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Hi all --- I am pasting here a detailed response to Jeffrey Cooperman's whining letter to Obama back in 2012 (I think he wrote it in 2012). I call it *PITY THE POOR BILLIONAIRE* *The following is a much expanded version of a commentary delivered by Michael Meeropol over WAMC radio on October 31, 2012.* Have you ever heard of Leon Cooperman? He is a billionaire whose 1500 word letter of complaint to President Obama has made him the darling of the top one tenth of one percent. In the NEW YORKER's October 8 (2012) issue he is profiled in a fascinating article that quotes from his letter. The article is by Chrystia Freeland. It is entitled Super-Rich Irony Why do billionaires feel victimized by Obama? It can be accessed at: http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2012/10/08/super-rich-irony I will reproduce Cooperman’s letter in full with interspersed comments. *COOPERMAN:* It is with a great sense of disappointment that I write this. Like many others, I hoped that your election would bring a salutary change of direction to the country, despite what more than a few feared was an overly aggressive social agenda. And I cannot credibly blame you for the economic mess that you inherited, even if the policy response on your watch has been profligate and largely ineffectual. (You did not, after all, invent TARP.) I understand that when surrounded by cries of “the end of the world as we know it is nigh,” even the strongest of minds may have a tendency to shoot first and aim later in a well-intended effort to stave off the predicted apocalypse. *MEEROPOL:* Did Cooperman oppose TARP? It is very likely that without TARP a number of important money-center banks would have gone bankrupt - perhaps taking down Cooperman’s hedge fund with them. I, myself, joined with a number of libertarian economists in signing a petition to Congress urging rejection of TARP. However, what really is bothersome about the beginning of his letter is the claim that President Obama’s policy response has been "profligate” and "ineffective.” That is totally false. It was hardly profligate to spend $787 billion in stimulus to plug what was a much bigger hole in total aggregate demand as a result of the collapse of the housing bubble. (Economist Dean Baker estimated that the reduction in aggregate demand was at least $1.2 trillion.) TO the extent that it was ineffective it was because it wasn’t large enough. As far as it went, the best estimate is it prevented the loss of anywhere from 1 to 3.5 million jobs. To see some details, a good place to start is a piece by Christina Romer in the New York Times from October 20. It is entitled, "The Fiscal Stimulus, Flawed But Valuable.” and is available at: http://www.nytimes.com/2012/10/21/business/how-the-fiscal-stimulus-helped-and-could-have-done-more.html *COOPERMAN:* But what I can justifiably hold you accountable for is your and your minions’ role in setting the tenor of the rancorous debate now roiling us that smacks of what so many have characterized as “class warfare.” Whether this reflects your principled belief that the eternal divide between the haves and have-nots is at the root of all the evils that afflict our society or just a cynical, populist appeal to his base by a president struggling in the polls is of little importance. What does matter is that the divisive, polarizing tone of your rhetoric is cleaving a widening gulf, at this point as much visceral as philosophical, between the downtrodden and those best positioned to help them. It is a gulf that is at once counterproductive and freighted with dangerous historical precedents. And it is an approach to governing that owes more to desperate demagoguery than your Administration should feel comfortable with. *MEEROPOL:* Here and in other places in the Cooperman letter, I can only scratch my head. What world is he observing? Obama made a couple of comments about the fact that the Wall Street people whose businesses had been saved by TARP money should not be giving themselves lavish bonuses so soon after they virtually destroyed the economy. He has stuck to his campaign promise of trying to get the top marginal tax rate back up to 39.6% (it had been 50% under Ronald Reagan until 1986). What else has he done to stoke the fires of class resentment? *COOPERMAN:* Just to be clear, while I have been richly rewarded by a life of hard work (and a great deal of luck), I was not to-the-manor-born. My father was a plumber who practiced his trade in the South Bronx after he and my mother emigrated from Poland. I was the first member of my family to earn a college degree. I benefited from both a good public education system (P.S. 75, Morris High School and Hunter College, all in the Bronx) and my parents’ constant prodding. When I joined Goldman Sachs following graduation from Columbia University’s business school, I had no money in the bank, a negative net