I walk on gilded splinters

Oh, yes, by all means let's celebrate the modern-day resurgence of the robber barons and backroom trusts and colonial pillagers and union-busters of the Gilded Age. And let us all praise them as great philanthropists and humanists so long as they toss the occasional coin towards their inferiors. Smashing, simply smashing.

His achievement required political clout, and that, too, is on display. Soon after he formed Citigroup, Congress repealed a Depression-era law that prohibited goliaths like the one Mr. Weill had just put together anyway, combining commercial and investment banking, insurance and stock brokerage operations. A trophy from the victory — a pen that President Bill Clinton used to sign the repeal — hangs, framed, near the magazine covers.

[...]

Only twice before over the last century has 5 percent of the national income gone to families in the upper one-one-hundredth of a percent of the income distribution — currently, the almost 15,000 families with incomes of $9.5 million or more a year, according to an analysis of tax returns by the economists Emmanuel Saez at the University of California, Berkeley and Thomas Piketty at the Paris School of Economics.

[...]

Other very wealthy men in the new Gilded Age talk of themselves as having a flair for business not unlike Derek Jeter’s “unique talent” for baseball, as Leo J. Hindery Jr. put it. “I think there are people, including myself at certain times in my career,” Mr. Hindery said, “who because of their uniqueness warrant whatever the market will bear.”

Huzzah huzzah. Pink gins all around.

(Also, Derek Jeter? Really?)

UPDATE: Okay, let me be even more explicit. Sanford ("Sandy") Weill, who is prominently featured in the article (including photo and interview clips)... the Sandy Weill of the "Joan and Sanford I. Weill Recital Hall," who is the Chairman of Carnegie Hall's Board of Trustees and was "honored at a huge fund-raising party that Carnegie Hall gave on his 70th birthday"... the Sandy Weill who proclaims "We didn’t rely on somebody else to build what we built, and we shouldn’t rely on somebody else to provide all the services our society needs"... that same Sandy Weill led Citigroup into a notoriously scandal-ridden period from which they have yet to fully emerge. He was up to his neck in the Enron, WorldCom, and Global Crossing shenanigans (as tig points out in comments, they had to pay a $120 million SEC settlement for helping Enron commit fraud), and that's just the tip of the iceberg. Of course, this part of the story goes completely unmentioned in the Times piece.

That BBC piece also has a quote from Amey Stone, who co-authored this (largely uncritical) biography of Sandy Weill:

"[Mr Weill] was very hands on and a very controlling manager who oversaw a lot of operations," she says. "He did have an aggressive style, he emphasised profits, he was very strict about divisions delivering profit goals. I think questions of ethics really took a back seat."

See also Chris Sullentrop's 2002 piece in Slate.

Comments

[tig]

1.

Citigroup? That same Citigroup? Wow, talking about stretching the boundaries of philanthropism.

S, tig

[DJA]

2.

Hey tig,

See my update (written before I saw your comment). Thanks for that SEC link -- I will fold it into the post.

[Matthew]

3.

Well, Hindery used to run the YES Network, which broadcasts Yankee games, so he probably hasn't shaken all those pinstripe metaphors out of his conversation yet.

I like a Pink Gin, but more apt is probably an Alamagoozlum, which was supposedly invented by J. Pierpont Morgan. Here's the Charles Baker version:

To serve about 5 cocktails: take 1 jigger each of Jamaica rum, gomme syrup, and yellow or green Chartreuse; add 1/2 pony uellow Curaçao and 1/2 pony of Angostura bitters. Add 2 scant ponies of Holland gin, the same of water; donate 1/2 the white of an egg and shake hard with lots of cracked ice. Serve in a Manhattan glass.

Hey, I'll raise a glass—these guys are making the revolution so inevitable that they might as well foment it for me. (Then again, I'm a glass-half-full guy.)

[DJA]

4.

Good call on the Alamagoozlum, Matthew (although J. Pierpont Morgan's concoction sounds perfectly vile).

I dream of an attorney general who will rain holy hell down on these bastards. Feingold, perhaps? Or Spitzer?

[mwanji]

5.

"I am proud to be an American. But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard."

Do those two sentences bear any relationship?

[tig]

6.

“But if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would not be working this hard.”

Do the two halves of that sentence make any sense? A somewhat idiotic flaw is the assumption that the rich are rich necessarily because of labor. A better formulation might be: if the tax became too high, as a matter of principle I would reduce my taxable earnings.
However, I better stop there before I come across as a commie.

S, tig