And here is today’s biggest asshole (although I could probably write this every day about this jackass):
Unreal.
What is up with multimillionaire oligarchs who love to play dress up and pretend to “act” poor? Yet while the nation is currently focused on the embarrassing spectacle of “reality” show morons who make their living doing this kind of stuff, this smirking bastard is doing some real damage and has so far escaped notice.
His name is Peter Schiff.
Quick background: He amassed a huge fortune by moving/hiding wealthy people’s money overseas and naturally fancies himself a patriot. He funds his own radio show and his own personal channel he calls “Schiff TV”. Its so grating to watch because he actually thinks he’s very clever and I suppose really thinks he would somehow be a media personality if he wasn’t funding it himself. He is such a Burns/Peweterschmidt stereotype of the 1% he decided to literally represent the 1% at the OWS rally in New York two years ago. According to his wikipedia page, he credits his dad for his views on the economy… who by the way is currently serving a 13-year sentence for tax evasion in Federal prison.
So this idiot claimed on his show that Walmart is paying not only fair wages, but GOOD wages and the workers should be grateful. This even though more than half of their employees are paid below the Federal poverty level (with taxpayers being forced to subsidize Walmart’s greed through public assistance).
So Schiff pulled a John Stossel and decided to dress down and, along with his smirking wife, literally follow and harass shoppers right outside a Connecticut Walmart (I have no idea which one, but its probably either the one in Norwalk or Stratford since he works in Westport.) His spiel was that he was a Walmart employee/protester and told everyone they should donate 15% of whatever they paid at Walmart directly to him. He kept screaming “higher prices for higher wages” as the protester’s “motto”. When people said they were broke, he mocked them and said they just bought “all this stuff” and they didn’t care about the workers. He kept yelling “We are counting on you to pay higher prices!” When someone told him that they were poor workers who couldn’t afford to pay, he actually said “But the Walmart workers are more important!” Even when people tried to give what they could, he would get irate and demand 15% of their purchases!
In other words, he was a colossal ass and did it all on purpose.
This is the jackass who has been predicting hyperinflation for the past six years, driving Kthug insane.
Gravenstone
Queue him up for the guillotine. Then he won’t have to worry about someone, somewhere having more money than he does.
revrick
I think the word you were looking for is sociopath. There’s no difference between Peter Schiff and Charles Manson.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
Apparently someone doesn’t understand the difference between “wages” and “tips.”
Ben Franklin
Nothing has changed since the Greeks. When Plato noticed rich politicos stumping in poor districts while dressed down, he noted;
Your narcissism shows through every hole in your garments.
‘Nuff said.
Villago Delenda Est
The way you deal with assholes like this is to find a reason (shouldn’t be difficult) to toss them into prison.
Then conveniently forget them.
Chris
How is this the shoppers’ responsibility? They’re not the employers. They don’t set WalMarters’ wages.
Once again, a basic responsibility that comes with running a business – paying your employees for their work – has them trying to off-load it onto the public, because God forbid they should ever be responsible for anything.
Citizen_X
Please tell me these people get their asses kicked in the parking lot.
Omnes Omnibus
The question is answered later in the piece.
Ben Franklin
Cruise lines play the same tune…”please tip our cabin boys, waiter, busboys and dishwashers, because we can only afford to pay them $.97 per hour during their 90 hour work weeks.”
rikyrah
fuck this mofo.
Citizen_X
Wait, people actually gave them money for being poor Walmart employees? Isn’t that, uh, fucking fraud? Why is this idiot not in jail?
Gex
There’s some room between raising wages and raising prices that falls in the continued growing (and often record setting) revenues that would be interesting to explore. Notice how their vision of how the free market works is that they are guaranteed obscene profits while workers aren’t guaranteed food/housing/health care/education.
Scott S.
@Citizen_X: The prosecutor has already been bought.
cathyx
So is he implying that in order to pay the Walmart workers $15 per hour, the prices of all the items they sell must go up 15%?
