Blind American Concern Troll Finds Nut
You may not be able to say this every day, but hats off to the Washington Post’s Richard Cohen. In an op-ed for Tuesday’s print edition that first hit the online version late Monday, Cohen analogizes the Masters of the Universe on Wall Street to scummy used car salesmen:
As a mere youth, I bought a used car in New York to drive to California to be with the woman of my dreams. Inexplicably, she decided to rush back to New York, so I promptly took the car back to the dealer. He made a shockingly low offer. The car had been in an accident, he explained. The chassis was bent. I was flabbergasted. I had just bought the car from him. If the chassis was bent, it was bent when I bought it. The salesman offered me a take-it-or-leave-it shrug. He probably now works on Wall Street.
That the morality of the used car lot has been adopted by Wall Street is now abundantly clear. Citigroup recently settled a civil complaint in which it was accused of selling mortgage-related investments that it knew were dogs. It was so certain that the investments were the financial equivalent of my used car that it bet against them — heads I win, tails you lose — and even selected the investments themselves, choosing from a cupboard of depleted and exhausted financial instruments. An investment in the Brooklyn Bridge would have been safer.
Go read the whole piece. Seriously.
Cohen punches Wall Street, Goldman Sachs, outrageously crooked and belligerent New York cops, Citigroup, JP Morgan Chase and the SEC. It is a once in a lifetime thing of Cohen beauty.
Next thing you know America’s Concern Troll will be slinging hash down at Zuccotti Park with the #OWS denizens.
With Cohen there is always the nagging sense, encouraged by his occasionally producing a piece like this, that he isn’t a totally lost cause. It’s almost as if 90% of the time he’s going around in a drugged haze, kept doped up and chained to his keyboard turning out Villager-approved crapola, yet every so often his handlers miss a doping date and he then sobers up enough to write something of startling intelligence and clarity.
It’s like exactly half a year from April fools day. Is this some MTWheel sick tradition? Thanks for the excerpt, but I would sooner be seen walking out of a brothel with a fresh herpes outbreak than have that link in my browser. Love the part about the woman running all the way to LA and back to get away from him, though.
And now it looks like Bloomberg and the NYPD are literally inviting and herding all the homeless, destitute, and substance-abusing street-dwellers in NY to Zuccotti Park so they can make a media show of the filthy incapable mob at OWS.
@Phoenix Woman: could be it only means he lost money.
Who are these investors he says got their money back? I’m sure they weren’ the pension funds.
@KWinIA: Oh, my guess is he is referring to the other MOTU CDS/CDO and financial rigs.
Which nut did the zombie-corpse-dean find?
Gosh, it’s like three years later and he’s waking up to some fishy smelling facts only now. Gotta open some windows in that ivory tower!
He must have eaten some vegetables and passed a floater. “Oh, I’m a hippie now”…
But then, what better excuse to roust some union thugs… Now there’s a poppin’ fresh lede!
I can’t wait till Broder hurls this invective at the OWS movement…
@person1597: Broder is dead.
Wow, splat!
EW–
Thanks for this.
Typo alert: Looks like words such as “for comparing them” are missing from the second sentence.
Bob in AZ
Just to extend the used-car-sales line: the LA Times is doing a multi-part story on ‘buy here, pay here’ car lots, their dishonest practices, and the love that investment groups have for them. The story includes high-interest loans (more than 20% APR), fraudulent loan papers, repossession and resale of cars (in some cases eight times), and the slicing and dicing of car loans into ‘securities’ that are worth … well, not much.
Like guest, the first thing I noticed was the woman fleeing from Cohen, noted sexual harasser. Icky.
I don’t think the used car salesmen analogy is that on point, either. The banksters have ruined lives. Literally ruined the lives of millions. How many used car salesman can make that claim?