David Brooks Says Rich People Work Harder Than The Rest of Us

You can read Bobo's Rich People Suck-Off here.

Matt Taibbi calls Bobo on his bullshit here.

I had to read this thing twice before it registered that Brooks was actually saying that he was rooting for the rich against the poor. If he keeps this up, he’s going to make his way into the Guinness Book for having extended his tongue at least a foot and a half farther up the ass of the Times’s Upper East Side readership than any previous pundit in journalistic history. But then you come to this last line of his, in which he claims that “for the first time in history, rich people work longer hours than middle class or poor people,” and you find yourself almost speechless.

I would give just about anything to sit David Brooks down in front of some single mother somewhere who’s pulling two shitty minimum-wage jobs just to be able to afford a pair of $19 Mossimo sneakers at Target for her kid, and have him tell her, with a straight face, that her main problem is that she doesn’t work as hard as Jamie Dimon.

Only a person who has never actually held a real job could say something like this. There is, of course, a huge difference between working 80 hours a week in a profession that you love and which promises you vast financial rewards, and working 80 hours a week digging ditches for a septic-tank company, or listening to impatient assholes scream at you at some airport ticket counter all day long, or even teaching disinterested, uncontrollable kids in some crappy school district with metal detectors on every door.

Most of the work in this world completely sucks balls and the only reward most people get for their work is just barely enough money to survive, if that. The 95% of people out there who spend all day long shoveling the dogshit of life for subsistence wages are basically keeping things running just well enough so that David Brooks, me and the rest of that lucky 5% of mostly college-educated yuppies can live embarrassingly rewarding and interesting lives in which society throws gobs of money at us for pushing ideas around on paper (frequently, not even good ideas) and taking mutual-admiration-society business lunches in London and Paris and Las Vegas with our overpaid peers.

You can see where a pundit who works so hard to propagate the mythification of rich people and how "hard" they work would also push an education deform agenda that forces working class kids to spend 60 hours/6 days a week and 48 weeks a year in school.

Heck, it's just the kind of long hours and hard work rich people already do.

We're just socializing these kids to work as long and hard as their overlords in the hopes that some day they will be part of that class.

Uh, huh.

Never mind the advantages of access, privilege, connections, nepotism and cronyism rich people enjoy that allow people like Chuck Prince or Stan O'Neal or Bob Nardelli or Carley Fiorina or other CEO's who drive their companies into the ground the opportunity to parachute out with huge severance packages and then work in industry again (even though all the "data" and "evidence" needed is available to show just how stupid and incompetent these people are.)

Hell, Fiorina is running for Senate even after nearly driving HP into the ground and being forced to resign from her position as CEO.

If there were any justice in the world, she would be slogging some minimum wage job somewhere instead of running for Senate.

Nardelli tried his best to destroy Home Depot when he was CEO, received a golden parachute when he left of $250 million and then went on to drive Chrysler to bankruptcy.

How much you want to bet he gets some board positions even with his track record of failure wherever he goes?

Tell us, Bobo, is that from all the hard work and long hours Fiorina and Nardelli put in or is it just because people of privilege continue to get advantages the rest of us don't?

For the above column he wrote with Gail Collins (another idiot who write the most inane drivel you've ever seen) Bobo Brooks wins the Fred Dicker of The Day award for the month.

What a Dicker.

UPDATE: I should add that even "successful" CEO's like Jamie Dimon of Chase and Lloyd Blankfein at Goldman are "successful" because they had access to people in the corridors of power, were "successful" at lobbying those people for an AIG bailout and made sure that AIG's counterparties were paid 100 cents to the $1 for the derivatives crap deals they had between them.

Bobo of course would say Dimon and Blankfein work harder than everybody else.

President Obama would say the same (actually he has.)

I would say they just steal better than everybody else - they're so good at their cons that they have their marks saying "Thank you, would you like some more?" after Dimon and Blankfein rob them blind.