The Cheerful Billionaire Who Thinks Obama's a Socialist - Businessweek: "The unusual ad, “Freedom to Succeed,” is the handiwork of Thomas Peterffy, 68, an emigre from socialist Hungary who founded Interactive Brokers, the world’s largest online broker, and built a fortune of $7.6 billion, according to the Bloomberg Billionaires Index. Peterffy, who is ruddy and thickset, narrates and appears in the ad, which intersperses shots of him as a young boy with scenes from the aftermath of Hungary’s failed 1956 revolution. “I grew up in a socialist country and I know what that does to people,” he says solemnly, as images of poverty and suffering flash by. “There is no hope, no freedom, no pride in achievement. The nation became poorer and poorer.”
The ad is also striking because it essentially takes up the plight of the poor, albeit from an unusual angle. Peterffy suggests that “badmouthing success” of American capitalists causes them to stop succeeding and paying the taxes that support the less fortunate. The ad, while slightly ridiculous, is deeply sincere and also quite affecting. It argues on behalf of the “47 percent,” not against them."
Shortened: http://gg.gg/sanity Contact: bob underscore wtf at comcast dot net
QUOTE OF THE HOLOCENE: "The way to crush the bourgeoisie is to grind them between the millstones of taxation and inflation" - V.I. Lenin -- You're welcome to point out to me any decision that Hugo Chavez Barack Obama has yet made that Lenin would quarrel with. [ crickets ]
RUNNER-UP QUOTE OF THE HOLOCENE: "When buying and selling are controlled by legislation, the first things to be bought and sold are legislators." - P. J. O'Rourke
DUAL QUOTES OF THE 20TH CENTURY: "Democracy is the theory that the common people know what they want and deserve to get it good and hard." and "The urge to save humanity is almost always a false-face for the urge to rule it." --H. L. Mencken
LAST YEAR'S QUOTE: Washington, D.C. runs "just like the mob, except it's legal," said Schweizer. "If problems are being solved, if things are going smoothly and things are being fixed, a lot of people are not going to give. The party establishments and the political leaders from both sides are collaborating a lot more than they let on," explained Schweizer."
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