worth, a National Defense Education Act student loan to repay, and a six-month-old child (not to mention his mother, my wife of now 47 years) to support. I had a successful, near-25-year run at Goldman, which I left 20 years ago to start a private investment firm. As a result of my good fortune, I have been able to give away to those less blessed far more than I have spent on myself and my family over a lifetime, and last year I subscribed to Warren Buffett’s Giving Pledge to ensure that my money, properly stewarded, continues to do some good after I’m gone. My story is anything but unique. I know many people who are similarly situated, by both humble family history and hard-won accomplishment, whose greatest joy in life is to use their resources to sustain their communities. Some have achieved a level of wealth where philanthropy is no longer a by-product of their work but its primary impetus. This is as it should be. We feel privileged to be in a position to give back, and we do. My parents would have expected nothing less of me. I am not, by training or disposition, a policy wonk, polemicist or pamphleteer. I confess admiration for those who, with greater clarity of expression and command of the relevant statistical details, make these same points with more eloquence and authoritativeness than I can hope to muster. For recent examples, I would point you to “Hunting the Rich”; (Leaders, *The Economist*, September 24, 2011);”The Divider vs. the Thinker”; (Peggy Noonan, *The Wall Street Journal, *October 29, 2011: http://www.wsj.com/articles/SB10001424052970203554104577002262150454258 ”Wall Street Occupiers Misdirect Anger” (Christine Todd Whitman, {Bloomberg}: http://www.bloombergview.com/articles/2011-10-31/wall-street-occupiers-misdirect-anger-christine-todd-whitman “Beyond Occupy”; (Bill Keller, {The New York Times}: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/10/31/opinion/keller-beyond-occupy.html?pagewanted=all October 31, 2011) - all, if you haven’t read them, making estimable work of the subject *MEEROPOL:* Noonan and Whitman are Republican ideologues. It is useful, however, to note that Cooperman is conflating Obama with the Occupy Movement. To see how far removed they are from Obama’s proposals and policies, check out Richard Wolff, OCCUPY THE ECONOMY (Open Media Series, City Lights Books) and Noam Chomsky, OCCUPY (Occupied Media Pamphlet Series, Zuccoti Park Press) *COOPERMAN:* But as a taxpaying businessman with a weekly payroll to meet and more than a passing familiarity with the ways of both Wall Street and Washington, I do feel justified in asking you: is the tone of the current debate really constructive? People of differing political persuasions can (and do) reasonably argue about whether, and how high, tax rates should be hiked for upper-income earners; whether the Bush-era tax cuts should be extended or permitted to expire, and for whom; whether various deductions and exclusions under the federal tax code that benefit principally the wealthy and multinational corporations should be curtailed or eliminated; whether unemployment benefits and the payroll tax cut should be extended; whether the burdens of paying for the nation’s bloated entitlement programs are being fairly spread around, and whether those programs themselves should be reconfigured in light of current and projected budgetary constraints; whether financial institutions deemed “too big to fail”; should be serially bailed out or broken up first, like an earlier era’s trusts, because they pose a systemic risk and their size benefits no one but their owners; whether the solution to what ails us as a nation is an amalgam of more regulation, wealth redistribution, and a greater concentration of power in a central government that has proven no more (I’m being charitable here) adept than the private sector in reining in the excesses that brought us to this pass - the list goes on and on, and the dialectic is admirably American. Even though, as a high-income taxpayer, I might be considered one of its targets, I find this reassessment of so many entrenched economic premises healthy and long overdue. Anyone who could survey today’s challenging fiscal landscape, with an un- and underemployment rate of nearly 20 percent and roughly 40 percent of the country on public assistance, and not acknowledge an imperative for change is either heartless, brainless, or running for office on a very parochial agenda. And if I end up paying more taxes as a result, so be it. The alternatives are all worse. *MEEROPOL:* This paragraph should be directed at the Tea Party and the Republican Party in general. They resisted every effort by Obama to create some useful change - whether in energy policy with cap and trade (originally a Republican proposal), whether in health care reform (again he presented an originally Republican proposal - the individual mandate), whether in stimulating the economy (the Republicans wanted just