Joshua Brown: “Dear Jamie Dimon”
Here Joshua Brown, a New York investment advisor, writes compellingly about the heart of America’s fury after the 2008 meltdown (without the normal tribal 1/2 view) in his blog “The Reformed Broker” (and gives us another view on our rising inequality asteroid):
Not only do we not “hate the rich” as you and other em-bubbled plutocrats have postulated, in point of fact, we love them… We love the success stories in our midst and it is a distinctly American trait to believe that we can all follow in the footsteps of the elite, even though so few of us ever actually do.
So, no, we don’t hate the rich. What we hate are the predators.
What we hate are the people who we view as having found their success as a consequence of the damage their activities have done to our country. What we hate are those who take and give nothing back in the form of innovation, convenience, entertainment or scientific progress. We hate those who’ve exploited political relationships and stupidity to rake in even more of the nation’s wealth while simultaneously driving the potential for success further away from the grasp of everyone else…
America hates unjustified privilege, it hates an unfair playing field and crony capitalism without the threat of bankruptcy, it hates privatized gains and socialized losses, it hates rule changes that benefit the few at the expense of the many and it hates people who have been bailed out and don’t display even the slightest bit of remorse or humbleness in the presence of so much suffering in the aftermath.