Former Goldman Prop Traders Can’t Survive in the Wild.

Turns out Goldman traders are not at all what they’re hyped out to be, once they are deprived of their Goldman platform. Many went and started their own hedge funds and failed. One guy even managed to lose 7%. 7%! In this market! I guess he was long gold. How else one loses money in this market.

I’m almost disappointed. It’s as if Dr. Evil from bond movies turned out to be just an old grandpa with a cat – no handlers, no masterplan, no secret weapon. Once stripped of their magic lever that Goldman provided them they can’t walk on their own.

T’fy, blya! Such a major disappointment.

 

Vegas As a State of the American Mind.

“Real dope gives you the freedom to dream your own dreams; the American kind forces you to swallow the perverted dreams of men whose only ambition is to hold their job regardless of what they are bidden to do.” Henry Miller, The Air-Conditioned Nightmare

I’ve been to Vegas a million times, always having a great time. My routine has always followed the same pattern: sleep till noon, have a breakfast in the room – eggs, bacon, mimosa – the whole shebang. Then some time by pool. Then an hour at the gym, sometimes followed by a visit to the spa and a massage. Then light dinner and poker till the wee hours of the morning. I always loved Vegas.

It’s not like we are unaware of all of the fakery and the illusion and the buffoonery of Vegas, and yet we flock to it as if looking for something. Perhaps for an adventure that we don’t have at home. We are looking, in vain, for a contrived “Hangover”-style bacchanalia. But it only works in the movies: in real life, if you want an adventure it will be staged and choreographed, because someone has to make money off of it. In Vegas your desires will be met like the whims of a petulant but doted upon child. The staff is highly trained. The flawless diction, the straight look in the eyes, the smiles, the friendliness, the knowingness. They know what you need before you do. They know what you need to stay in the facility for as long as possible. In Vegas even TSA agents are friendly. If Vegas is a mental facility, the staff is an army of Nurse Ratcheds, schooled in the art of placating the patients.

Even if you are sane and rational, Vegas will get to you. You may be fully aware of the business model and all the tricks of trade and how everything is designed to keep you in and part you from your money and yet you will still fall under a spell. Knowledge does not protect you from the charms. It’s like heroin. You know it’s bad, you’ve heard all the stories but you do it anyway. Because it feels good.

That’s the reason the place works so brilliantly – because we seek to be fooled. We want the illusions, we want to forget our daily grind. Vegas is a hit of an anti-depressant, a quick but potent sugar high.

Maybe I needed the drug because I had a condition. In my 20s, like many others, I chose the blue pill. I have receded into the numbness of the corporate culture. I became an exemplary, abiding member of the capitalist society. It’s not like I had any qualms about it: I wanted to be the square corporate type, I wanted to get up at the same time every morning and get to work, day after day, year after year, till the day of my retirement. I followed that routine for many years. This road was understandable, it didn’t require a lot of thinking, I knew how to navigate it and it promised tangible rewards. I had everything figured out. The other path would require dealing with abstractions and philosophy. I never had a great capacity to understand art and never had time to wallow in the grey areas of metaphysics anyway; I always needed someone to explain to me why a piece of art is important. Art is for the effete eggheads, I thought, for hippies who don’t know how to make money. I was thus too honest to even pretend to enjoy European vacations – a must for the busy but self-respecting corporate types, who’d also like to think of themselves as cultured. Instead, Vegas was my mental release, an honest to God unpretentious, crude fun. This is not a place to have deep thoughts, this is a place to get away from them.

Someone must have spiked my drink with a red pill when I wasn’t looking. (We have already established that I wouldn’t have taken it voluntarily). For the past year I was writing a lot. (My book will come out, hopefully, this summer.) Writing means putting your thoughts in order and to do that you have to spend a lot of time thinking. Too much thinking is bad for you. A different me landed at McCarran International airport this time around. I arrived at the circus with an atrophied ability to enjoy the show. An inner child, who enjoyed watching trained elephants perform the tricks before, was no more.