as big a stimulus - only with only tax cuts creating the deficit rather than a mix). I could go on but I hope readers get the picture. We know that Republicans decided before Obama was even inaugurated to resist everything he proposed in order to try and make sure his presidency was a failure so they could take back the Congress in 2010 (it worked) and the Presidency in 2012. So why is he complaining to Obama about this? *COOPERMAN:* But what I do find objectionable is the highly politicized idiom in which this debate is being conducted. Now, I am not naive. I understand that in today’s America, this is how the business of governing typically gets done - a situation that, given the gravity of our problems, is as deplorable as it is seemingly ineluctable. But as President first and foremost and leader of your party second, you should endeavor to rise above the partisan fray and raise the level of discourse to one that is both more civil and more conciliatory, that seeks collaboration over confrontation. That is what “leading by example” means to most people. *MEEROPOL:* Of course this is exactly what Obama tried in his entire first two years - that’s why the stimulus had so much tax cutting in it. That’s why he tried to get Republican cooperation on the health care bill. What world has Cooperman been living in? *COOPERMAN:* Capitalism is not the source of our problems, as an economy or as a society, and capitalists are not the scourge that they are too often made out to be. *MEEROPOL:* Cooperman should check out a book by the conservative jurist, Richard Posner: A FAILURE OF CAPITALISM: THE CRISIS OF ‘08 AND THE DESCENT INTO DEPRESSION (2009). It is not capitalism in the generic sense that is the source of our problems. Instead, as Posner and many others have pointed out, it is the peculiar brand of capitalism that has come to dominate the United States since the early 1980s - a capitalism where finance has run wild (permitting people like Cooperman to become billionaires by basically figuring out how to outsmart other people). For details about this very dangerous version of capitalism, see THE ABC’s OF THE ECONOMIC CRISIS by Michael Yates and Fred Magdoff (Monthly Review Press, 2009) *COOPERMAN:* As a group, we employ many millions of taxpaying people, pay their salaries, provide them with healthcare coverage, start new companies, found new industries, create new products, fill store shelves at Christmas, and keep the wheels of commerce and progress (and indeed of government, by generating the income whose taxation funds it) moving. To frame the debate as one of rich-and-entitled versus poor-and-dispossessed is to both miss the point and further inflame an already incendiary environment. It is also a naked, political pander to some of the basest human emotions - a strategy, as history teaches, that never ends well for anyone but totalitarians and anarchists. *MEEROPOL:* Actually, the last President to campaign against "economic royalists” and "welcome” the hatred of the rich and privileged was none other than Franklin D. Roosevelt. His New Deal saved American capitalism from ending up either like Italy, Germany or the Soviet Union. The reforms instituted by the New Deal and solidified under Presidents Johnson and Nixon created the American version of social democracy which between World War II and the late 1970s brought a shared prosperity to virtually the entire population. These decades created the great American middle class which bought all the products that American capitalists sold - making those capitalists rich and successful - even as they (high income Americans) were taxed at a maximum marginal rate of 70% and unions represented a much higher percentage of the labor force than they do now. When Cooperman was growing up and starting his career, did he feel crushed by the heavy hand of government under Johnson and Nixon? *COOPERMAN:* With due respect, Mr. President, it’s time for you to throttle-down the partisan rhetoric and appeal to people’s better instincts, not their worst. *MEEROPOL:* Again - what world has he been living in? Before Obama was even elected he was called a socialist. Since his election the percentage of Republicans who believe he is a secret Muslim has grown! (And let us not forget Donald Trump and birtherism.) *COOPERMAN:* Rather than assume that the wealthy are a monolithic, selfish and unfeeling lot who must be subjugated by the force of the state, set a tone that encourages people of good will to meet in the middle. When you were a community organizer in Chicago, you learned the art of waging a guerrilla campaign against a far superior force. But you’ve graduated from that milieu and now help to set the agenda for that superior force. *MEEROPOL:* The superior force in this era of Citizens United are people and institutions with billions of dollars. Congress is currently so gerry-mandered that most seats are safe and citizens are almost completely