering that General Electric is a huge Obama supporter), that’ll be about it.
Libertini
@shelley matheis: Snarky, yes, but your logic is off. The “400” is families (with male heads of household) – hence total attendance is 800 when spouses are included.
Face
@Cain: who cares? We have Dems control the House/Sen/WH, we get nothing of substance legislatively. We get the Repubs to own the House, we get nothing of substance from Congress.
So what’s the difference? I’m serious.
Cain
@Face:
@Cain: who cares? We have Dems control the House/Sen/WH, we get nothing of substance legislatively. We get the Repubs to own the House, we get nothing of substance from Congress.
True enough, but at least we have some chance. I mean what kind of bill do you think we would have if Republicans in charge? I mean they wouldn’t even touch health care, they’d be off looking to see if they can gin up another war on something. So at least we’d have status quo.
cain
Robertdsc-iphone
Memo to the President:
Your emo whining about one term is ridiculously unbecoming. Stop it. Show some spine and forcefully reject the obstructionists.
David Hunt
Time for the cookie gathering post
HyperIon
@jwb: Cue the tiny violins and all that. Sometimes, especially after reading articles like this, I wish the NY Times and WaPo would just up and die already.
Don’t worry; be happy. They are in the process of dying right before your eyes.
arguingwithsignposts
@Demo Woman:
I can’t judge his heart, honestly, but I do think it was a classy move of him to accept some responsibility and respond in the comments. Hell, that’s one of the few articles I’ve actually seen comments on for the times. must be a new thing.
HyperIon
@Scruffy McSnufflepuss: YES! I will cry no tears for the guy responsible for that piece of crap.
Brachiator
@Chad N Freude:
I noted before how the article elicited odd variations of fantasy conventional wisdom about wealth and the wealthy. I found one comment at the NY Times site similar to a sentiment that I’ve heard many times.
When I see this kind of thing, I don’t know if people are supposed to work until they’ve earned $5 million and then stop or (more likely) that people should work as hard as they want, but expect the government to take every dollar in excess of $5 million and use it for some supposedly worthy purpose.
The full comment and others can be found here:
http://community.nytimes.com/comments/www.nytimes.com/2009/08/21/business/economy/21inequality.html?sort=editors-selection
While some of McAfee’s losses may be related to mismanagement of his finances, a portion of his wealth was lost because of the financial markets mess.
Again, it’s interesting to note the attitude that at some level of wealth, people are “supposed to” be able to maintain it.
In an odd way, this is the flip side to the sentiment expressed by Rush Limbaugh and others that if a person is poor in free market America, he or she is a failure or a loser.
HyperIon
@Just Some Fuckhead: (and Joshua) Recall that lush Hollywood musicals and dramas about people with loads of money were the rage during the depression. It was considered escapism. It seems like the same thing now. Is it more tacky than “Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous”? (I’m doing basic cable now and so am mired in public access and CSPAN programming now. Strangely I don’t miss the incessant L&O re-runs. But I do like paying $14 a month for cable.)
HyperIon
@arguingwithsignposts: Thanks for linking. I read some comments this am but did not see his. I agreed with this:
But we have over time equated entrepreneurism with the drive to accumulate wealth, which is a perversion of this spirit.
freelancer
Currenly valued at 4 million, all this guy has to do is lose 3.97 million, and the Wall Street Journal will be bitching about how much of a Lucky Ducky he is.
In other news, I took the day off to pick up my friend Sharon from the Airport. She’s coming into town for a wedding over the weekend. Due to an airline catastrofuck, she is being bounced around the American West like a pinball.
Portland to Boise to Vegas (currently here) to Chicago to Omaha.
Most wasted day off ever.
I think I’ll clean up and go do something that doesn’t reinforce this notion that we’re completely fucked as a species and we are not going to make it.
HyperIon
@arguingwithsignposts: The Times has comments on many articles and columns. But not all, which I don’t understand. I have pretty much given up reading WaPo comments–lots of snark and name-calling. The NYT comments are much better these days IMO.
Brachiator
@Punchy:
OK. You put your $100 million in the bank. Maybe you spread it to a few banks, but not so many that you forget where you’ve stashed it. All your banks fail as a result of the financial meltdown.
The FDIC sends you your insured savings of $250,000 (or small multiple based on how you spread it out) including a card saying “So sorry. Have a nice day.”
Yeah, you could roll it all into a 1 yr T bill earning .48%, and while the $480,000 you earn is actually pretty good, you also settle for having inflation eat away at the real value of your stash.
And even Swiss banks are not always what they are cracked up to be.
But I got the message: the rich deserve our scorn if they don’t automatically settle for the most conservative investment strategy after they get their big ol’ pile of money.
arguingwithsignposts
@HyperIon:
I agree about the quality of comments at NYT vs. WaPo, although, like I said, I’ve only ever seen them on blogs before. The Times also has someone pre-screen their comments, which may explain the higher level of discussion.
And I should also say that both WaPo and NYT are light-years above the comments at ESPN.
Tattoosydney
@Brachiator:
@R-Jud:
“I would pay good money to anyone who could explain cricket to me.”
Cricket is an excuse to sit and drink for seven hours a day for three days with your friends, with no reason to do anything other than drink for seven hours a day for three days, because the game is carefully designed so that NOTHING EVER HAPPENS that might distract you from your drinking.
That is all.
SiubhanDuinne
The great Anna Russell (I’m doing this from memory so it may be a little bit off for you purists):
We are the Great Four Hundred
If you want to know who we are.
We put on airs
‘Cause our forefathairs
Came over on the Mayflower.
And it’s very very snappy
When your mammy and your pappy
Are descended from the Mayflower.
We are in the Social Register.
All lower-class types we shun.
And to keep our niche
We must stay very rich
Or we’ll be thrown out when we’ve none.
And it’s very very funny
When you’ve lots and lots of money
To be horrible to those with none,
To be hor-ri-ble to those with NONE.
Kilkee
@Redshirt: Re Snowe and Collins. As a Mainer, I can tell you that they are both (somewhat mysteriously, to me) virtually unbeatable here. That said, if and when the count comes down to the wire, and the press begins the ‘it all depends on Snowe and Collins’ line, they must fall in line to support HCR. There are lots of libs and poor folk in Maine (and not as much overlap between ’em as some would think), and they want HRC, and now. It would be a tough sell for either to stand in the way insisting that there was something not quite right about whatever proposal was being voted on.