01.20.14

The Plutocrat Sociopaths who go off the range

Posted in Culture of Lickspittle at 1:42 pm by George Smith

The plutocrat sociopath is a common sight. Every now and then one of them pretends to go off the range, appearing on the opinion pages of the New York Times, or in some allegedly important documentary, anywhere high profile, to tell us all he or she has seen the corruption of their ways. Over the weekend it was someone named Sam Polk, in the pages of the old gray lady, to inform us the 1 percent are “wealth addicts,” raising inequality and ruining us all, and he knows this because he was one.

It set off the predictable “me-too” coverage. Over at Pine View Farm, Frank scoffs at the idea:

There’s another, much more descriptive term for “wealth addicts???: Pigs.

There’s another simple explanation to bookend it. Sam Polk, now that he’s fabulously wealthy, like a few others before him, is still of the Wall Street swine, just differently.

The idea, in landing on the pages of the nation’s marquee newspaper, is to get great publicity for something, further invitations and opportunities for the perspicacity of your thinking and doing, a book contract.

In 2012 it was Greg Smith, collaborating with the Times to tell us “Why [He Was] Leaving Goldman Sachs.”

And no sooner was the ink dry, Smith had a book contract with a $1.5 million dollar advance.

Two years later, the book — unsurprisingly — flopped. One reaction, from the New York Daily News:

That book — the unimaginatively titled “Why I Left Goldman Sachs” — is being published today, and it will deprive both Smith’s champions and detractors of the sort of outrage that now reigns supreme in America. In 265 pages, he delivers a less effective critique of the financial system than he had in 1,280 words …

Smith’s book is primarily remarkable for how unremarkable it is, a coming-of-age story by an investment banker with a Stanford degree who wore Brooks Brothers, drank beer and, once, found himself in a hot tub with a topless woman … His insight into the workings of the financial industry does not extend much beyond, “Sometimes Wall Street can be a little like high school.” Then again, so can much of adult life.

But Greg Smith did get his second pile.

Sam Polk’s NYT column is entitled “For the Love of Money,” and if that’s not a gift-wrapped invitation to the publishing industry I don’t know what is.

Polk:

IN my last year on Wall Street my bonus was $3.6 million — and I was angry because it wasn’t big enough. I was 30 years old, had no children to raise, no debts to pay, no philanthropic goal in mind. I wanted more money for exactly the same reason an alcoholic needs another drink: I was addicted …

[A few paragraphs about great personal greed, power drinking and being a wrestler at Columbia that come off more like brags than soul-searching, skipped.]

I had recently finished Taylor Branch’s three-volume series on the Rev. Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. and the civil rights movement, and the image of the Freedom Riders stepping out of their bus into an infuriated mob had seared itself into my mind. I’d told myself that if I’d been alive in the ‘60s, I would have been on that bus.

But I was lying to myself. There were plenty of injustices out there — rampant poverty, swelling prison populations, a sexual-assault epidemic, an obesity crisis. Not only was I not helping to fix any problems in the world, but I was profiting from them …

If nausea was provoked in reading the white millionaire’s invocation of MLK 24 hours before MLK Day in a piece on said white millionaire’s naked avarice and the 1 percent, don’t worry. This shows only that you’re still a decent and sane human being.

You can contrast Polk’s piece in the New York Times Sunday Opinion, where he’s propped up by all the editorial assistance money can buy, and an opinion piece that ran in the much more low-rent Orange Country Register a week earlier.

There he’s left more to his own skills and this is what he came up with:

Our nation is stress eating. The obesity crisis is a sign of widespread desperation.

Raging inequality is causing the majority of us to eat too much and also in a very shitty way. And that’s why the poor have this problem.

Sam Polk is thin and fit looking.

Having made his pile there is probably not much reason to stress eat cartons and cartons of junk food.

Polk’s OC Register piece, like his opinion for the New York Times, is well beyond intelligence-insulting.

Many people have written quite convincingly on the reasons obesity is frequently associated with poverty in America.

For example, a dry citation from authority:

Are poverty and obesity associated? Poverty rates and obesity were reviewed across 3,139 counties in the U.S. (2,6). In contrast to international trends, people in America who live in the most poverty-dense counties are those most prone to obesity (Fig. 1A). Counties with poverty rates of >35% have obesity rates 145%
greater than wealthy counties …

How is poverty linked to obesity? It has been suggested that individuals who live in impoverished regions have poor access to fresh food. Poverty-dense areas are oftentimes called “food deserts,??? implying diminished access to fresh food (7). However, 43% of households with incomes below the poverty line ($21,756) are food insecure (uncertain of having, or unable to acquire, sufficient food) (7). Accordingly, 14% of U.S. counties have more than 1 in 5 individuals use the Supplemental Nutrition Assistance Program. The county-wide utility of the program, as expected, correlates with county-wide poverty rates (r = 0.81) (7). Thus, in many poverty-dense regions, people are in hunger and unable to access affordable healthy food, even when funds avail. The double-edged sword of hunger and poor availability of healthy food is, however, unlikely to be the only reason as to why obesity tracks with poverty.

You should be more than sick of Sam Polk now.

The other high profile multi-millionaire in the I’ve-seen-the-horror Plutocrat’s Club is Nick Hanauer.

I recently watched Robert Reich’s Inequality for All documentary and Hanauer is all through it, the wealthy and wise-sounding man (venture capitalist, author, activist, philanthropist, true patriot and civic leader, according to his bio) delivering the same clarion call: Inequality is wrecking the country, the wealthy need to be taxed more, the people need to be paid more.

The documentary’s Hanauer bits are taken from his home. In the back of the shot, an acoustic guitar is tastefully set.

All I could think of when I saw these was to turn to my friend and tell him it would be nice to see the butt of the guitar shoved in Hanauer’s teeth mid-sentence.

Here are framing questions for this post: How many people maimed by the American economy have been given the marquee treatment by the big newsmedia for the sheer audaciousness of their thinking about our trying times? How many have benefited in the wallet from a big spread in the New York Times?

Rhetorical, obviously. In the Culture of Lickspittle there’s no benefit in that kind of thing.

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