Sam Zell Latest One Percenter To Stand Up For Poor Beleaguered One Percenters

Rich people! They just cannot shut up lately about how awesome they are and how everyone is out to get them. Last week it was spittle-brained lackwit Tom Perkins suggesting that the current mood towards our nation’s rich was just like Nazi Germany just before Hitler started shipping all the Jews off to death camps. Perkins was rightly excoriated for being a fucking idiot, though he did have at least one defender. Oops, make that two defenders. 

Sam Zell, who is both an infamous private equity/business titan and a Keebler elf caricature of Patrick Stewart, was interviewed on Bloombereg TV . The first chunk of the interview is a lot of boring blah blah about the new CEO at Microsoft and the real estate market and the young people wanting to live in cities and not buy houses where their old parents live out in “Bumblesomething.” But it’s towards the end of the interview that we get to the good stuff. First the interviewer, Betty Liu, asked Zell if he thought Chris Christie would survive his recent troubles.

I think he will. I think this Bridgegate scandal is another example of journalistic hypocrisy. I just wonder whether the president lying to everybody about healthcare was more…more or less important than Bridgegate because I think Bridgegate has gotten more press, more focus than who knew what and when…the President of the United States for three years told the American people the same thing. Not one reporter challenged that in three years? Not one reporter said that’s false?

Yes, the drafting of Obamacare got so little coverage, it was really a dereliction of the press’s duty that no one ever asked any questions about the plan or wrote millions upon millions of words examining what might or might not happen when the law’s provisions started kicking in. If only everyone on the internet had spent less time watching cat videos.

It was written! It was written!

Very Talmudic, Sam. What do you have to say about Tom Perkins, who compared the persecution of people with your wealth to the persecution of people with your religious beliefs in Germany in the 1930s?

The quote one percent are being pummeled because it’s politically convenient to do so. The problem is that the world and this country should not talk about envy of the one percent, it should talk about emulating the one percent. The one percentwork harder, the one percent are much bigger factors in all forms of our society…The politics of envy, the politics of class warfare are what have separated America from the rest of the world.

No class warfare in American history? Sam Zell has lived his 72 years on this earth wrapped in bubble wrap and locked in a trunk under a pile of boxes in an attic in an abandoned house with his eyes closed and cotton stuffed in his ears, apparently. If only, he tells Betty Liu, we had fewer government regulations because when government makes everyone’s life more difficult the one percent can afford to hire someone to help them figure out what to do while the less wealthy cannot, and if the government just simplifies everything for everyone then that gap would close. It's so simple even the proletariat can figure it out!

This was when we remembered that Sam Zell is a capitalistic sociopath who colluded with noted cowlick Rod Blagojevich to get the state of Illinois to help him out of financial difficulties by buying Wrigley Field, and who took over our belovedLos Angeles Timesa few years back and told it to go fuck itself, and why the hell are we listening to him anyway?

In conclusion, fuck Sam Zell with a rusty Nazi analogy.

[ HuffPo ]