I had a sense I would have smile on my face,
blame a good man by the name of Barack Obama for a lot of these problems.
I don't think that Bush one or Bush two, Ronald Reagan,
Bill Clinton villainized wealth.
He villainized wealth and I sent him a letter 12 years ago.
They went viral on the Internet and I said to him, Mr.
President, you're telling you 99%, they're being screwed by the 1%.
You should be telling you 99% with hard work and luck,
they could become part of the 1%.
You depreciate the American dream.
Now, unfortunately, President Biden has picked up on that theme.
I see no reason to villainize wealth.
>> That was notorious billionaire crybaby Leon Cooperman who never passes up
an opportunity to go on cable news to talk about the number one problem in America,
the vilification of wealthy people.
That's right, as women have their reproductive rights stripped away from
them, as children die of mass shootings and gun violence on their own campuses.
Fact of the matter is the real problem in the country.
According to Leon Cooperman is wealthy people are being demonized,
which means it's time for another segment of when rich men cry.
[MUSIC]
>> I care.
[MUSIC]
That's it.
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>> So, Cenk, Leon Cooperman wants to blame everything that's happening in
the country right now on Obama.
Because Obama wasn't nice enough to the billionaires who
destroyed the economy in the 2008 economic collapse.
And then proceeded to be bailed out by the Obama administration.
In the form of quantitative easing the federal reserve printing money and
handing it over to banks so
they can get the liquidity they need to do corporate stock buybacks.
To buy single family homes and real estate on the market,
pricing all of us out of it.
You know, Obama, notorious foe of the billionaires in America.
>> Yeah.
So, Leon Cooperman lives in an alternate reality where the poor have it great,
the middle class are just ecstatic things are going great for them.
But the poor billionaires, they're the only ones that are aggrieved.
They're the victims, they're victimized.
He genuinely believes.
>> Well someone think of the billionaires.
>> Yeah. I mean, the poor billionaires.
First of all, Leon just lifestyle tip,
you're a multi billionaire, fill up your pool with $100 bills.
You can easily do it and be perfect and swim in it, okay?
And maybe it'll relieve a little bit of the stress that you have
over being such a big victim in this country.
You can do anything you want.
You have all the money in the world.
Why do you keep coming on TV and crying, crying about these people, all right?
So, now let's, so there's two parts of this one is of course,
quick debunking of his insane reality, which isn't real at all.
So, the reality is that not only did Obama massively help the banks, but
on top of that, he never demanded something that any and
Leon Cooperman will know this, I'm a businessman.
He's a businessman, he knows I'm right.
If you rescue any operation like they did AIGA multibillion dollar
insurance company, and you're a private investor, well you would own AIG and
you would have their profits from then on.
Or you could sell them.
If you wanted to nationalize them then resell them to the private market.
At least the taxpayers would get something for their investment.
Now you know that's true Leon.
But we didn't ask for any of that cuz Obama works for you guys.
You don't even know that, right?
And so, he gave you all that for free.
Same thing for all, for Goldman Sachs that got a backdoor bailout of $13 billion
through AIG and Leon you know that too.
And we could have gotten profits of Goldman Sachs for the American taxpayer.
At least until you sell it back into the private market.
But we didn't do any of that because our politicians are corrupt.
They're not corrupt in favor of the poor, the middle class,
they're corrupt in favor of you Leon, okay?
And not only did they do all of that, but on top of that, Biden personally
negotiated when he was in the Obama administration with Mitch McConnell.
To take the tax cuts for the rich that that Bush did,
which was actually twice the size of what Trump did, was about $4 trillion.
But the Republicans didn't have enough political muscle to make that permanent,
only lasted 10 years.
Obama and Biden and Biden specifically engineering it,
made over 90% of the tax cuts for the rich permanent.
>> But why were they so mean to the rich Cenk?
>> They left out 4 or 6%.
That could have also been made permanent.
>> Weren't those tax cuts that impacted like the middle class though?
Those were like the tax cuts that they did not make permanent.
Yeah, no, that's right.
Yeah.
It was the overwhelming majority of the tax cuts after the 10 year sunset,
both for Bush and Trump's tax cuts, helped the rich.
So for example, in Trump's tax cuts after the 10 years is up,
83% of all the gains from those tax cuts goes to the top 1%.
83% goes to the top 1%, but Leon Cooperman says not enough.
>> Not enough.
Their class warriors and they've hurt my feelings.
So, on a factual basis,
there's no question about who lives in the actual reality.
But in their world, they really believe all these things,
these fantasies about how the billionaires are the victims.
Now, if you just left it at Leon Cooperman and his billionaire buddies,
that would already be insane and interesting, right?
But the reality is Washington believes the same thing.
So, not only does every Republican politician believe what Leon Cooperman
just told you, but almost every Democratic politician believes that.
And so, and almost everybody in the media believes that.
They really think that Obama and Biden are so tough on the billionaires, so
tough on the rich.
