this post was submitted on 09 Sep 2023
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7
Billionaire close to tears amid fears of "lefties" like AOC, Bernie Sanders (www.newsweek.com)
submitted 1 year ago by runiq@feddit.de to c/politics@beehaw.org
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Billionaire Leon Cooperman was on the verge of tears while speaking about his concern about "the lefties" and their progressive outlook on capitalism.

"I've lived the American dream. I'm trying to convince people like [Senators] Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)—don't move away from capitalism. Capitalism is the best system," Cooperman said on CNBC's Squawk Box on Friday while holding back tears. "I get choked up when I talk about it because basically, my father came to America at the age of 12 as a plumber's apprentice. No education."

"I went to public school in the Bronx, high school in the Bronx, college in the Bronx. I started my career in Wall Street the day after I got my MBA from Columbia. I had no money. I couldn't afford a vacation. I made a lot of money. I'm giving it all back," Cooperman said before co-anchor Rebecca Quick stepped in as he choked up.

"Giving it all back?" Give me a fucking break, asshole.

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[–] Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social 4 points 1 year ago (2 children)

"...my father came to America at the age of 12 as a plumber’s apprentice. No education.”

“I went to public school in the Bronx, high school in the Bronx, college in the Bronx. I started my career in Wall Street the day after I got my MBA from Columbia. I had no money. I couldn’t afford a vacation. I made a lot of money. I’m giving it all back...

I'm imagining the cost of living that allowed his father to live on the salary of a 12 year old who worked as a plumbers assistant. I'm also imagining that this billionaire probably went to Bronx Science (a free public school now where attendees likely have paid for test prep to do well on the entrance exam, out of reach for a lot of NYC public school students). If he went to college in the Bronx, it was likely Fordham - the 2023 cost of attendance (tuition plus fees and books) is now $89,575. For an MBA from Columbia, their cost of attendance (which includes room and board) is now $127,058 in 2023.

He cannot make the connection that COL and earnings have grown exponentially since the time his father was 12, yet wages haven't. Does he not see that very few students would be able to go to private universities for undergrad and grad schools and service their debt with current wages? How many graduate and immediately start working on Wall Street? He's probably against WFH, too, solely seeing the benefit to his commercial real estate portfolio and ignoring the commuting costs and work life balance issues for the workers. The world capitalism gave him and his father is gone. At this point it's as real as ghosts and dreams. We are dealing with the current world that capitalism has given us, a capitalism that only a billionaire would cry over.

[–] tryptaminev@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

hat COL and earnings have grown exponentially since the time his father was 12, yet wages haven’t. Does he not see that very few students would be able to go to private...

He sees and he knows. It is crocodile tears of a men that has a "fuck you i got mine" attitude.

[–] KevonLooney@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

No, he probably doesn't know. It's been decades since he had any real "economic anxiety". His type of budgeting and belt tightening is renting out his yacht when he's not using it, or staying at his current vacation homes instead of buying new ones.

He literally doesn't know what the average person experiences, so we shouldn't listen to him for advice.

[–] tryptaminev@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

he made his billions at wall street and is an educated economist. He knows exactly how the system runs and how it fucks people over. He is investing in the system to be like this after all.

[–] ikiru@lemmy.ml 1 points 1 year ago

We are dealing with the current world that capitalism has given us, a capitalism that only a billionaire would cry over.

That's where you're wrong! Billionaires still have loyal friends unlike you!

bootlicker

[–] sanzky@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

lottery winner tries to convince people to spend all their savings in lottery tickets: “It worked for me and it can work for you too”

[–] kent_eh@lemmy.ca 2 points 1 year ago

"I've lived the American dream.

While creating more nightmarish conditions for others.

Congratulations, and fuck you.

[–] resin85@lemmy.ca 1 points 1 year ago

So he went to public school in New York back before Reagan started cutting taxes for the rich and exploding the wealth gap. The taxes that paid for that very school and gave him his start. Now this twat is on the conservative side of completely gutting public schools.

[–] ConsciousCode@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Now I want to see his reaction when people start breaking out the guillotines because his ilk have made peaceful resolution impossible.

[–] bermuda@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

capitalism is the best system

guy who made lots of money under capitalism expresses that capitalism is the best system

[–] agegamon@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

There are two groups of people who support capitalism as it exists today:

  1. The truly rich, the 1%, who exclusively got that way by exploiting the 99% as much as physically possible, and

  2. The portion of the 99% who've been brainwashed through various methods into thinking that they can become rich -or- that the rich will "watch out for them" or some equivalent fairytale

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (3 children)

There are two groups of people:

Those that think there are two groups of people, and those that don't.

