Scaling Warren Buffett’s mountain of success requires some ethical transgressions. The drive to achieve becomes so overbearing that it impinges on one’s conception of the good. Most other high achievers have had lapses in ethical judgment on their way to the summit: Jay-Z sold yay from the Marcy Projects, Michael Jordan punched the adorable Steve Kerr in the face, Steve Jobs was a cunty boss and an absentee father, Donald Sterling is a racist slum-lord who treats players like slaves. So excuse me if I don’t drop to my knees and fellate the newly minted left-wing heartthrob Warren Buffett. I think that Buffett’s recent outbursts of support for liberal tenets, like a more effective progressive tax structure and consequences for being a shitty politician, are hollow.
His incredible charitable donations are admired by everyone but Ayn Rand’s decomposing whore-corpse, but they fall in line with the attempts of other virtuosos’ attempts to rectify past errors. Jordan has drafted mediocre players to make up for beating up a mediocre player, Jay-Z is now a pawn in a Russian Billionaire’s attempts to woo talented players back to the New Jersey Nets, Steve Jobs wore a turtleneck of shame in his later years, and eventually even Donald Sterling will see the proverbial light and die a slow painful death as he stares into that proverbial light. But Buffett is overcompensating; his recent political equivocations lead me to believe he is cleverly playing both sides of the perception fence instead of actually giving a fuck about the fence.
He has always been a right-wing icon but now, because of a handful of clever statements, he is also a liberal darling, a capitalist success story who has found the error of his ways. He now apparently fights to rectify the inequalities in this country.
He is the American Dream that each tea-partier uses to portend the trajectory of their lives if they follow the teachings of Ayn Rand and Ronny Reagan. But the “American Dream” is now a statistical anomaly, a fate that is a near impossibility for so much of this country. But how could I ask a tea-partier to grasp statistics? Most of them believe that a Patriarch named Noah somehow built an ark without a Home Depot or power tools to escape God’s attempts to kill of the whole of humanity, and he then filled said ark with two of every animal in the world, including chipmunks, which we know to be impossible to catch, and then he sailed around the world and somehow survived “the perfect storm.” I guess I can see why they would believe in the false narrative of the “American Dream.” It fits nicely with the other fairy tales they believe. But the dream is dead and it was killed with the help of Bank of America and Goldman Sachs, two organizations that Warren Buffett funded.
Buffett has become a left-wing darling with the help of some ingenious quotes and columns. He has requested to be taxed more and accurately emphasized that his cleaning lady pays a higher tax-rate than he does. He then offered up this quote…
“I could end the deficit in five minutes. You just pass a law that says that any time there’s a deficit of more than three percent of GDP, all sitting members of Congress are ineligible for re-election. Yeah, yeah, now you’ve got the incentives in the right place, right?”
His words are hollow for two reasons. First, his solutions are not feasible. The tax rates on the wealthy have been in perpetual decline since it was at 90% in the 1950s. And with the dawdling pace of our government this will not change anytime soon, let alone during Buffett’s remaining lifetime. His second deficit resolution is impossible since it would require the Congress men and women responsible for the mess to pass the accountability law. Buffett’s statements are meant to engender good vibes from bearded hippies and the left-wing-gotcha media. He has landed a cameo on The Office and been commended by Olbermann, Michael Moore, and the guy who sells me my weed. But the fact that his requests will never come to fruition hurts his cause; it’s like blowing in the wind. It would be like me claiming that I would have been a hall-of-fame basketball player had I played in the 1950s. You cannot disprove my assertion with any more certainty than I can prove my assertion – but honestly, no one dunked or dribbled between their legs, I would have been a legend.
The second reason that his words carry no weight with me is because he is part of the problem. Out of one side of his mouth he gives liberals enough anarchy-porn to masturbate to while contributing billions and billions of dollars to the criminals who helped get us into this mess and continue to ensure that we will never get out of this mess. Buffett injected a $5 billion lifeline into Goldman Sachs; which Sachs then used to continue cheating investors with fraudulent mortgage-backed collateralized debt obligations. And as recently as August 2011 he invested another fat $5 billion into Bank of America; which helps Bank of America continue paying $0.00 in taxes, like they did last year. (Dammit, I heard someone say something about tax inadequacies earlier, hmm.) The Buffett money will help Bank of America get past that tiny misunderstanding that occurred when they openly lied and defrauded shareholders regarding their Merrill Lynch acquisition. Recently Bank of America and Goldman Sachs have gifted some well-timed donations to the NYPD – which for all intents and purposes has privatized a public, tax-funded municipal police force. The banks bought police protection, like the mob used to, except they did it legally and we can’t do a thing about it. The donation also successfully pitted middle-class against middle-class in an attempt to take attention away from their thieving transgressions, a method used by the British Empire in the 1700s to impede the growing discontent among the American colonists, and by slave owners to subdue uprisings. The same Occupy Wall Streeters who use Buffett as a bastion of their message are getting robbed and assaulted by the banks and the cops who have been directly and indirectly funded by Buffett.
Buffett is profiting off the destruction of this country and the middle-class while simultaneously alleging to give a fuck about the destruction of this country and the middle-class. So congratulations to Warren “The Contradiction” Buffett for being both the most prominent advocate of the liberal agenda and its most visible adversary.
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