Wall Street has responded — predictably, I suppose — by whining and throwing temper tantrums. And it has, in a way, been funny to see how childish and thin-skinned the Masters of the Universe turn out to be.
This is the thing I understand the least: why today’s elites care so much about what we moochers and looters say about them. Atrios put it well:
Someone please hand a copy of Atlas Shrugged to Our Galtian Overlords and try to explain to them that John Galt was Homo Superior in part because John Galt didn’t give a shit what the lesser mortals thought of him as long as they compensated him appropriately for his genius. John Galt’s feefees didn’t get hurt when people said mean things about him. True Galtian Overlords don’t care!
Xenos
I think the would-be galtians are aware that they are still, occasionally, at the mercy of the political power of the masses. They want to make sure that nobody respectable can organize opposition to them.
Of course, that will leave the not-so respectable taking the lead, like in Montreal where the new laws are empowering the more radical movements on the streets.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
__
Well duh. Because just saying mean things about them is only a prelude. What follows next is us actually doing something about this rotten situation, like putting handcuffs on them so they can’t loot as they please any more. You don’t have to be a rocket surgeon to figure this out. Any kid who has watched the movie A Bug’s Life knows that when you are the Grasshopper Gang you can’t let the Ants start to get ideas, because things get out of hand pretty quickly after that.
Nom de Plume
There is a certain personality type that craves validation. It’s not enough for them to have everything, they must also be the object of envy and admiration from everyone else for having everything. I don’t understand it, myself.
c u n d gulag
Who knew these manly-man “Masters of the Universe” had ego’s as fragile as china dolls, or eggshells?
“Man-up, Boys!” (And it IS mostly boys).
Rockefeller didn’t whimper.
J. P. Morgan didn’t sulk.
Carnegie didn’t cry.
Astor didn’t faint.
They stuck it to people and didn’t give a feckin’ shite!
I prefer my financial Supervillian’s to go “BWA-HA-HA!”, not “Boo-hoo-hoo…”
shortstop
Because they subscribe to the notion that (to a large extent) hierarchy and (to a total extent) plutocracy are the natural social order. Because they think “authoritarian” is a positive descriptor. Because they do not accept that lesser beings should have the right to publicly criticize their superordinates. Because they are control freaks.
Chris
That’s why John Galt is a cardboard character rather than a real one. Given her dedication to nerd revenge porn, I suspect Ayn Rand, on the other hand, cared immensely what other people thought of her.
Just Some Fuckhead
These are the same babies that were afraid to jump when the 2008 crash happened.
Hunter Gathers
OT – In a sane world, this would be the end of Romney’s political career. Birtherism has now evolved into He Said, She Said. This planet is fucking doomed.
trollhattan
@shortstop:
After you have your first billion, then it becomes equally important to gain power as it is to get that second billion. And since strike-busting isn’t the fun full-contact, head-cracking, shotgunning exercise of power it once was, you’re left with controlling what the proles think and say.
Violet
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Exactly. They fool themselves most of the time into thinking that they’re better than the proles, but at some level they know they’re where they are because the majority lets them. If the little people start getting ideas, the whole house of cards might come tumbling down.
the fugitive uterus
this is from an old post, just want to clarify that this was supposed to be snark cuz apparently some peeps don’t get my jokes (story of my life) and must think i am a right-wing b*tch or something. carry on.
(i maybe that “hairy-armpitTED” might be the giveaway but guess not)
JR
Be the Honey Badger, not the Snake.
butler
As Monty Burns once asked: “What good is money if you can’t inspire terror in your fellow man?”
Being rich is all well and good, but being rich and exalted is even better. After all, if those proles don’t worship you for your money making prowess then how will you know how special you are?
Or put another way: if you’re job involves fucking people over for money, then it probably helps you sleep at night to think that you’re actually doing overall good for society. Without job creators like you everyone else would be doomed, right?
Schlemizel
While they may be ignorant, obtuse and dense our masters are not stupid. They know that if people are allowed to make fun of them, demean them and point out that they are obviously wearing no cloths the obvious truth of the matter will be so plain that the morans panting to lick their boots in hope of catching some crumbs will see it.
If that happens the trade in guillotines will be quite brisk.
Our masters know this.
gaz
@Schlemizel: This.
srv
It’s like our new overlords are the spawn of Ayn Rand and Doug Whiner (Joe Piscopo on SNL)
SNL should bring the The Whiners back.
Sly
“This disposition to admire, and almost to worship, the rich and the powerful, and to despise, or, at least, to neglect persons of poor and mean condition, though necessary both to establish and to maintain the distinction of ranks and the order of society, is, at the same time, the great and most universal cause of the corruption of our moral sentiments. That wealth and greatness are often regarded with the respect and admiration which are due only to wisdom and virtue; and that the contempt, of which vice and folly are the only proper objects, is often most unjustly bestowed upon poverty and weakness, has been the complaint of moralists in all ages.”