The premise that socialism is better relies on the government not becoming corrupt. When it fails, it's really bad.

Capitalism also functions great when the government isn't corrupt ... it gives consumers choice and fails much more softly.

If you look at examples of cooperatives, socialist utopia projects, etc.. they break down much for the same reason capitalism has broken down for the majority of people in the US... The largest party is the party that doesn't vote, and of those that vote half of them don't know what they're voting for, and of those that know what they're voting for half of them are basing their votes on misinformation.

Managing society takes work from everybody in society. There's no easy button that keeps the train on the tracks.

To be fair, you did qualify "as it exists today" and that makes a difference. However, the point is it's not capitalism that failed us, in many ways it's ourselves, our parents, and/or our grandparents not paying attention and elected the right people. Similarly those same people buy the cheapest thing in Walmart and don't stop to ask themselves why it's so cheap.

Union busting, the manufacturing exodus, etc, it all could've been stopped if people had just paid more attention. You'll never get me to trust that by moving to socialism as an economic model people are suddenly going to pay more attention and not fuck it up.

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

This is why every country with a better lifestyle than the US is not a fully communist one, but a capitalist one with some key socialist programs like universal healthcare, free college education, generous paid maternal leave, standard 5 weeks of holiday for all workers, etc. These should be considered basic necessities in any relatively wealthy country.

I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs. At some point, hopefully we become so efficient at “work” that we can use UBI to help people survive who want to do something outside the usual 9-5 (or who have been automated out of their job).

[–] sandriver@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Unfortunately I live in a country where "social wages" and an actual wage freeze were later used to suppress labour actions, and then retracted anyway. There's a homeless crisis and mental illness suicide pandemic now. Oh yeah and Canada is euthanising "lost cause" disabled people, and Sweden let COVID cull off some of the elderly population...

Social safety nets can always be retracted. Social liberalism has run its course as a viable strategy, much like vanguardism (which is what people mean when they think of "communism"). We need perdurable systems, and as far as I'm concerned, confederalist systems are the only empirically successful systems, although even then it's hit or miss; see the collapse of syndicalism in Catalunya due to socialist infighting.

Anyway I'm a Bookchinite and currently making peace with the idea I may not live to see 2024, so that's my context.

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Say what you will, but the countries with a good balance of socialist and capitalist policies are still on the top of every list, from happiness to life expectancy, to income equality to health to education, etc.

You can say what you want about Canada and Sweden, but when compared to the US' far more "anarchist" approach, both have far longer life spans and higher rates of health than the US does.

As you use very ambiguous terms like Bookchinite, and confederalist which are open to massive amounts of interpretation, it's not really clear what you are proposing (government is a form of confederation, after all). But I suppose you are hinting at being a Libertarian Socialist. It's a view which I am very sympathetic to, but one in which the upheaval needed to implement would end us up back at some form of fascism, similar to the previous attempts at communism. I would love to see such a system someday, but I think the only way it could ever come about is by starting from social democracy and gradually working towards it. It could likely take centuries.

Social democracy is the best system we have managed to date by just about any yardstick we have for measurement. That's not to say it's perfect, I can imagine many types of organizational systems which could be considered far superior should we actually be able to implement them correctly, but unfortunatley human nature is a massive blocking point to so many things, and the tendency is always towards some form of fascism if things become unstable. So IMO, we have to first get as much of the world onto the "Scandanavian model" of stable social democracy with good rule of law, and then work from that point of stability to something even better (I'm a fan of UBI personally as it's far easier to implement than any sort of system which gets rid of property rights and achieves much the same thing when widely implemented).

[–] TokenBoomer@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

You have such a limited understanding of everything you profess to know about. It’s disheartening. Read Marx. Read Kropotkin. Read Lenin. Read Mao. These people aren’t the demons capitalist want you to see them as. They weren’t perfect either. But reading The NY Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and Wall Street Journal aren’t gonna give you the full understanding of economics. Socialism can work, but capitalism won’t let it.

[–] realitista@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago

Read my post. I never made any of them out to be demons. I'm pretty far left on the spectrum myself.

My only argument with any of those philosophies is that they are so hard to implement in the world that we live in. That if we try, I don't believe we will end up anywhere near what they wanted, and that we will end with something a lot worse than what we have now, something much more like fascism.

History bears this out pretty well. Now I know you will say "but those weren't real Marxist Leninist implementations". No, but they espoused to be in the beginning and degraded into something pretty close to fascism.

