Billionaire Leon Cooperman choked up several times while discussing capitalism and expressing his concern that progressives "don't get it."

Billionaire Leon Cooperman was on the verge of tears while speaking about his concern about “the lefties” and their progressive outlook on capitalism.

“I’ve lived the American dream. I’m trying to convince people like [Senators] Elizabeth Warren, Bernie Sanders and AOC (Rep. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez)—don’t move away from capitalism. Capitalism is the best system,” Cooperman said on CNBC’s Squawk Box on Friday while holding back tears. “I get choked up when I talk about it because basically, my father came to America at the age of 12 as a plumber’s apprentice. No education.”

“I went to public school in the Bronx, high school in the Bronx, college in the Bronx. I started my career in Wall Street the day after I got my MBA from Columbia. I had no money. I couldn’t afford a vacation. I made a lot of money. I’m giving it all back,” Cooperman said before co-anchor Rebecca Quick stepped in as he choked up.

“Giving it all back?” Give me a fucking break, asshole.

  • Very_Bad_Janet@kbin.social
    113·
    1 year ago

    "…my father came to America at the age of 12 as a plumber’s apprentice. No education.”

    “I went to public school in the Bronx, high school in the Bronx, college in the Bronx. I started my career in Wall Street the day after I got my MBA from Columbia. I had no money. I couldn’t afford a vacation. I made a lot of money. I’m giving it all back…

    I’m imagining the cost of living that allowed his father to live on the salary of a 12 year old who worked as a plumbers assistant. I’m also imagining that this billionaire probably went to Bronx Science (a free public school now where attendees likely have paid for test prep to do well on the entrance exam, out of reach for a lot of NYC public school students). If he went to college in the Bronx, it was likely Fordham - the 2023 cost of attendance (tuition plus fees and books) is now $89,575. For an MBA from Columbia, their cost of attendance (which includes room and board) is now $127,058 in 2023.

    He cannot make the connection that COL and earnings have grown exponentially since the time his father was 12, yet wages haven’t. Does he not see that very few students would be able to go to private universities for undergrad and grad schools and service their debt with current wages? How many graduate and immediately start working on Wall Street? He’s probably against WFH, too, solely seeing the benefit to his commercial real estate portfolio and ignoring the commuting costs and work life balance issues for the workers. The world capitalism gave him and his father is gone. At this point it’s as real as ghosts and dreams. We are dealing with the current world that capitalism has given us, a capitalism that only a billionaire would cry over.

    • tryptaminev 🇵🇸 🇺🇦 🇪🇺@feddit.de
      36·
      1 year ago

      hat COL and earnings have grown exponentially since the time his father was 12, yet wages haven’t. Does he not see that very few students would be able to go to private…

      He sees and he knows. It is crocodile tears of a men that has a “fuck you i got mine” attitude.

      • KevonLooney@lemm.ee
        19·
        1 year ago

        No, he probably doesn’t know. It’s been decades since he had any real “economic anxiety”. His type of budgeting and belt tightening is renting out his yacht when he’s not using it, or staying at his current vacation homes instead of buying new ones.

        He literally doesn’t know what the average person experiences, so we shouldn’t listen to him for advice.

    • ikiru@lemmy.ml
      19·
      1 year ago

      We are dealing with the current world that capitalism has given us, a capitalism that only a billionaire would cry over.

      That’s where you’re wrong! Billionaires still have loyal friends unlike you!

      bootlicker

  • kent_eh@lemmy.caEnglish
    77·
    1 year ago

    "I’ve lived the American dream.

    While creating more nightmarish conditions for others.

    Congratulations, and fuck you.

  • bermuda@beehaw.orgEnglish
    64·
    1 year ago

    capitalism is the best system

    guy who made lots of money under capitalism expresses that capitalism is the best system

    • agegamon@beehaw.org
      20·
      1 year ago

      There are two groups of people who support capitalism as it exists today:

      1. The truly rich, the 1%, who exclusively got that way by exploiting the 99% as much as physically possible, and

      2. The portion of the 99% who’ve been brainwashed through various methods into thinking that they can become rich -or- that the rich will “watch out for them” or some equivalent fairytale

      • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
        6·
        1 year ago

        There are two groups of people:

        Those that think there are two groups of people, and those that don’t.

        The premise that socialism is better relies on the government not becoming corrupt. When it fails, it’s really bad.

        Capitalism also functions great when the government isn’t corrupt … it gives consumers choice and fails much more softly.

        If you look at examples of cooperatives, socialist utopia projects, etc… they break down much for the same reason capitalism has broken down for the majority of people in the US… The largest party is the party that doesn’t vote, and of those that vote half of them don’t know what they’re voting for, and of those that know what they’re voting for half of them are basing their votes on misinformation.

