Money Don’t Buy You Smarts

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Residents of the Hamptons and their rich friends ♥ Mittens. Maeve Reston writes for the Los Angeles Times:

The line of Range Rovers, BMWs, Porsche roadsters and one gleaming cherry red Ferrari began queuing outside of Revlon Chairman Ronald Perelman’s estate off Montauk Highway long before Romney arrived, as campaign aides and staffers in white polo shirts emblazoned with the logo of Perelman’s property — the Creeks — checked off names under tight security. …

… A New York City donor a few cars back, who also would not give her name, said Romney needed to do a better job connecting. “I don’t think the common person is getting it,” she said from the passenger seat of a Range Rover stamped with East Hampton beach permits. “Nobody understands why Obama is hurting them.

“We’ve got the message,” she added. “But my college kid, the baby sitters, the nails ladies — everybody who’s got the right to vote — they don’t understand what’s going on. I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

Dogby has a chart explaining the impact. And I like the little dig at “everybody who’s got the right to vote.” The next step, of course, is to see to it the unwashed masses don’t get to vote any more, since they make bad choices.

The Zambrellis of New York City said they had been Obama supporters four years ago, but not now.

The Zambrellis scoffed at attempts by the Democrats — who mocked Romney in an ad Sunday as “great for oil billionaires, bad for the middle class” — to wage class warfare. “Would you like to hear about the fundraisers I went to for him?” Sharon Zambrelli said of Obama. “Do you have an hour? … All the ones in the city — it was all of Wall Street.”

Apparently in her mind, attending an Obama fundraiser in ’08 gives one humanitarian cred, something along the lines of tending to lepers with Mother Teresa.

Michael Barbaro and Sarah Wheaton write for the New York Times,

A few cars back, Ted Conklin, the owner of the American Hotel in Sag Habor, N.Y., long a favorite of the well-off and well-known in the Hamptons, could barely contain his displeasure with Mr. Obama. “He is a socialist. His idea is find a problem that doesn’t exist and get government to intervene,” Mr. Conklin said from inside a gold-colored Mercedes as his wife, Carol Simmons, nodded in agreement.

I wish he’d been pressed for an example of a problem that doesn’t exist. Lack of health care, maybe?

Ms. Simmons paused to highlight what she said was her husband’s generous spirit: “Tell them who’s on your yacht this weekend! Tell him!”

Over Mr. Conklin’s objections, Ms. Simmons disclosed that a major executive from Miramax, the movie company, was on the 75-foot yacht, because, she said, there were no rooms left at the hotel.

Oh, the humanity. BTW, the price of admission to this little shindig was $25,000 a head.

14 thoughts on “Money Don’t Buy You Smarts”

  2. All those turds collected in one punch bowl.
    Where’s a stray drone missile when you need one?

    “I just think if you’re lower income — one, you’re not as educated, two, they don’t understand how it works, they don’t understand how the systems work, they don’t understand the impact.”

    Yes, we riff-raff don’t understand.

    And here’s what WE DON’T understand:
    What are you rich people thinking?
    Are you even thinking? Does having more than a certain amount of money require a lobotomy?
    People can’t buy sh*t – we can’t afford it – WE HAVE NO FECKIN’ JOBS, NO FECKIN’ MONEY, LADY!!!
    How, are you going to stay at the level you’re at? Who is going to pay for that?

    A lot of these uber-rich @$$holes are my age, 54, or older.
    They don’t have any excuse for not knowing that income inequality, while being great for them, is death to our society as we know it.
    They grew up getting the benefits from programs FDR, Truman, and even Ike, built. If they’re recently wealthy, their parents enjoyed the benefits of SS and Medicare.
    They drove to vacations on roads built by taxes. Flew to meetings or get-away’s using airports paid for by taxes.
    TAXES!
    And who paid for all of that?
    WE ALL DID! Through PROGRESSIVE taxation.

    Now, we riff-raff are slowly dying.
    My parent’s modest house (as appraised by the town) has lost over $100,000 dollars since the height of the real estate bubble, before it burst – $12,000 of that in the past year alone!
    I have no job. My father passed away. My Mom and I live on his SS money – my Mom losing her SS money in the process.
    We live as cheaply as possible, spending as little as humanly possible. We eat cheap sh*t. Drink water we pay taxes on, and buy cheap juice. And the only “luxuries” we allow ourselves are internet access for me, cable TV for two rooms, one meal a month when I buy a pound of shrimp and cook them whatever way my Mom wants, and a drink of the cheapest vodka for me, or cheap wine for my Mom, at dinner. Oh – and AC in ONE ROOM, since I don’t want my 80 year-old mother baking and sweating to death while she’s trying to watch TV through ever more blind eyes.
    THAT’S IT!
    WE AIN’T SPENDIN’ NO MORE MONEY THAN WE HAVE TO!!!
    So, we buy just enough of the sh*t you rich people and your corporations are selling to stay alive – with the “luxuries” I noted above.

    And August, when the final 2012 tax payment on the house is due, and the electric bill for the AC we’ve had to use comes in, we may have to dip into a savings account that has almost nothing in it, or take another (last?) loan off the $50,000 Line-of-Credit on the house that has only a couple of thousand dollars left on it.