That is my concern. Not that I think the original ideas are evil incarnate.

[–] TokenBoomer@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don’t feel like debunking this crap, but you’re wrong and placing the blame on individuals.

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 2 points 1 year ago

Cooperations aren't people, but society sure as heck is.

[–] BricksDont@beehaw.org 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I don't think the US needs to go full socialist (mostly because I think it's impossible and as you said, still corruptible), but we need to lean more towards socialism to start clawing our way back to having a middle class. If we could get affordable universal healthcare and affordable colleges, I would be beyond thrilled. Even though these are things that many, many other countries have had for a long time.

I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs. At some point, hopefully we become so efficient at "work" that we can use UBI to help people survive who want to do something outside the usual 9-5 (or who have been automated out of their job).

[–] Dark_Arc@social.packetloss.gg 0 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If we could get affordable universal healthcare and affordable colleges, I would be beyond thrilled.

I agree.

I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs.

I don't really believe AI is going to come for that many jobs ... at least not in its current generation/family. It's more of a story teller than a serious threat (it's like a robot that builds caricatures of products that occasionally are correctly assembled).

That said, I'm not entirely opposed to a universal basic income or a universal supplementary income (a point my father made is that rather than trying to raise the minimum wage, why not progressively subsidize people below a certain threshold).

Personally, I'd prefer to see the efficiency gains result in a 3 or 4 day work week for most people. Lots of people would decline without anything to do and society in general could miss out on some great minds that instead of creating simply consumed.

[–] BricksDont@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Yes, I think we should already be at a 4 day work week for many jobs. If you look at productivity and efficiency growth since the 40 hour work week was invented, it's off the charts.

However, that's one of the problems with unbridled capitalism. The market demands constant growth, which is hard to sustain and doesn't reward easing up on employees.

[–] Treczoks@lemm.ee 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

If he gave it all back, why is he still a billionaire?

[–] massive_bereavement@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's a neat trick: You give your donations to a foundation where you also put your family members, and use that foundation to lobby for the stuff that you're investing in.

That's at least mostly what Gates is doing.

[–] downpunxx@kbin.social 0 points 1 year ago (3 children)

Are you talking about Bill Gates who's given tens of Billions to eradicate mosquito borne Malaria, and has pledged to give away ALL of his money to charity upon his death, that Bill Gates?

[–] massive_bereavement@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Yes, please see the links below, however as a brief summary:

Bill and Melinda Gates foundation do two things: Invest in public issues and lobby governments to spend in said issues, in exchange for further donations and investments.

However, in parallel, Bill Gates also invests in specific companies that will be targeted as main providers for those activities.
One could consider that he's investing in companies that help out (e.g., vaccination) and that's not a bad thing. The problem is that he is bennefiting from lobbying in pro of the companies he has invested on.

We could also agree that even if he's bullying governments and institutions into giving him more money through those companies, at the end it is a positive boost (like the example you mention).

That's not the case with Common Core: Diane Ravitch put it better than I could here, but basically Bill Gates' is forcing public schools into programs that do not work, alienate teachers and students, have almost bankrupt public education and required purchasing materials from companies he controlled.

Furthermore, for each time Common Core failed, he doubled down, and for each consecutive failure he decided that a new drastic measure will solve the issue, even though the education community was saying otherwise.

The issue with these foundations is that rich people believe they have the solution to all the problems: not money but their intellect, and that they know more than everyone combined on that profession.

This is in parallel what is been happening with carbon capture. This foundation is also lobbying for a technology that has been heavily critisized as a pipedream; however, surprise surprise, Bill Gates do have large investments in carbon capture companies (e.g. Heirloom).

Again, I do not think he's evil or is going to inject me with pentium II mmx now; I just think he feels smarter than everyone else and is misguiding governments to invest in failed practices despite what the actual professionals are saying.

Videos:
https://youtu.be/U3Z9gBKuTIk (CNBC - How Common Core Broke U.S. Schools)
https://youtu.be/laGtd-b0vMY (FT - Carbon Capture: hopes, challenges and controversies)
https://youtu.be/ag5zQeXC-TY (THD - How Bill Gates Hijacked US Education Agenda (Opinion))

