HENRY lemon CREAM.
Put it all together and at this rate, the government—that is, taxpayers—will own much of the housing, auto, and financial sectors of the economy, those sectors that are failing fastest.
Consider too that the government already finances much of the aerospace industry, which is still doing reasonably well but depends on a foreign policy that itself has been a dismal failure. And a large portion of the pharmaceutical industry and health care sector (through the Medicare and Medicaid, the Medicare drug benefit, and support of basic research). These are in bad shape as well, and it seems likely the Obama administration will try to reorganize much of them.
What’s left? Most of high-tech, entertainment, hospitality, retail, and commodities. So far, at least, we taxpayers are not propping them up. And when the economy turns up—perhaps as soon as next year, most likely later—these sectors have a good chance of rebounding.
But the others—the ones the government is coming to own or manage—are less likely to rebound as quickly, if ever. If anyone has a good argument for why the shareholders of these losers should not be cleaned out first, and their creditors and executives and directors second—before taxpayers get stuck with the astonishingly-large bill—I would like to hear it.
It’s called Lemon Socialism. Taxpayers support the lemons. Capitalism is reserved for the winners.
So one might say that we are seeing not the tender creep of socialist possibilities into the national discourse, but their further erasure. Every time that we agree that the word “socialism” might refer to something other than, at a minimum, worker ownership if not indeed the end of surplus value extraction; every time that we misrecognize state corporatism as something other than a moment in capital’s “equilibrium in motion,” we “turn the wheel of discursive normativity a click” away from socialism. We forget what that word promises. Perhaps the most optimistic memory, as Jasper reminded us, is that the corporatist regimes have arisen historically in the fact of popular socialist challenges—but that in no way guarantees the motion will summon forth such a movement via some blind mechanism of counterweights.
“My bonus is ‘shameful’ — but I worked hard to get it,” said John Konstantinidis, a wholesale insurance broker, lunching Friday at Harry’s at Hanover Square.
“I’m a HENRY,” Mr. Konstantinidis added. “High Earner but Not Rich Yet.”
Nonetheless, it was rather remarkable on Friday how many white shirts denied getting a bonus altogether when they were asked. Indeed, if the data obtained by reporters in the district was any measure, there is no telling where that $18 billion really went.
What can be told, however, is that President Obama is substantially less popular on Wall Street this week than he was last week. Words like “outrageous,” “shameful” and “the height of irresponsibility” — especially when applied to a man’s paycheck — tend not to make you many friends.
“I think President Obama painted everyone with a broad stroke,” said Brian McCaffrey, 55, a Wall Street lawyer who was on his way to see a client. “The way we pay our taxes is bonuses. The only way that we’ll get any of our bailout money back is from taxes on bonuses. I think bonuses should be looked at on a case by case basis, or you turn into a socialist.”
That, indeed, was a recurring equation: Broad strokes + bonuses = socialist.
—”It’s Theirs and They’re Not Apologizing”
And I want to take that acronym, HENRY, and set it on fire and wrap it around his neck, but it’s still too goddamn bland; it just doesn’t sneer yet, not like YUPPIE or BOBO or CREAM. High Earner but Not Rich Yet. Fuck you, you silver-spooned Masters of the Universe.
Say you’re a banker and you flushed $30 million down the toilet, which is the actual scenario we’re looking at. When can we expect you to pay a part of that back?
You know what, Henry? That guy walking ahead of us, down the street? Too out of it to spaynge like the ghettopunks and anyway if he ever stopped walking the cops would roust him in an instant under sit/lie? Travel-stained, in the euphemism of fantasy novels, hasn’t seen the inside of a shelter in months in spite of the cold? No coat on his back but that sleeping bag clutched around his shoulders to draggle down the sidewalk? Not to pull a cliché trump, Henry, but he ain’t rich yet, neither. —And you know what else? He’s too big to fail, Henry.
We’re all too big to fail.
1/31 WSJ Heard on the Street – Overheard:
“One of the world’s richest men in Davos, Switzerland, at the World Economic Forum explains the difference between socialism and capitalism: In socialism, you nationalize and then you destroy. In capitalism you destroy then you nationalize.”