There's a billionaire named Leon Cooperman who cried on live television and there's a
lot of sort of
misreporting about why he was crying or what the entire point of the thing was.
If you've not heard of Kuperman, he's a hedge fund guy.
He runs Omega advisors.
He's been sort of going back and forth with Elizabeth Warren saying, I don't need Elizabeth
Warren telling me I'm a deadbeat and that billionaires are deadbeats.
Arguing that the vilification of billionaires makes no sense to him and that the world is
a better place because of people like bill Gates and Michael Bloomberg and other rich
people.
This happened on CNBC.
Let's look at it and then discuss.
I think, um, I mean I think it's obvious people can not only see the emotion on your face,
but hear it in your voice when you talk about this Lee, why
I care.
That's it.
But in all that you have said of of where the economy is, where the stock market is,
uh, the wealth that has been created since the president was inaugurated through, through
the stock market appreciation, you still think it would be a better idea if he did not run
for reelection at this particular time where I think [inaudible], like
I said, you know, you're looking to get me into trouble.
So listen, there's no shame in crying.
I mean, this is just, this is 0% about, Oh look at the guy crying.
It's not manly to cry.
It's not about anything like that at all.
And there are also headlines that have promoted this as Leon Cooperman is crying over being
taxed or whatever.
It's not really about that either.
He signed a pledge to give away like all of his money or almost all of his money.
This is about, first of all, a guy who's 76 and has more than $3 billion crying because
he sees Elizabeth Warren's policy ideas of a wealth tax as bad for the country.
And more importantly, he's crying because he seems to feel that these policies are personal
attacks on billionaires as individual people, as being individually bad people.
This is what I think the main point that should be made about all of this is and the idea
of a wealth tax and inequality in dealing with it.
This is not about billionaires personally being bad people.
This is about fixing a broken system that allows this level of inequality that allows
a country as rich as the United States to still have people starving or unable to meet
basic expenses or unable afford an unexpected $400 expense or at risk of bankruptcy if they
get sick or have a medical condition or some kind of car accident.
That's what this is about.
So I understand Leon Cooperman taking it personally to a degree, but someone needs to tell him
that simply not what it's about.
I'll even go further.
I am open to the idea that Leon Cooperman is a pretty good guy.
At a personal level.
I might not agree with his politics, but at the same time, he is part of the system that
allows the raping and pillaging of the, the, the, the greater good and the middle-class
for the gain of the financial industry and really rich dudes like him.
Now, how could he both be an okay guy and part of such a corrupt system and process?
This is the way it is.
Personally, he's pledged to give away some huge portion of his fortune or all of it.
Okay.
That's a good thing.
He's a philanthropists.
That's fine.
But at the same time, he was one of the top executives at Goldman Sachs during the time
that they were engaging in all sorts of criminal activities for self enrichment, including
um, uh, insider trading, uh, manipulating energy prices, mortgage fraud, accounting
fraud.
So he's taking it personally, maybe because he doesn't understand, maybe he's taking it
personally because he has a guilty conscience, but the policy prescriptions of taxing wealth
or capital gains or whatever, these are not attacks on people personally, or at least
they shouldn't be seen that way.
It's about even good people can be cogs.
In a system that is fundamentally immoral and the immorality of the system needs to
change.
It's not necessarily the people, although many of the people could use some realignments
to their moral campuses as well.
And so I think that this is an interesting video.
I think that a lot of the coverage of it has maybe misunderstood what this is and isn't
about, but it actually gives us some insight into some of the resistance that exists out
there to the policies of people like Elizabeth Warren and Bernie Sanders, which is that it
is being taken personally and it really shouldn't be, uh, because this is about fixing a system,
not about calling individual people necessarily bad people.
That being said, industry is filled with horrible people.
Uh, if you look at, you know, executives at fossil fuel companies who knew the damage
that their business was doing to the planet and to people's health for decades, and they
covered it up and continued raping and pillaging the resources of the planet at the expense
of people's health and the planet's health, uh, that's not something a good person does.
Uh, but we should be able to think about these things discreetly and separate them out and
really make more sense than what some of the salacious headlines seem to be implying.