  • nccs.urban.org/publication/nonprofit-sector-brief-2019#recipients
  • statista.com/statistics/250878/number-of-foundations-in-the-united-states
  • propublica.org/article/the-secret-irs-files-trove-of-never-before-seen-records-reveal-how-the-wealthiest-avoid-income-tax
  • nytimes.com/2021/06/08/us/politics/income-taxes-bezos-musk-buffett.html
  • irs.gov/charities-non-profits/private-foundations/taxes-on-failure-to-distribute-income-private-foundations
  • nptrust.org/philanthropic-resources/charitable-giving-statistics
  • issuelab.org/resources/36381/36381.pdf
  • thenation.com/article/society/bill-gates-foundation-philanthropy
  • latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2007-jan-07-na-gatesx07-story.html
  • sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1166559/000110465923060842/0001104659-23-060842-index.html
  • sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1663801/000089843223000302/0000898432-23-000302-index.html
  • latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-2012-may-18-la-ford-foundation-los-angeles-times-20120517-story.html
  • archives.cjr.org/behind_the_news/ford_foundation_los_angeles_ti.php
  • jacobin.com/2015/11/philanthropy-charity-banga-carnegie-gates-foundation-development
  • washingtonpost.com/local/education/pearson-pays-77-million-in-common-core-settlement/2013/12/13/77515bba-6423-11e3-aa81-e1dab1360323_story.html
  • sec.gov/Archives/edgar/data/1067983/000095012323005270/0000950123-23-005270-index.html
  • philanthropynewsdigest.org/news/gates-foundation-awards-11-million-for-financial-inclusion-in-africa
  • news.stanford.edu/2018/12/03/the-problems-with-philanthropy
  • washingtonpost.com/education/2021/05/05/what-bill-melinda-gates-did-to-education
  • chalkbeat.org/2018/6/21/21105193/the-gates-foundation-bet-big-on-teacher-evaluation-the-report-it-commissioned-explains-how-those-eff
  • currentaffairs.org/2021/05/humanity-does-not-need-bill-gates
  • prweb.com/releases/2014/02/prweb11601976.htm
  • washingtonpost.com/education/2020/02/10/bill-melinda-gates-have-spent-billions-dollars-shape-education-policy-now-they-say-theyre-skeptical-billionaires-trying-do-just-that
  • philanthropyroundtable.org/almanac/statistics-on-u-s-generosity/[28] charitywatch.org/nonprofit-compensation-packages-of-1-million-or-more
  • nytimes.com/2013/07/27/opinion/the-charitable-industrial-complex.html
  • latimes.com/business/la-na-gates8jan8-story.html
  • policy-practice.oxfam.org/resources/carbon-billionaires-the-investment-emissions-of-the-worlds-richest-people-621446
  • oxfam.org/en/research/time-care → PDF report
  • oxfam.org/en/research/survival-richest → PDF report
[–] OmnipotentEntity@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I mean, I think he's evil. But I also remember Microsoft in the 90s: the EEE strategy, the monopolistic bullshit with web browsers, the FUD against competitors, the Strong arming of computer manufacturers to not offer alternatives, etc.

[–] SnipingNinja@slrpnk.net 0 points 1 year ago (2 children)

I mean, I think he's evil.

You don't mean to say that the guy who tried to keep vaccines for COVID patented instead of making them free for everyone to manufacture is evil, right?

[–] massive_bereavement@kbin.social 1 points 1 year ago

You're probably right, I just watered down my rant to make it sound less like 5G chips in vaccines gang.

[–] ConsciousCode@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Gates is a weird figure - I don't think he's actually evil (nowadays), because evil implies malicious intent. Rather, he unintentionally commits evil actions (those which harm people and if committed with full understanding would be unambiguously evil) as a result of his own personal extremely warped values. The guy thinks patent law is the highest moral good, so the millions of people who don't get vaccinated as a result are either forgotten about or a necessary sacrifice for the societal good of protecting patents (which he might justify as making these sorts of innovations possible in the first place - demonstrably incorrect, but good luck getting him to listen to anyone who might tell him that).

tl;dr you can't be evil by human standards if you have alien blue and orange morality.

[–] CeruleanRuin@lemmings.world 1 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago)

He's certainly a better example than most, but there's nothing stopping him from using his insane wealth to literally BUY reform, or even giving it all away now and living comfortably on the interest alone. Money like that could purchase half of Congress.

[–] TokenBoomer@beehaw.org 1 points 1 year ago

Why wait until death?

[–] stefenauris@pawb.social 1 points 1 year ago

yeah it worked for you, you miserable old fuck. unfortunately it's failed everyone else

[–] bquintb@midwest.social 1 points 1 year ago (1 children)

I was told there would be a video of a crying billionaire.

[–] TokenBoomer@beehaw.org 2 points 1 year ago

Yeah, where video?