This time I found something profoundly sad about the town. Perhaps my mood was partially influenced by a poor choice of airplane reading material – Henry Miller’s The Air-Conditioned Nightmare – especially given the destination.

On arrival, I skipped all the usual indulgencies except poker. I played like a maniac. I haven’t gone outside for 4 days – from the moment we arrived to the day of the departure. I skipped meals or ordered food at the poker table – unable to leave the table, but too malnourished to continue to play well.

Everything except poker seemed contrived.

A big real estate convention was in town and all the bars and restaurants and night clubs were overrun by men and women in suits and convention passes around their necks. If you dissect these events they are the most boring and tedious activities. The corporate parties take place at the best restaurants and nightclubs in town. You see crowds of well-dressed participants, drinks in hand, spilling out of the venues in clusters, masking their torture and conformity, stiffness and furtive despair with fake cheerfulness. They are in Vegas after all! “We went to a party at a nightclub last night,” you would hear someone say. It only sounds like it was fun, but if you think about it what do you think they did there? Do you think they had hookers and cocaine in there? Please! They spend the whole time elbowing their way to the bar through the thick crowds of similar dealmakers, trying to outshout everyone. One can’t have a normal conversation at those parties. It’s too loud and too crowded. Free drinks and hors d’oeuvres are the only things I used to enjoy when I went to those events back in the day. But there’s no there there. Even if you want to talk business, it’s impossible to discuss anything in depth. So you end up just drinking and bullshitting. Corporate parties are an excruciating waste of time and energy. The attendees would be better off by just booking a hooker to a room and doing blow discreetly in the solitude of the bathroom. The best fun does not require crowds and nightclubs. But I doubt they do that though. How will everyone know they had a good time then? You have to be seen having a good time, so everyone goes to a nightclub party and pretends. I found myself feeling sorry for them.

In fact, sorrow was an overwhelming emotion this time around. Pity – for both the customers and the providers. Who knows what the concierge – smiling and polished and all-knowing – had to forgo to get a job serving the likes of me. What if she had an engineering degree but had to take a service job to pay her bills? How did they all end up there? And the customers – seeking deliverance, only to have their search being rerouted, profitably, into the circus tent by the skilled professionals. And the Sheldon Adelsons and the Steve Wynns, like an eye in the sky, are watching us all.

We are all customers now, not citizens. Citizenship has been diluted to the point of irrelevance and replaced with all-consuming stupor. Vegas doesn’t want you to be a citizen. Citizens think and thinking is bad for business. Being a citizen means putting aside self-interest for the sake of community, but we’ve been conditioned for too long that self-interest will miraculously translate into a societal good. No one has actually explained how, Ayn Rand’s delirious attempts notwithstanding, but everyone believes that.

“Whatever does not lend itself to being bought and sold, whether in the realm of things, ideas, principles, dreams or hopes, is debarred. In this world the poet is anathema, the thinker a fool, the artist an escapist, the man of vision a criminal.”

Indeed. We are all one big Vegas now.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century.

Naturally, I can’t ignore this book by French Economist Thomas Piketty that is #1 on Amazon right  now. The thing is I haven’t read it yet, although I read multiple reviews (even by those criticizing it who haven’t read it).

Conservatives are foaming at the mouth, attacking a book’s message, but their attacks do not go beyond calling Piketty a Marxist, even though he himself shuns the label. He merely points out the dysfunctional aspect of present-day capitalism to which many conservatives/neo-liberals simply have no coherent counter-argument. Thus, the shrieks and name-calling. Branding someone a “Commie” or a “Marxist” or a “Socialist” used to be all that was required to end the discussion about economics in the olden days, because one could always point at the Soviet Union. But Soviet Union is long gone and kids these days don’t give those labels the weight the conservatives routinely assign to them. Now, not only they would actually have to explain why is it bad, but they would also have to provide an alternative. But in all the AEI (American Enterprise Institute), Heritage and other right-wing “think-tanks” one won’t find anything other than Reaganomics and “trickle-down”. They are out of ideas. And when you’re out of ideas your only refuge is to scream louder and call your opponent names.

