Cooperman’s contempt for people who aren’t at least half as rich as he is is without limit. He discusses friends of his, a “top cardiologist,” and his wife, “of the country’s experts in women’s medicine,” who are heading into retirement with a mere $10 million. “You know, I lost more today than they spent a lifetime accumulating.” What pathetic weenies!
For Cooperman and his fellow übermenschen, President Obama has declared war on capitalism merely by threatening to increase their taxes to the same level that prevailed during the Clinton Administration, a time when profits and overall economic growth were distinctly superior to the supposedly halcyon days of the Bush Administration.
Comparing Hitler and Obama, as Cooperman did last year at the CNBC conference [held in New York in September 2011, where, according to Freeland, Cooperman “compared Hitler’s rise to power with Obama’s ascent to the Presidency, citing disaffected majorities in both countries who elected inexperienced leaders”], is something of a meme. In 2010, the private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, of the Blackstone Group, compared the President’s as yet unsuccessful effort to eliminate some of the preferential tax treatment his sector receives to Hitler’s invasion of Poland. After Cooperman made his Hitler comment, he has said, his wife called him a “schmuck.” But he couldn’t resist repeating the analogy when we spoke in May of this year. “You know, the largest and greatest country in the free world put a forty-seven-year-old guy that never worked a day in his life and made him in charge of the free world,” Cooperman said. “Not totally different from taking Adolf Hitler in Germany and making him in charge of Germany because people were economically dissatisfied. Now, Obama’s not Hitler. I don’t even mean to say anything like that. But it is a question that the dissatisfaction of the populace was so great that they were willing to take a chance on an untested individual.”
In 1933, Hitler was appointed chancellor of Germany after the Nazi Party won about one-third of the popular vote. He quickly assumed dictatorial powers, staging bloody purges of his own party, revoking the German citizenship of all Jews, and sending political opponents to concentration camps. Obama was elected president by the largest majority accorded an incoming president since Eisenhower. He encountered furious opposition from the Republican Party. When the Republicans took control of the House of Representatives in 2010, he did not have their leaders imprisoned or murdered.
When Hitler invaded Poland in 1939, he planned to exterminate all the Jews in that country, and also execute every Pole with a college degree. In the long term, he planned to eliminate the Polish language, the Polish Catholic Church, destroy every book, newspaper, or journal written in Polish, and reduce the Polish people to the level of slaves. The modern-day equivalent, apparently, is ObamaCare and a 5% bump in tax liability for the rich. Well, at least we know how much they love their money.
These facts are not obscure. It might be expected that educated people might know them. But men like Cooperman and Schwazman are so swollen with pride that the failure of the President of the United States to conform to their least whim drives them to the most vicious and absurd comparisons, for which they later gracelessly apologize.
It goes without saying that they assume not the least responsibility for the global meltdown which would have obliterated all their fortunes had not the federal government intervened. And since the Tea Party “rage” over the bailout emerged, their first and only instinct has been to stand by and hope that all the fury will be spent on the government. When the populist Republican right threatened to destroy the credit of the United States by refusing to allow an increase in the debt ceiling, Wall Street was dumb. They are almost as hungry for Obama’s destruction as the Republican right, because he has given them 90% of what they wanted, instead of 100%. They continuously moan that they want Obama to contain entitlements, but they put no pressure on the Republicans to make a deal. All they really want is lower taxes and no regulation. The rest is noise and posturing.
Afterwords
Does anyone think that the most salient fact about Hitler is that “he never worked a day in his life”? If Cooperman isn’t saying that Obama is like Hitler, why does he make the comparison? Is he aware that, by his standards, Abraham Lincoln never worked a day in his life before becoming president? Nor John F. Kennedy, nor Richard Nixon? Nor Margaret Thatcher nor the Younger Pitt? For Cooperman, somehow, having his taxes raised is the equivalent of being sent to the gas chamber. Except, of course, he’s not saying that. He’s just saying.