    So, in August, rather than dip into the meager savings, or the final dollars on the LOC, we’ll say “Feck the shrimp this month, and let’s drink water with dinner so we can keep the AC going as this planet continues to heat,” and give you rich people and your corporations EVEN LESS MONEY!!!

    When are you rich, greedy, and stupid, people going to see that your luxury apartments, penthouses, and mansions, are standing on foundations that are at the shattering point?
    When we finally crack, you don’t think you’re going to crash down?
    Think again.
    Sure, you can jet off and live somewhere else. But your asset’s here will depreciate drastically. That $5 million dollar home – now worth whatever the poor people left can afford – which will not be what you sell if for – so, it’ll be a worthless asset. Ditto the empty penthouse – same with the luxury apartments and mansions.
    WorthLESS, if not completely WORTHLESS!

    And, what kind of a welcome do you think you’ll get, and how hospitable will your stay in your new country be, when the new country realizes that it let in a bunch of morons with depreciating assets, who’ve already shown the willingness to cut off their noses to spite their faces, and may be ready to do so again there?

    And sure, EVERYTHING’S global now – including the workforces, the potential buyers, and your assets.

    BUT POVERTY IS GLOBAL TOO!
    And the number of people in poverty here, and in the world, keeps growing and growing – something your assets may not continue to do until you realize something very important:
    PEOPLE CAN’T BUY ANY OF THE SH*T YOU NEED TO SELL TO MAKE AND KEEP YOUR MONEY, ‘CAUSE MORE AND MORE OF US AIN’T GOT NONE!!!!!!!!!!!!!

    I hope you enjoy the eventual trip to the same Hell as you are damning the rest of us to.
    We’ll save the hottest seats for you.
    YA FECKIN’ NOSELESS IDJITS!!!

    Ok – end of long rant.
    What cheap sh*t do we want for breakfast?

  3. Most jobs in my profession have gone to China, even though they do horribly shabby work. No new investment in the US. Banks and companies are sitting on TONS of money here and in, yes, the Caymen Islands instead of expanding businesses here or starting new ones. Last week another PAC (of fools) threw another $25 M at Mittens. They could have hired a bunch of people, at high salaries, even, instead of pissing it away on Mr. Moneybags.

    Eat the rich, man.

  5. OY!
    This dying laptop sucks!
    NO! Just kidding, baby – you da bestest!!!

    “Eat the rich, man.”

    Because of personal trainers and dieticians, they’re all to lean – and we fat poor people can’t afford the lean cuts.

    So they’re hoping fat poor people eat one another.

    And so far, it’s kinda workin’, since we poor people keep fighting one another over stupid sh*t instead of our focusing our energies on the real enemy – THEM!
    Maybe after the next election, if the R’s win, we’ll have no other choice but to start killing one another off to survive. They’ll like that.
    And FSM, we know THEY’LL never lend a hand to help us – but do everything they can to hurt us.

  6. I’m thinking the ones that shouldn’t be allowed to vote are the rich. They clearly have no idea what is going on in this country. How the middle-class is disappearing. Time for the pitchforks, comrades.

  7. These rich people voting is the least of our problems, buckeyblue – if they even bother to vote at all.

    It’s the pundits and propagandists, their mass-communications mediums, and politicians they can buy, who can keep the vast majority of the real voters divided, so that they can conquer.

    And ya gotta admit – they’ve been doing a great job of that for almost 50 years!

    If they made whatever sh*t it is they sell as good as their divide and conquer bullsh*t, nothing they sell would ever need to be replaced. It seems rather permanent.

  8. The Ted Conklin remark echoes the tenor of a speech I recently sat through given by a self-proclaimed patriotic American conservative.

    Each ‘issue’ he tackled – social, political, economic – if left to the present administration to deal with/solve would, finally, be at the mercy of bureaucrats, socialists, regulators or union bosses, all of whom were in reality intent on destroying America as we know it.

    Instead we must turn over our country to corporatists, capitalists, the market freed of regulators and the management side (only) of labor deliberations.

    I’m sure the Hampton crowd would whole-heartedly agree.

  9. Oh, I COMPLETELY understand how the system works, that’s why I joined the church of George Carlin several years ago.
    The way it works, is you dumb everybody down to the level where they think their owners are deserving champaign and caviar, and everyone else gets “the dream”.
    ‘Nothing wrong with offshore bank accounts or retaining tax lawyers and personel physicians;nothing wrong with contracting Chinese slave labor to make what used to be made here.
    And ‘Gulag is right; who’s gonna buy the stuff they need to sell to keep living their lifestyle when nobody can afford anything beyond the basic necessities?
    When you can get a working man to hate teachers, postal workers, lifeguards, union tradesmen,and the folks that work at city hall; you’ve bloody well killed Mayberry.
    These days, the right worships money, hate radio, the military, Israel, and a sick twisted form of Christianity.Everybody else can suck it……………

  10. All for the vague notion that Mittens will favor their interests over all others… It’s refreshing in a macabre sent to see someone voting their own interests. At least doing that makes some sort of sense regardless of how god awful bad it is for most Americans.

  11. Groucho Marx, if he were alive today:
    “Why, I’d horse-crop you, if I only had a dressage horse~”

  13. I get the impression that the babysitters and the nails ladies don’t deserve the right to vote.

    Some of us are just born to rule, right, Madame de Pompadour?

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