Piketty, in other words, scares the shit out of American right.

For Douthat and his tribe, the proposition that unfettered capitalism marches toward gross inequality is not a conclusion based on carefully collected data, strenuous research and a sweeping view of history. It has to be a Communist plot.

The very heft of Piketty’s book is terrifying to the Douthats, and no wonder they don’t dare to read it, because if they did, they would find chart after chart, data set after data set, and hundreds of years worth of economic history scrutinized.

The Fruits of Neoliberal Economic Thought.

Over the weekend, when I was not playing poker, I read this long piece on neoliberal economics. It’s a very long, exhaustive and thick read and it took me a while to absorb all the major points. I wanted to distill this excellent critique of neoliberalism into a few distinct points, mostly for myself, but also for those interested who don’t have the luxury of 2-3 hours of undisturbed time.

  1. Recent economic order seems to reward paper speculation and penalize work.
  2. Governing elite’s response to the recent crises is to double down on old dogmas: reduced government spending, low taxation, worship of markets to cure social ills.
  3. Our public life is thus a hostage to neoliberal market idolatry.
  4. This ideology, however, never holds any of the elites responsible or accountable for the system failures.
  5. Originally, neoliberal thinkers positioned themselves as observers and thinkers above the fray, intellectuals who looked for refuge from the New Deal liberalism. Their early association served as a basis for founding of the Mont Pelerin Society. A few decades later it coalesced around the Austrian anti-Keynesian economic thought, with F.A. Hayek at the helm.
  6. Hayek and his contemporary and intellectual comrade Ludwig von Mises, both haunted by the terrors of totalitarianism and exiles from Nazi regime shared their sense that free-market liberalism was the only answer to fascism and communism.
  7. However, Hayek drew his inspiration from Karl Popper, another economic philosopher, known for his “open society” ideas, who understood that individual liberty doesn’t have to be antithetical to economic democracy. Such philosophy permitted the adoption of egalitarian, even redistributionist policies.
  8. But Hayek chose intellectualism over practicality. He reasoned that an “intellectual adventure” even if it’s utopian in nature is what’s needed, rather than “practical compromises”, which should be left to politicians.
  9. The biggest irony is that Hayek’s utopian longings were fully realized, in Reagan’s America and in Thatcher’s Britain, but failed to bring the results he envisioned.
  10. Enter Milton Friedman, the monetarist from University of Chicago, who popularized the purely intellectual strain of Hayek’s neoliberalism. He advised Reagan, Thatcher, and Augusto Pinochet, had a regular column at Newsweek, a hit series on PBS, not to mention his association with Cato Institute, Heritage Foundation and American Enterprise Institute.
  11. With such an advocate, the free-market gospel has multiplied all over the globe. Along the way, the gospel managed to mutate from simply worshipping the markets to demonizing all public sphere. It is at that point, the 1980-90s, that the suspicion of government, or of anything “public” first took shape. Friedman believed and made others accept it as an axiom that a government, by its very nature, can’t serve the public interest.
  12. Regulations and any government involvement is thus to be resisted, or to be rid of, which is what’s been happening since the 1980s, culminating in 2008 crisis. But it’s not the lack of regulations that is the culprit in neoliberal thought. Conveniently, neoliberals are now focusing on a problem of regulatory capture: you see, the regulators rotate between the government and the industry, thus confirming the neoliberal idea of the evils of government.
  13. Because government itself is full of “defects”, according to Friedman, it therefore cannot be the one to regulate whatever flaws happen to appear in the markets. Neat logical trick, isn’t it? And that’s where we are today.
  14. The neoliberal thought that has enthralled most of today’s politicians, stymies any attempts to stimulate economy through government spending. The entire focus of the elites, nowadays, seems to be revolving around placating the “job creators,” and any suggestions to raise taxes on the rich or to help the poor are to be nipped at the bud.
  15. The author gives an example of the destructive force of such an uninhibited capitalism: the factory collapse in Bangladesh that killed more than a thousand workers. What the disaster like this should have demonstrated, is that regulations are “a largely cosmetic watchdog effort funded overwhelmingly by private-sector concerns, far from delivering oversight and accountability.” What aggressive free market delivers is “race-to-the-bottom competitive forces…that ritually sanctify all of this routine dishonesty. In their malignant neglect of worker safety measures, local factory managers are able to cite the same market pressures to maximize production and profit that have prevented the ornamental Western groups conducting audits of workplace safety practices from releasing their findings to the workers at risk of being killed by the neoliberal regime of global manufacturing.”
  16. But Chicago and Austrian scholars are unfazed by such misfortunes. It’s just a cost of doing business. Their response was a predictable call to resist the passage of any new laws to improve worker-safety standards or to allow “workers to veer into unionism or other non-market-approved modes of worker self-determination.”
  17. The grip of neoliberalism is still strong today, even among liberals. Everyone feels like they have to at least pay lip service to the wisdom of markets, if they still want to be admitted to the discussion.