Chris
@Gravenstone:
I’ve said this before, but the last five years have given me far, far more understanding of and sympathy for why things like the French Revolution or [insert revolution here] happen (actually, the backlash is usually put off until long after it would have been warranted). When the elites simply won’t stop because they have to have it all, people eventually hit the point of “fuck it, it can hardly get worse.”
max
ACK!
It’s the perfect editorial cartoon summation of this particular week!
max
[‘Mike Luckovich is on a roll, man.’]
Anya
I never support violence but I am willing to make an exception in his case.
GRANDPA john
@Citizen_X: My thought also, I’m surprised somebody didn’t stomp a mudhole in his ass.
Pen
@Chris: This cycle has happened many times throughout history and you’d think that guys like Schiff would notice.
burnspbesq
@Villago Delenda Est:
If there were reasons to throw this guy in jail, they would have been found some time ago. Nothing advances the career of an ambitious AUSA like hanging a big scalp on the office wall.
chopper
it would be great if this schmuck were to be actually poor for a good amount of time.
karen
Put him on an anthill naked in the hot sun. Cover him with maple syrup..Let the ants eat him to death.
Mike in NC
The number of Americans who believe there should be no such thing as a “minimum wage” is between 27% and 47%.
mainmata
Thank you for the Plato quote. This is a pathology you see all over the world. It is partly a desire to rub the working classes noses in the dirt while celebrating their narcissism but is also a prurient desire (deliberate choice of adjective) to participate in the lives of the proles. Sick, useless bastard.
Walker
Why do so many so-called Capitalists not understand how pricing power works?
geg6
I have dickheads on my FB from back in high school who sound just like this guy and who would do this in a second. There is no one on earth more despised by these people than the poor or working poor. Having grown up in a working/middle class community where almost everyone’s father either worked at a steel mill, was a tradesman or worked for an airline (and not pilots either), it’s quite striking to see.
Mnemosyne (iPhone)
@Citizen_X:
Didn’t you know? If you commit a crime to prove a wingnut point, it doesn’t count as a crime.
raven
This is the team jersey from the High n Mighty from about 1978.
Caliph Garrett
It’s so lonely when you don’t even know yourself. It’s so lonely.
Schlemizel
John, you can be happy now – the Stealers just got royally screwed by the refs
Joel
This kind of stuff is so transparently self-serving and boring, it’s amazing that it works anyone up at all.
Gravenstone
Someone do a safety check on Cole. The Steelers were just the receiving end of a very bizarre series of officiating. I don’t know whether the call was correct or not, but damn what a cluster.
Hungry Joe
This evil son of a bitch set off yet another round of empathy fail: Although, to me, someone who is already rich wanting to be richer and richer and richer is kind of weird, I at least understand what it’s like to want stuff. But to want other people to have nothing, to suffer? Millions of people you don’t even know? Can’t put myself in his mind … not that I’d want to spend much time in those nightmarish digs anyway.
Omnes Omnibus
@Gravenstone: Weird. But I’ll take the result.
Alison
@Anya: Seriously. The main reason I can’t really call myself a pacifist is because I’d be plenty happy to kick a dude like this in the balls. Hard. Repeatedly.
raven
@Gravenstone: And marched right down for the score!
Napoleon
@Citizen_X:
I wonder if someone like him convicted of any fraud, even unrelated to securities, would be stripped of his securities license?
SiubhanDuinne
@max:
On a roll? Guy is a fucking genius. One of the few things about living in Atlanta that makes me proud to be here.
GHayduke (formerly lojasmo)
@Gravenstone:
He just mentioned it on FB. He’s expecting a letter of apollogy.
PeakVT
Collective action problem alert.
Cassidy
Connecticut huh? Without looking him up, I’d have guessed Texan.
Chris
@Hungry Joe:
Word. I’m no psychologist, but words like “sociopath” and “psychopath” always come to mind when reading about this.
It also points to yet another case of “it’s always projection,” given how often they bitch about how we’re just “jealous” and “envious” of those rich people who’ve worked so hard and the finger-waggling advice that “you cannot lift up the poor by tearing down the rich.” Actually, as it turns out… they’re the ones for whom it’s not enough for them to succeed beyond any reasonable measure, other people have to suffer before they’re happy.