        Managing society takes work from everybody in society. There’s no easy button that keeps the train on the tracks.

        To be fair, you did qualify “as it exists today” and that makes a difference. However, the point is it’s not capitalism that failed us, in many ways it’s ourselves, our parents, and/or our grandparents not paying attention and elected the right people. Similarly those same people buy the cheapest thing in Walmart and don’t stop to ask themselves why it’s so cheap.

        Union busting, the manufacturing exodus, etc, it all could’ve been stopped if people had just paid more attention. You’ll never get me to trust that by moving to socialism as an economic model people are suddenly going to pay more attention and not fuck it up.

        • BricksDont@beehaw.org
          3·
          1 year ago

          I don’t think the US needs to go full socialist (mostly because I think it’s impossible and as you said, still corruptible), but we need to lean more towards socialism to start clawing our way back to having a middle class. If we could get affordable universal healthcare and affordable colleges, I would be beyond thrilled. Even though these are things that many, many other countries have had for a long time.

          I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs. At some point, hopefully we become so efficient at “work” that we can use UBI to help people survive who want to do something outside the usual 9-5 (or who have been automated out of their job).

          • Dark Arc@social.packetloss.ggEnglish
            2·
            1 year ago

            If we could get affordable universal healthcare and affordable colleges, I would be beyond thrilled.

            I agree.

            I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs.

            I don’t really believe AI is going to come for that many jobs … at least not in its current generation/family. It’s more of a story teller than a serious threat (it’s like a robot that builds caricatures of products that occasionally are correctly assembled).

            That said, I’m not entirely opposed to a universal basic income or a universal supplementary income (a point my father made is that rather than trying to raise the minimum wage, why not progressively subsidize people below a certain threshold).

            Personally, I’d prefer to see the efficiency gains result in a 3 or 4 day work week for most people. Lots of people would decline without anything to do and society in general could miss out on some great minds that instead of creating simply consumed.

            • BricksDont@beehaw.org
              2·
              1 year ago

              Yes, I think we should already be at a 4 day work week for many jobs. If you look at productivity and efficiency growth since the 40 hour work week was invented, it’s off the charts.

              However, that’s one of the problems with unbridled capitalism. The market demands constant growth, which is hard to sustain and doesn’t reward easing up on employees.

        • realitista@lemm.eeEnglish
          2·
          1 year ago

          This is why every country with a better lifestyle than the US is not a fully communist one, but a capitalist one with some key socialist programs like universal healthcare, free college education, generous paid maternal leave, standard 5 weeks of holiday for all workers, etc. These should be considered basic necessities in any relatively wealthy country.

          I think a universal basic income would also make a ton of sense, as we potentially enter the era of AI taking over a lot of our jobs. At some point, hopefully we become so efficient at “work” that we can use UBI to help people survive who want to do something outside the usual 9-5 (or who have been automated out of their job).

          • sandriver@beehaw.org
            1·
            1 year ago

            Unfortunately I live in a country where “social wages” and an actual wage freeze were later used to suppress labour actions, and then retracted anyway. There’s a homeless crisis and mental illness suicide pandemic now. Oh yeah and Canada is euthanising “lost cause” disabled people, and Sweden let COVID cull off some of the elderly population…

            Social safety nets can always be retracted. Social liberalism has run its course as a viable strategy, much like vanguardism (which is what people mean when they think of “communism”). We need perdurable systems, and as far as I’m concerned, confederalist systems are the only empirically successful systems, although even then it’s hit or miss; see the collapse of syndicalism in Catalunya due to socialist infighting.

            Anyway I’m a Bookchinite and currently making peace with the idea I may not live to see 2024, so that’s my context.

            • realitista@lemm.ee
              2·
              1 year ago

              Say what you will, but the countries with a good balance of socialist and capitalist policies are still on the top of every list, from happiness to life expectancy, to income equality to health to education, etc.

              You can say what you want about Canada and Sweden, but when compared to the US’ far more “anarchist” approach, both have far longer life spans and higher rates of health than the US does.

              As you use very ambiguous terms like Bookchinite, and confederalist which are open to massive amounts of interpretation, it’s not really clear what you are proposing (government is a form of confederation, after all). But I suppose you are hinting at being a Libertarian Socialist. It’s a view which I am very sympathetic to, but one in which the upheaval needed to implement would end us up back at some form of fascism, similar to the previous attempts at communism. I would love to see such a system someday, but I think the only way it could ever come about is by starting from social democracy and gradually working towards it. It could likely take centuries.

              Social democracy is the best system we have managed to date by just about any yardstick we have for measurement. That’s not to say it’s perfect, I can imagine many types of organizational systems which could be considered far superior should we actually be able to implement them correctly, but unfortunatley human nature is a massive blocking point to so many things, and the tendency is always towards some form of fascism if things become unstable. So IMO, we have to first get as much of the world onto the “Scandanavian model” of stable social democracy with good rule of law, and then work from that point of stability to something even better (I’m a fan of UBI personally as it’s far easier to implement than any sort of system which gets rid of property rights and achieves much the same thing when widely implemented).