Borgata Poker Open Ladies Event.

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In the last 2 weeks I played in 3 poker tourneys. In two of them I finished right on “the bubble” – a poker term that can be described as “close but no cigar”.

To finish on the bubble is the most frustrating element of poker tournaments. You feel like a guy who keeps going on dates but never gets invited upstairs after a date. You spend all this time working hard on a project and then, as you come within a grasp of a win, it slips away. If you busted midway, at least you didn’t have to spend 12-13 hours grinding at the poker table.

I busted out of two tournaments in this manner. But, in the third one, the Borgata Poker Open Ladies event, I finally broke the spell and finished in the money. This is me after playing for 14 hours.

Here’s full reporting from last night’s game, with pictures, stack sizes and hands.

And here’s one of the hands that carried me through.

The Winning Mindest Wins. Everybody Loses.

Conservatives love to ascribe laziness to large swaths of the population. They think the prudent thing to do is to give the lazy moochers a kick in the butt. A kick in the butt to do what? People who are unemployed are not lazy, contrary to a widespread conservative belief. The mistake, or rather the convenient excuse, of the libertarians/conservatives is that they apply their own abilities and their own career trajectory to all the others. They think “if I can do it, so can anyone.” This is the fork in the road, this is the basis of all other aspects of their political philosophy: low-taxes on the rich, ripping of the safety net, worshipping of self-reliance, as if there are no children, single mothers, elderly and the disabled in this world – only white frat-boys, stomping the ground in their bullpen, eager for a race. “Let the best one win!” they yell, knowing full well, even before the race started, that they are the best. Wouldn’t you want to participate in the race if you knew in advance that you’re going to win? And then, they attach philosophy to their own abilities. Then, after they won, they create a narrative that they won fair and square, missing the fact that their skill is the result of their current proximity to the trough, not the way they got there. This is the idea behind “Trading Places” – it doesn’t take a special pedigree to be a trader. One just needs a platform and a nice suit. But still, they pontificate about their scrappy childhood and the bootstraps and hard work and risk-taking and wallow in their own narcissism, followed by a humble-brag “I’m just a regular guy” mandatory display of modesty. Is then there’s any surprise that people like Tom Perkins think only the winners should be allowed to vote? They think that it’s validated by them winning the race.

