Bloomberg reports: Jamie Dimon, the highest-paid chief executive officer among the heads of the six biggest U.S. banks, turned a question at an investors’ conference in New York this month into an occasion to defend wealth.
“Acting like everyone who’s been successful is bad and because you’re rich you’re bad, I don’t understand it,” the JPMorgan Chase & Co. (JPM) CEO told an audience member who asked about hostility toward bankers. “Sometimes there’s a bad apple, yet we denigrate the whole.”
Dimon, 55, whose 2010 compensation was $23 million, joined billionaires including hedge-fund manager John Paulson and Home Depot Inc. (HD) co-founder Bernard Marcus in using speeches, open letters and television appearances to defend themselves and the richest 1 percent of the population targeted by Occupy Wall Street demonstrators.
If successful businesspeople don’t go public to share their stories and talk about their troubles, “they deserve what they’re going to get,” said Marcus, 82, a founding member of Job Creators Alliance, a Dallas-based nonprofit that develops talking points and op-ed pieces aimed at “shaping the national agenda,” according to the group’s website. He said he isn’t worried that speaking out might make him a target of protesters.
“Who gives a crap about some imbecile?” Marcus said. “Are you kidding me?”
‘Feels Lonely’The organization assisted John A. Allison IV, a director of BB&T Corp. (BBT), the ninth-largest U.S. bank, and Staples Inc. co- founder Thomas Stemberg with media appearances this month.
“It still feels lonely, but the chorus is definitely increased,” Allison, 63, a former CEO of the Winston-Salem, North Carolina-based bank and now a professor at Wake Forest University’s business school, said in an interview.
At a lunch in New York, Stemberg and Allison shared their disdain for Section 953(b) of the Dodd-Frank Act, which requires public companies to disclose the ratio between the compensation of their CEOs and employee medians, according to Allison. The rule, still being fine-tuned by the Securities and Exchange Commission, is “incredibly wasteful” because it takes up time and resources, he said. Stemberg called the rule “insane” in an e-mail to Bloomberg News.
“Instead of an attack on the 1 percent, let’s call it an attack on the very productive,” Allison said. “This attack is destructive.”
How can we get anywhere when the “job creators” think and speak like this, and the populace follows Faux news and the rest (GE, Westinghouse, Disney etc) and does not care to know?
Occupy and keep fighting, for yourselves and the planet. Nobody will give up power and riches (or even reduce them a little) without push, but you are the majoriy. Try to Reps of you and not lobbies.
All we’re missing in this regard is an announcement from Obama to stop insulting his major source of re-election funding. The corruption is so deep and widespread that it’s hard to see how it will ever get cleaned up. Although we are seeing OWS going into semi-hibernation, I’m confident that the spring will bring a newer, more robust movement. And I hope they mount a direct threat to Obama’s campaign.
They are, of course, thoroughly corrupt. but beware of 3rd Party fantasies. In November, 2012 we will have as President EITHER Obama OR somrome like Romney orNewt. that’s it. No one else will be in the oval office. And the best thing about Obama is the many criminal and stupid things that he Has NOT done–like cave to the maniacs who want a war with Iran. I’m not saying I like him, or that you should. I’m saying that the art of politics at its best is the fine art of averting the very worst and stupidest. Whichnwe had from 2000 to 2008. And Whichnwe could easily have again. By all means organize and protet. And also, remain part pf the a reality- based community…