Some fucking Communist wrote that.
“Moochers” and “Looters” set tax policy. If you can’t convince them to set tax policy at levels favorable to you through the capricious application of pointy objects, then the only recourse is to corrupt their ethical intuitions to such an extent that they would protect your privilege at the expense of their own happiness. If people start saying mean things about you, its a sign that your project to co-opt their moral reasoning is not performing at peak efficiency.
Chris
@Sly:
Adam Smith, I presume?
david mizner
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
Yeah, this, but I also think it’s because the banksters regard themselves not as the assholes they are but as heroes. They don’t just want billions, they want love. This is from a good Atlantic piece on the super-rich:
CVS
This is the thing I understand the least: why today’s elites care so much about what we moochers and looters say about them.
Because they are sad, tiny little people who have giant, gaping holes in their souls that only the total adulation of the weeping masses can fill. It’s not something that any amount of money can fill. It requires complete acknowledgement of their superiority, even between themselves.
Davis X. Machina
@Chris:
That, ladies and gentlemen, is a sentence. Count the antitheses! Marvel at the chiastic word order! Wallow in the parallelisms!
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@butler:
__
It doesn’t help that these folks in global finance live in an almost completely virtualized world. There is in many cases nothing in the physical world they can point to and say with pride “I built that” in the way that say an Andrew Carnegie could. Never mind that Andrew Carnegie was lying when he said stuff like that, because he didn’t actually build that factory with his own hands, his employees did. Today’s MOTU don’t even have that. They don’t even have good lies to point to as a positive legacy. All they have is words and a bunch of bits in a database somewhere. So of course they want people to speak nicely of them. It’s all they’ve got that they can leave behind.
butler
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: So true.
Citizen_X
It also has a real financial motivation. If the peons view Wall Street with contempt, they might start to realize, “Hey, the stock market is too risky an investment for people who’s retirement funds are as marginal as ours are. Let’s look for safer places to put our money” And then, boom! There goes a trillion dollars in suckers’ capital for the elites to play with.
beltane
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: It’s not as thought they’d ever sponsor great works of art or gladiatorial contests or anything like that. These people have the wealth and power of aristocrats but the dull, joyless mindset of the petit bourgeoisie. Even their dwellings are just over-sized versions of typical suburban tract houses.
Reklam
Status.
Money buys status; but only in relation to peers and with diminishing returns as it is only a proxy.
It is just less fun for them when driving a Ferrari if hoi polloi don’t ‘appreciate’ how they look driving it.
Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water
@Davis X. Machina: christ, no wonder I could never get through that pile of crap
Marcellus Shale, Public Dick
working the refs.
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@beltane:
__
Dear God yes. What a
BraveCowardly New World, that has such people in it.__
__
Having an amateur interest in architecture, it makes me weep thinking of how little we are leaving in the legacy of future generations. Our great grandchildren will curse us, asking, “you fucked up the climate of the entire planet and for what? For this? Yougottabefuckingkiddingme !?!”
4tehlulz
Mitt Romney = Birther Trash
MikeJ
@Hewer of Wood, Drawer of Water: Really? I quite liked Smith. He was exactly right and said it with style.
Citizen_X
@beltane:
Yeebus. Don’t give them any ideas. I’m sure at least a couple have been saying lately, “You know, Flauntworth, I’m starting to think this ‘Hunger Games’ thing is something we should look into. I’ll bet we can get the rubes to go for it. We’ll call it ‘Survivor Extreme!'”
Chris
@Citizen_X:
That line from the woman at the beginning, when Katniss volunteers for tribute – “Wow! I’ll bet that was your sister, wasn’t it? Of course it was! So much competitive spirit!” – sounds like it was made for Mitt Romney’s mouth.
beltane
@Citizen_X: OK, let’s just replace “gladiatorial games” with “public entertainments”. Even John Gotti used to put on a huge fireworks display for his neighborhood every July 4th. In this way the banksters are inferior even to the gangsters.
El Cid
Why were British and French colonial officers so obsessed with a proper degree of deference from their African subjects, including a continual monitoring of what they said or printed about the glories brought to them by their conquering heroes?
Because the entirety of the colonial structure was built around having lots of its leaders believing that they were glorious superiors bringing as much civilization as they could to these poor savages, whom without their assistance would be failing to use all their wonderful natural resources and would be rioting and killing each other and generally getting in the way of imperial business.
Why were the strictest rules of segregation so often built around the tiniest behavioral control of manners and public custom?
Because the symbolic is dangerous.
Sure, you’ve got the resources and the power, but it’s too risky to just rely upon that all the time; these ingrates have to appreciate and enunciate your superiority, otherwise who knows what lack of respect or even genuine threat you may soon face?