Gex
@Hungry Joe: As a culture we are just not prepared to call the desire for more money than one can spend and the need to chase that more money instead of doing other things an addiction. You’ll never see these guys on hoarders, but if they pursued anything else like they pursue money they’d be clinical.
The average joe thinks of making their big payday then retiring to do things they like. Not these guys. They don’t like anything else.
maya
Perhaps Anonym_us can play dress-UP with Mr Peter Schiff’s bank accounts and whatnot.
bewleys
@maya: Yeah, not likely. They like fighting among themselves better.
Less prison time and all that.
sacrablue
@Cassidy: The asshole is one of Larry Kudlow’s friends.
kc
He needs a good kick in the nuts.
dp
What a colossal dick.
danielx
The nice folks at wonkette.com refer to this individual as a twatwaffle, which i must confess is a term that I hadn’t heard/read before. I was thinking more on the lines of “misbegotten sociopathic roaring screaming asshole” myself, but hey, if the foo shits…somehow I don’t think he’ll be performing this particular piece of street theatre again, lest he be recognized and have that box he’s holding shoved up his ass.
Ruckus
@Alison:
If you wear spiked heels it would also count if you just stepped on them after he was down by someone else’s toe. Might even add something to the effect. And there are people who would pay money to watch that.
So I’ve heard.
Unabogie
@Alison:
Wouldn’t a nice long prison stint be more humane? We could even pay for his food and medical care.
schrodinger's cat
Wasn’t this guy the economic adviser for one of Ron Paul’s Presidential campaigns?
Lurking Canadian
@Walker: seriously. What the hell is wrong with these people? Papa John was running the same bullshit about the ACA. Hey genius! If Walmart could increase its revenue by raising prices, IT WOULD ALREADY HAVE DONE THAT. For fuck’s sake, the Waltons are not running a goddamned charity because it’s so important to them to provide low cost crap to the masses. Saying they could increase revenue by raising prices is saying they are deliberately leaving profit on the table. Why would any business do that?
Asking for increased wages for the workforce is asking for an increased share of revenue going to the workforce. It would not lead to an increase in prices, because, once again, if raising prices would not lead to a decrease in revenue, the price would already have gone up. This is what they teach on the first day of microeconomics, for fuck’s sake. It’s not complicated.
fuckwit
Wow, mad props for the classic old Chili Peps (before they were huge) reference.
Ruckus
@Lurking Canadian:
You seem to be expecting rationality from
peoplerich fuckers who got rich/get richer fucking over other people. Their largest fuck is the one they don’t give about anyone outside their small circle of other rich fuckers.The Fat Kate Middleton
@Hungry Joe: Beautiful, and … exactly.
Mike G
@Walker:
MallWart sure as shit do. It’s their propagandists and useful idiots who suck up to power who want to convince everyone that MallWart’s market power is anointed by Jesus and represents an economic Divine Right of Kings that must never be questioned. Rightards love them some magical thinking and authoritarianism.
Ruckus
@Mike G:
Rightards love them some magical thinking and authoritarianism.
They love this because it removes all responsibility for the resulting fuck ups. Even with actual thinking we get occasional fuck ups, wrong forks taken in the road and all that, but with their magical thinking all they ever get are fuck ups, so not having any responsibility for anything is nice.
Fred
@Gex: Someone did the math. As I recall, raising the pay to bring the lowest paid WM workers up to 25 K per year (full time) would add 60 cents or so to the average shoppers’ bill. Where this bozo came up with 15% is beyond me. Out of his asshole I suppose.
Fred
Isn’t this kind of an anti Yes Men bit? Turnabout may be fair play but the part about soliciting “donations” under the false pretext of being Wall Mart employees strikes me as fraudulent. But of course the 1%ers are allowed to defraud people, it’s right there in the Constitution.
ThresherK
@Fred: Turnabout may be fair play, but half the act of satire is picking the proper target.
PS I’m in CT. We call this guy’s fans Schiffheads for a reason.