Obama was such a champion of the middle class, nonsense.
He barely helped the middle class.
He passed the right wing healthcare plan cooked up by the Heritage Foundation,
originally put together by forward by Mitt Romney.
The financial reform was a joke,
Paul Voelker took his name off of it because it was so weak.
And he did a cover story and gave over 90% of the wealth to the rich.
And Biden is doing the same exact thing now, but in Washington and
New York, they think not enough.
We need to get 200% of all of everything and we're the real victims.
>> And look, just to answer Leon Cooperman on why billionaires are vilified in
America, it's not because of politicians and the policies they implement.
I mean, they barely even pretend to support those types of policies when
they're campaigning.
It's because of the rhetoric that he hears that he doesn't like.
And look, this is why people are furious with billionaires, it's not because
of rhetoric, it's because of what we see happening with inequality in this country.
So, inequality was already a problem prior to the pandemic.
It exploded during the pandemic.
For instance, the richest, 10% of the world population owns
76% of the wealth, while the poorest half owns just a sliver.
And that's according to World Inequality Lab.
In fact, let's get a little deeper and see just how bad the situation is.
Just how many people own all of this wealth.
The pandemic wiped out years of progress in reducing poverty and
caused economic inequality to spike.
The world's 10 richest men.
Ten, ten people.
You can count them on both hands,
have doubled their fortunes since the global health emergency began.
While the incomes of 99% of humanity are worse off as a result.
According to Oxfam, more than 160 million people have also been pushed
into poverty the UK charity estimates.
So, this is why people are furious because the system always takes
care of the billionaires.
You look at what went down in the United States in the form of economic stimulus or
economic help, as the pandemic was underway.
As tens of millions of Americans were laid off, furloughed, lost their jobs,
nickel and diming the American people, right?
How much should that one time stimulus check be?
Behind the scenes, you got the Federal Reserve printing literally
trillions in money and providing that economic assistance to banks
corporations in the form of what's known as quantitative easing.
And look when we talk about inflation,
that's always left out of the discussion, right?
There has been asset inflation as a result of quantitative easing for
quite some time now because what did the banks do with that money?
What did private equity firms do with that money?
What do corporations do with that money?
Did they actually use that money to stimulate the economy?
Did they lend it out to small businesses and
lend it out in the form of mortgage loans for ordinary Americans?
No, they did corporate stock buybacks artificially inflating the shares of their
own stocks, okay?
Of their own stock.
They did real estate purchases, buying up entire neighborhoods of single
family homes, pricing out Americans from the market entirely.
There's never any discussion about that,
with these wealthy people who think that they're being demonized and villainized.
The cards are not stacked against you, they're stacked against us.
You have every advantage in this broken corrupt system and you're still crying.
It's amazing.
>> Yeah. And
you're also wrong about your fundamental premise that, we hate rich people and
it's- >> I like some rich people.
>> No, the idea isn't to hate the idea of wealth and
do people on the left also wanna be rich?
Of course.
Because then you're more comfortable, you can pay the rent,
you can take care of your family, I wanna be rich.
That isn't the problem.
The problem is some of the rich rigging the system.
And so, if you don't know that it's been rigged,
honestly Leon you're just ignorant.
So, I'll give you one example, but I can give you literally hundreds and
I've already given you a couple last one though is, Biden used to be,
when he was in the senate known as the senator, from MBNA.
MBNA was a credit card company back then.
Since Delaware is loaded with financial companies or
corporations of all sorts, but especially credit card companies,
Biden represented them rather than his own voters.
So, he helped to do a bankruptcy bill that prevented getting rid of student
debt through bankruptcy.
It rigged, it literally changed the rules that rigged the rules against
students who were largely poor and middle class.
But the Donald Trumps of the world could still declare bankruptcy at a much higher
level.
And Donald Trump took advantage of that and
has declared bankruptcy six different times.
The rigs, the rules are literally rigged by some of
the rich giving campaign contributions to politicians on both sides.
And Democrats are almost just as corrupt as the Republicans, especially on economic
issues, especially in how they serve people like Leon Cooperman,
the billionaires of the world, who they cherish actually.
And so, they rigged the rules so
that the poor in the middle class couldn't get rid of their debts.
But the rich could, that's what we hate.
That's what we can't stand and that's what we're trying to fix.
But Cooperman is not wrong.
I don't think he's doing it on purpose, but he's not wrong about one thing,
strategy, which is if you go yell at Biden on television on Bloomberg in that case.
And so, he's being too mean to the rich.
Biden will give him even more.
Like, I'm so sorry Leon.
Then you'll see Biden cry.
Doctors, I promise you nothing would fundamentally change.
Leon what do you need?
I'll give it to you, I'll give you anything you need.
Cuz Biden works for the donors.
That's this whole job.
So, maybe Cooperman doesn't understand that.
But that's not surprising.
They're completely deluded and live in a bubble where again,
they're the victims when in reality it's the exact opposite.