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@El Cid:
__
Well that, and that in many cases the European colonial powers got in charge in the first place by buying off local elites and/or playing them against each other, and were really thinly spread in terms of boots on the ground. The British administration of the Raj in India contained about as many actual English people as would be required to administer the population of say Wales, on a good day. Co-opted natives did the rest. You need a really impressive and compelling ideology of natural and unquestionable superiority in order to pull off something like that.
Alexandra
Christine Lagarde, managing director of the IMF, shows her inner Galt:
The Guardian
Villago Delenda Est
@Hunter Gathers:
From TPM: “I believe the president was born in the United States,” Romney told Kudlow. “The man needs to be taken out of office, but his citizenship isn’t the reason why.”
Note the weasel word “believe” in that sentence.
Rmoney has to give the birfers hope.
El Cid
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: No doubt, and in particular the British generally preferred when possible to follow the Lord Lugard model which is the exemplification of ruling by local proxy.
The French went so far as to legally integrate the locals as part of the French nation, even offering citizenship in varying degrees.
But no matter the ruling style, the insistence upon cultural obeisance both in formal policy and in one’s general outlook are only occasionally deviated from.
(The buying off of local elites, though, was nearly always in combination with regular interventions of massive violence.)
But I’m thinking a bit more about the colonial officers (and their similarly positioned peers in the church, or education) who were personally insistent upon the appreciation of what they offered.
At least in these cases, unlike the Wall Street example, the colonial European elites could always see themselves as having temporarily forsaken the civilization of their home country for the onerous task of living amongst the savages, no matter how much they enjoyed their varying degrees of ‘going native’.
beltane
@Alexandra: Is it true that as managing director of the IMF Christine Lagarde’s income, all $400,000 of it, is tax exempt?
gaz
@MikeJ: This. Aside from Jesus, I don’t know of too many historical figures who were so maligned by there most ardent fans.
Anyone who exalts Adam Smith should be forced to read him. (Same goes for Jesus)
Forum Transmitted Disease
What is the use of being a God among men if you are not worshiped?
I totally get it.
Calouste
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
At least with Carnegie, Rockefeller et al., the proles got some bridges and railroads and other infrastructure out of the deal. With the current MotU, the proles get nothing.
Villago Delenda Est
@gaz:
They might read the words, but they won’t grok the meaning.
As I’ve pointed out before, it’s ridiculously easy to troll glibertarian/objectivist types with passages from The Weatlh of Nations.
gaz
@Calouste: Don’t forget the libraries =)
gaz
@Villago Delenda Est: That’s why I like challenging them on The Theory of Moral Sentiments ;)
Stuck in the Funhouse
Just ran across an interesting article at TNR, that at first thought would be dlc whining about Obama’s populist rhetoric of anti Wall Street and anti private equity. But the author made an incisive point as to the Obama strategy, juxtaposed against the Romney campaign strategy.
I think this is true, and likely what some of the business friendly wing of the dem party is butthurt about. But Obama is in it to win, and so should they be, and maybe need to look under the hood of Obama strategy to get a fuller perspective of what he is trying to do.
So it is a kind of triangulation with the corpse of Herbert Hoover, or at least with the country’s mindset being similar today as back then, with our biggie sized economic problems widely perceived as caused by big business run amuck.
With an intersection of candidate Romney using his big business creds as the center piece of his election effort. Seemingly making Obama’s case in real time, in hopes of catalyzing the public’s mistrust of business right now, in general.
This isn’t really 11 dimensional chess, but it is a good game of Rovian two step, attacking your opponents strongest points, and letting them define themselves toward your critique.
I don’t think something like this would work in any other environment than like the one we are in right now. If we could just get all the dem cats herded enough to shut their yappers long enough about Obama hating business.
My big navel gaze for today.
gaz
@Stuck in the Funhouse: Apparently, what we really need is another World War.
God I wish this was snark =)
pseudonymous in nc
@Davis X. Machina:
Heh. Cicero ain’t a compact sedan.
IrishGirl
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ: Exactly and once us ants start to get angry the Galtians will no longer have us to pick on. So it matters to them that we are happy, ignorant and believe in their supposedly inherent goodness.
Stuck in the Funhouse
Jeebus, the wingnuts are going total apeshit over this Kimberlin person, more so than about any other time or topic, seems to me. And none of it based on anything the guy has recently done, other than file a harassment lawsuit, and citing his criminal past some thirty years ago. very weird, even for them. You’d think Hannibal Lector was stalking them.
Tonal Crow
It’s high time the liars who keep threatening to “Go Galt” actually up and did it.
America would be far better off with moderate capitalists. You remember those, right? The people who made good products, sold them at fair prices, and treated their employees and communities well? And told investors to expect reasonable returns, not get-rich-next-quarter windfalls?