If you view society as a competitive construct, as many social Darwinists do, then it is a natural conclusion: The winner gets to claim the prize and to write rules and history books. Thus the pitting of citizens one against the other at the altar of “competitiveness” is a normal course of events. The suckers lost, too bad. That’s just life. And that would be fine, too, if only the winners knew moderation. Here, the winners would be wise to stop and take, or rather give the suckers, a breather. But the winning mindset and moderation do not go together. The game is in full swing, we can’t just stand up and leave. If we don’t take that last stack from the sucker at the table then someone else will. It’s just the cruel truth. Who can stop a train at full speed? We would rather just jump on the bandwagon.

And what or who can play the role of a moderating hand at this point? Where is that ‘invisible hand” that restores the balance, applies breaks to a runaway train? Where is the mitigating factor of supply and demand, the efficient markets, the equilibrium that we learned about in Econ 101? There’s no push and pull, no regression to the mean. The “pull” is nonexistent, or has been sidelined, or denied meaningful levers. The classic argument is that if the customers don’t like the product they will stop consuming it or go to another provider. But what if, at this point, the product that we’re talking about is a bare minimum of food, shelter and basic health care? Are those customers really in the position to dictate anything, to refuse to buy food, to refuse to pay rent? Where the hell are they gonna go, what the fuck are they gonna eat?

The train won’t stop on its own. It can either crash into a wall or go off a cliff. The winners will be playing musical chairs till the very end, because they will always think to themselves: “I can get out just in time. I’m the winner.”

 

Charity as a Conservative Delusion.

The topic of charity as a distraction is really gaining ground. In the last week I stumbled upon 2 articles on the topic, both making powerful arguments against private charity.

First is the article in LA Times that gives trenchant observations about the failure of private charity to attend to social needs, summarized in two main points:

1. Private charity is as cyclical as the economy. It can’t step up precisely when it is needed the most – in times of economic collapse;

2. Charity is not synonymous with helping the needy. Most charitable donation go towards religious institutions, alma maters and other personal pet projects.

To quote Robert Reich, former Labor Secretary, “Philanthropy appears to be more about the pursuit of one’s own projects, a mechanism for the expression of one’s values or preferences other than a mechanism for redistribution or relief for the poor.”

I guess that explains why we have Koch theater at the Lincoln Center, but not in the projects.

 

Second article is Mike Konczal’s long read. It aims to strike at the conservative myth of charity as a functional replacement of government programs. He calls it “voluntarism fantasy.”

At a basic level, much of our elite charitable giving is about status signaling, especially in donations to elite cultural and educational institutions. And much of it is also about political mobilization to pursue objectives favorable to rich elites. As the judge Richard Posner once wrote, a charitable foundation “is a completely irresponsible institution, answerable to nobody” that closely resembles a hereditary monarchy. Why would we put our entire society’s ability to manage the deadly risks we face in the hands of such a creature?

He also makes a case for liberals to reclaim the definition of charity as, to use President Truman’s words, “good will towards one’s fellow man; of brotherhood, of mutual help, of love.” The idea is that true charity is not a whimsical giveaway from rich to the poor, but a common participation from all members of the community. This way it won’t be easy for people like Paul Ryan casually throw “charity” as a panacea and retreat back into his ideological niche, thinking that the problem of poverty is in no need of further attention.

This is what happens when you run a conspiracy blog.

Zerohedge – the anti-Fed, libertarian, gold-standard conspiracy blog, that’s been seeing inflation and economic collapse everywhere for the last 5 years, scored a big victory lately. Or so they think.

Russians have pulled about $100bn of Treasuries that they held in custody accounts at the Fed. To me, and to any reasonable person I would think, the answer for such a massive pullback is simple: they are trying to avoid the Ukraine-related asset freeze.

Not so with Zerohedge. They got the same data, too, but their conclusions are all over the place, and none mentions the most obvious one. I guess when you run a conspiracy blog, the easiest explanation for any event is always the most suspect.

So either China selling TSYs and buying EURs to make European import power
stronger, if not so much its exports (much to Draghi’s ongoing horror). Or
Russia, which may be dumping USTs to support the ruble… Or dumping just
because.