shut out of the political process. (Check out the Atlantic for October 2012 - "The New Price of American Politics” by James Bennet.) The Presidency and Senate are now for sale to billionaires - and it can only get worse in the future. *COOPERMAN:* You might do well at this point to eschew the polarizing vernacular of political militancy and become the transcendent leader you were elected to be. You are likely to be far more effective, and history is likely to treat you far more kindly for it. *MEEROPOL:* In the New Yorker article, Cooperman is quoted at an event saying: "Our problem frankly is as long as the President remains anti-wealth, anti-business, anti-energy, anti-private-aviation, he will never get the business community behind him.” *MEEROPOL:* If the President is anti-wealth and anti-business he is a terrible failure. The top 1% have recovered completely from the recession and financial crisis. He refused to force banks to write-down overvalued mortgages --- He failed to raise taxes ONE PENNY on the super-rich --- He expended no political capital to make it easier for workers to join unions. The claim Obama is anti-energy relates to his effort to wean the US from fossil fuels - something every right-thinking person knows is essential if the planet is to survive. Finally, consider the claim that Obama is "anti-private-aviation.” This is obviously a complaint that Obama has often criticized the fact that businesses can deduct their corporate jets as a business expense. Note that Obama’s desire to end a taxpayer subsidy to businesses who own private jets is translated into a broad attack stating Obama is against "private aviation.” Cooperman’s quote in the New Yorker continues: "The problem and the complication is the forty or fifty percent of the country on the dole that support him [Obama].” NOTE here the echo Mitt Romney's so-called "mistake” when he attacked the 47% who are allegedly dependent on government in the famous secretly recorded tape. But note here the incredible statement that 40 or 50 percent of the country is "on the dole.” Does Cooperman mean social security recipients? Does he truly believe they all support the President? Since Romney’s statement was at a private fund-raiser that he did not expect to see recorded, we can only assume that these super rich people actually believe that stuff. Obama can only be accused of fomenting class warfare in the perverse sense that he proved to the poor and working classes of this country that the deck is stacked against them and in favor of the superrich. So --- What is going on with Cooperman, Romney and other whining billionaires? I think these folks must in their heart of hearts know that they are billionaires not because they have done anything particularly valuable and useful for society but because they have been lucky --- the New Yorker article quotes Cooperman as admitting that he's very very rich because of lucky decisions. So they not only want the money but they are so insecure they want the rest of us to praise them as they rake it in. These insecure billionaires claim that they themselves created the successful businesses that they profit from. The fact that they had essential help from workers, long gone inventors and discoverers, government public works, a police force and courts is ignored. This reminds me of a great poem by Bertholt Brecht—A Worker Reads history. *Who built the seven gates of Thebes?* *The books are filled with names of kings.* *Was it the kings who hauled the craggy blocks of stone?* *And Babylon, so many times destroyed.* *Who built the city up each time? In which of Lima’s houses,* *That city glittering with gold, lived those who built it?* *In the evening when the Chinese wall was finished* *Where did the masons go? Imperial Rome* *Is full of arcs of triumph. Who reared them up? * *Over whom* *Did the Caesars triumph? * *Byzantium lives in song.* *Were all her dwellings palaces? * *And even in Atlantis of the legend* *The night the seas rushed in,* *The drowning men still bellowed for their slaves.* *Young Alexander conquered India.* *He alone?* *Caesar beat the Gauls.* *Was there not even a cook in his army?* *Phillip of Spain wept as his fleet was sunk and destroyed. * *Were there no other tears?* *Frederick the Great triumphed in the Seven Years War.* *Who triumphed with him?* *Each page a victory* *At whose expense the victory ball?* *Every ten years a great man,* *Who paid the piper?* *So many particulars.* *So many questions. * (End of Poem) In our society, there is much too much celebration of the top dogs who get most of the money and too much of the credit while virtually none of the credit and too little money goes to the unsung heroes who do the work. _________________________________________________________ Full posting guidelines at: http://www.marxmail.org/sub.htm Set your options at: https://lists.csbs.utah.edu/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