Whatever happened those those moderate, dare I say “centrist”, capitalists?
That would be “centrism” I could believe in. Hey Bobo, you agree, right? Right?
Villago Delenda Est
@Stuck in the Funhouse:
See the thread a few posts down about “SWATting” in which fascist shitstain Patterico claims that some leftist tricked the LAPD SWAT team into traumatizing his family. Before the blessed event of the death of Breitbart, he was making hay about how wingtard bloggers were being “intimidated” by “SWATting” incidents and death threats.
None of these vile sacks of shit have been able to support any of these idiotic claims.
Alex
How can they even begin to complain about some factual discussion about greed and private equity, when the President has been called a socialist, a fascist, a Muslim, etc. for 3 years now? aw, somebody hurt their feefees
Stuck in the Funhouse
@Villago Delenda Est:
Yea, I been reading bunches of right wing accounts of things like the Swatting, but none of them offer any evidence of even having contact with the guy, except for the lawsuit, and are frothing into some kind of maniacal rage of liberal boogymen massing to do something to them, whatever. And all cause some guy did, or is doing something to some of them, without evidence or even explanation what that is to cause such a reaction.
It doesn’t make any sense at all, and seems like some kind of cathartic raging against invisible enemies, of liberal hordes massing in the hinterlands to come after them, that I don’t think I’ve seen to such a level blog swarm twisted hate crazy before.
Truly amazing, to me.
mclaren
But in the book, John Galt had a perpetual motion machine. That makes a difference.
the fugitive uterus
if you can’t fix what you fucked up like nothing has been fucked before, pick up your designer bags and get the fuck out of America and stay the fuck out, just to stop your sorry asses from doing more damage. you can’t even have the basic decency to be grateful to the American people and the current administration that your collective asses are not in jail.
the fugitive uterus
@Stuck in the Funhouse: what i want to know, but don’t care enough to look up, is where is the police report, dispatch report, something. he says he filed something with the FBI, wouldn’t he have attached that to the filing? wouldn’t they have requested it?
Stuck in the Funhouse
@the fugitive uterus:
Well, yea, the guy had a fifty year sentence, and is still on parole, so why aren’t the cops looking for him, and if they are, why don’t the wingnuts say so and make available some shred of evidence of what they are claiming. If it is true, and I am increasingly thinking it isn’t true, then the guy needs locking up.
But everything I am reading from the righty blogs, is becoming less and less about Kimberlin, and more and more about evil liberty sucking liberals in general, and Obama in particular, screwing up, in their pea brains, the real America, or some such shit.
It is starting to sound like some kind of staged rage fest into creating some kind of dangerous reality, they need to go to war to stop. That has little to whatever threat this Kimberlin guy poses. Fascinating phenom and very creepy.
the fugitive uterus
i’m just guessing Romney would be one of those people who’d swat somebody, that would be a real gas for somebody like Mitt
the fugitive uterus
@Stuck in the Funhouse: people really shouldn’t make this into a shitstorm without at least expecting some evidence to back it up, right now it’s just hearsay as far as i am aware. i’ll take that back if a report or witness turns up.
SiubhanDuinne
@the fugitive uterus:
Your nymhandle isn’t enough of a clue??
SiubhanDuinne
@ThatLeftTurnInABQ:
180 degrees O/T, but having just been in Albuquerque (and said so on the Book of Faces), I finally FINALLY understand your nymhandle!! Several FB friends sent me a collection of appropriate Bugs Bunny clips! So, as the kids say these days, LOL and ROFL and LMAO!
SiubhanDuinne
@Citizen_X:
Flauntworth.. Heh.
SiubhanDuinne
@El Cid:
Now though you’d have said that head was dead
(For its owner dead was he),
It stood on its neck, with a smile well-bred,
And bowed three times to me!
It was none of your impudent off-hand nods,
But as humble as could be;
For it clearly knew
The deference due
To a man of pedigree,
Of pedigree!
And it’s oh, I vow,
This deathly bow
Was a touching sight to see;
Though trunkless, yet
It couldn’t forget
The deference due to me!
SiubhanDuinne
(I seem to be alone in this thread.)
ThatLeftTurnInABQ
@SiubhanDuinne:
__
Thanks. It’s nice when somebody appreciates the joke I’m making by mixing geography, a reference to my leftward political drift over time, and a classic cartoon reference all in the same handle.
asiangrrlMN
@Nom de Plume: Yeah, this. This kind of person (usually a narcissist) depends on others to parrot back at him how awesome he is, so when he doesn’t get the accolades he needs, he gets upset and angry. Why aren’t the mirrors working properly?!? They’re supposed to reflect the greatness that is me!
Unfortunately, my father is this type of personality so I understand it all too well.
ETA: At least my father has a social conscience. He would be appalled by the greed of the bankers.