“To support the ruble”, “Just because”. Right!

And the comment section is predictably trashing the Fed and the “printing presses”.

The Failure of the Elites.

“Elites, by definition, are often brilliant and attractive-looking people who, because of their own sophistication and social confidence, welcome cosmopolitanism in all its aspects. For they are never insecure in the midst of exotic environments. But most people in this world are not brilliant, not terribly attractive and therefore not confident. Their lives are full of struggle. So they naturally take refuge in family, community, religion or some form of solidarity group. And in an era when mass communication technologies foster a vulgarized assault on traditional values — whether directly or indirectly, knowingly or unknowingly — the sense of alienation among the masses intensifies, leading them deeper into such exclusivist beliefs.”

This is the quote from this article that I couldn’t get out of my head for days. You can apply the points made in this article to pretty much all global political events that happen today, including Ukraine. I find Ukraine events to be a symptom of other, more global geopolitical shifts. Today, I’d like to explore one of the reasons for this global turmoil. It’s the failure of the elites.

It doesn’t really matter if the elites are liberal or conservative. No matter how open-minded they consider themselves they still remain isolated from and thus blind to the real world. They ask themselves: “Why can’t others be like us?” To which they quickly find an answer: “Why! Of course they can, if only they do X, Y and Z! And we should encourage them to do that.” That’s how they fashion themselves into benevolent citizens of the world. But no one mentions that to become like them you have to be born a Romney, have rhetorical talents and political prowess of Clinton, the looks of Gwyneth Paltrow or the money of Arianna Huffington or simply be at the right place at the right time. This blindness is stunning. Maybe the elites are more concerned about appearing like they care rather than actually caring? All these bullshit self-help and spirituality and new age crap books just confirm my hypothesis. “Look at me, I’m so spiritual and so successful, I found balance and wisdom and so can you.” I mean, seriously, Arianna’s recent cause is “mindfulness and spirituality”; Gwyneth is now a lifestyle guru who hands out diet and lifestyle advice on her blog. But let’s think of who is their target audience? Is it their own fellow elites? But that would make them look “elitist” – a label they surely would reject. Or is it the rest, the rubes, the 99%? Here we are talking about people who commute hours to and from work, do some repetitive menial or administrative tasks, then go to a second shift just to make ends meet, counting pennies paycheck to paycheck. And you’re telling me in order to make their lives more fulfilled they should take yoga and spinning classes, eat tofu and try to get an afternoon nap? Or, as conservative elites prefer, they should go to church and get a kick in the butt that they need so bad to get off the couch? What the fuck?

I’m sure meditation helps to those who practice it. Having free time to practice mindfulness is a luxury that the middle-class doesn’t have. I’m not against people having spare time to sit and stare and meditate. In fact I do want the people to have as much free time as they need to become “spiritual”. But let’s face it: they don’t have the freaking time to do all that fancy shit. And let’s stop pretending that they can find that time, if only they could, you know, cut their working hours. Conservative elites for instance, like future presidential candidate Paul Ryan, believe that the rubes don’t work hard enough. So, I guess, cutting the workload is out of the question.

As a result, the poor and middle-class are trapped between “do yoga and meditate” and “work harder” messages coming from both sides of the political aisle. And the elites are upset that those unwashed show some unwanted tendencies like being too religious, or too lazy or too dumb to follow politics? That’s where the elites are stunningly detached. The problem is that, the other 99% are not as successful and beautiful and shrewd as the ones on top of the hierarchy. The elites, perhaps genuinely, want those at the bottom to break out of their circumstances, probably because many of the elites did it themselves, thus awarding ordinary people qualities they don’t have. Every time someone like Sam Zell or Sheldon Adelson goes on TV and delivers us a sermon on his scrappy childhood and pulling themselves by the bootstraps and how anyone can do it – that’s where it all breaks down. No, not anyone can do it. It takes a special person in a propitious situation at the right time with the right amount of resources. It also takes some noblesse oblige from the elites. But let’s stop pretending that these days everyone can do it.

Thus the ordinary people seek refuge in other things, like their self-identity, or belonging to a group, or religion. And the elites can’t complain, don’t have the right to complain, about the unwashed rubes who just don’t understand things. It is the elite’s job to understand those things and to show prudency and statesmanship and restraint and to not fuck things up the way they did in the last few decades. And then the elites act surprised when these people don’t vote the way we want them to vote.

Ordinary people, like the elites, want to be and feel special. But when they are denied access to real political and economic resources and get offered yoga or some worthless business advice instead, the soil is rich for social break down and various nationalists, separatists’ and populists movements. When that happens, the elites will have no one to blame but themselves.

Tom Perkins is an attention-seeking poseur.

If you are genuinely afraid of Kristallnacht, I mean really, seriously afraid that the unwashed will come to your mansion with pitchforks, then you should be doing something to avoid it. If you are not doing anything about it then you do not consider those threats to be serious and your goal is simply to grab headlines and upset a lot of people. If you are not a complete fool, you know that comments like this will piss off a lot of people and because you choose to do it anyway, I suspect you want to see the reaction. The public outrage that ensues is fitting to your worldview: you essentially create your own reality that didn’t really exist before you made those comments. People get pissed and you get to point finger at them and say: “See? I told you so. The 99% are intolerant of success.” Nice racket!

Anyway, I digress. I’d like to explore options for someone who thinks that Kristallnacht is really coming. Those option might include: leaving the country; try to make a deal with those in power; in some way placate those unwashed masses. Seriously, if paying taxes is as bad as a Kristallnacht, you wouldn’t think twice before packing, making a money transfer to Switzerland and leaving. When there is a threat to your life, even a profitable business won’t stop you, right?

Second option would include making a deal with those in power. The 1% would have to convince the Congress to pass a bill that will cut their carried interest tax rate from 20% to, well, whatever it is that they think is commensurate with fair treatment. Considering that 20% = Kristallnacht (a rather steep starting point, the next notch on that scale surely wouldn’t be a Civil Rights Act), a 15% would probably constitute an equivalent of Southern segregation (where the 1% would compare themselves to blacks) and a 10% – a soft discrimination and bigotry (where the 1% see themselves as women and gays). Because of the severity of the starting point, an almost vertical reduction in taxes would only be adequate to bring full satisfaction to those guys. There can be several reasons they do not pursue that option. There are not enough votes in Congress; Obama will veto it; there are plenty of loopholes to not pay even that 20% rate. Such lackluster approach is telling. I would expect a more forceful appeal to power if, you know, you were about to get killed!

Third option – placating the ingrates – seems like a viable one. The problem here is that the slogans from the 80s era that used to put a numbing spell on any signs of unrest among the working stiffs, stopped working in a past few years. It’s hard to accuse them of being lazy fucks and tell them to go get a job – a foolproof shortcut that used to silence any critic in the olden years. But today it seems like these lazy fucks want jobs after all. Now, again, let’s remember that the backdrop here is that your life and livelihood is on the line. You have billions in cash with nowhere to put it. Unemployed, like the zombies in the World War Z movie, are spilling over your fence, hungry for your blood. You put two and two together and throw money at them, in the form of employment. I mean it doesn’t have to be meaningful employment: you can create some stupid data entry or spreadsheet jobs for them for, like $30K a year. Who cares about the bottom line at this point? We’re talking about you staying alive!! The price for your life is a paycheck for those storming the gate.

Naturally, I’m engaging in extreme metaphors in seeking solutions, but only because the original parameters of the problem were just as extreme.

Because neither Tom Perkins, nor Sam Zell are inclined to do anything about it, except taunting the audience even more, is a proof that they are a bunch of attention seeking poseurs. If anything leads to “economic extinction” of Tom Perkinses, it will be Tom Perkins himself.