              • sandriver@beehaw.org
                1·
                1 year ago

                Say what you will, but the countries with a good balance of socialist and capitalist policies are still on the top of every list, from happiness to life expectancy, to income equality to health to education, etc.

                Sorry if my tone isn’t exactly right. You have my unconditional respect. I’m learning that I’m just not always a clear communicator, sometimes I get fired up and sound harsher than what I mean, etc.

                I think this is actually a major mental blinder put in by the supposed “evidentiary basis” of modern neoliberalism. If you’re receptive to philosophy, I think you might like Rawls’s “veil of ignorance”. And then following from that, statistics mean nothing to the worst off in society. I’m currently fighting Australia’s health system for my human rights, why does it matter to me or people like me that statistics say Australia is doing okay? If I die, then what? What value are statistics to my corpse, and all the others who have been killed before me?

                I think it’s also important to distinguish “social liberalism” from “socialism”. This is another instance of tricky words that have distorted people’s understanding of history and the trajectory of societies in crisis. Fifty years ago, what you are calling “socialist policies” were just liberalism, social liberalism in particular. This authoritarian meatgrinder we live in is also liberalism, albeit the neoliberal strain.

                Socialism isn’t when you have your rights accepted and provided for, it’s the destratification of society along lines of resource ownership. Also, as an anarchist-adjacent I would say a further goal is the collective custodianship of the natural world and the proliferation of a culture of symbiosis and egalitarianism :) (but that’s me).

                I don’t mean this as a slight, but I’m very sick and don’t have much energy, so I’ll just make some other offtopic remarks related to what you said, if you’re interested in personal research:

                “Confederalist” is different from “federalist”. For instance, Catalunyan syndicalists were federated, in a confederalist system. The Kingdom of Spain is a Federalist system of government–and one that has very recently blocked Catalunyan autonomy. Also, the Fediverse is “federated” but confederalist in character. But you’re right, it is ambiguous.

                I say “Bookchinite” because I’m somewhere hanging around the anarchists, but I’m not totally married to anarchism, and there are anarchist tendencies that I have mutual antagonism with; much like Marxists I’ll never be friends with. I’ll take whatever I can get so there is less horrific evil in the world. Social liberals, social democrats, Marxists, anarchists, whatever. Bookchin’s post-anarchist writings are the most aligned with my beliefs, values, and personal context.

                I just have a dim view of liberalism as a durable and stable system with the way the world has turned out. Same way I think vanguardists are misguided.

              • TokenBoomer @beehaw.org
                1·
                1 year ago

                You have such a limited understanding of everything you profess to know about. It’s disheartening. Read Marx. Read Kropotkin. Read Lenin. Read Mao. These people aren’t the demons capitalist want you to see them as. They weren’t perfect either. But reading The NY Times, Washington Post, Forbes, and Wall Street Journal aren’t gonna give you the full understanding of economics. Socialism can work, but capitalism won’t let it.

                • realitista@lemm.ee
                  1·
                  1 year ago

                  Read my post. I never made any of them out to be demons. I’m pretty far left on the spectrum myself.

                  My only argument with any of those philosophies is that they are so hard to implement in the world that we live in. That if we try, I don’t believe we will end up anywhere near what they wanted, and that we will end with something a lot worse than what we have now, something much more like fascism.

                  History bears this out pretty well. Now I know you will say “but those weren’t real Marxist Leninist implementations”. No, but they espoused to be in the beginning and degraded into something pretty close to fascism.

                  That is my concern. Not that I think the original ideas are evil incarnate.

  • ME5SENGER_24@lemm.eeEnglish
    53·
    1 year ago

    If he was giving it all back, the story would start with words “former billionaire.”

    I also don’t understand this constant probing of the people when it comes time to provide assistance. I pay my taxes, that’s my contribution to social programs. When there’s a natural disaster or issue don’t put a bunch of celebrities on TV asking for slightly less poor people to donate. I want the government to step in and help out. Billionaires should not exist unless everyone has a safe place to sleep at night and warm meals to eat during the day. Considering that’s not the case, that’s how you know capitalism isn’t the best system

  • resin85@lemmy.caEnglish
    48·
    1 year ago

    So he went to public school in New York back before Reagan started cutting taxes for the rich and exploding the wealth gap. The taxes that paid for that very school and gave him his start. Now this twat is on the conservative side of completely gutting public schools.

  • iHUNTcriminals@lemm.ee
    37·
    1 year ago

    “I lived the American dream.”

    Aka greedy ganged out selfish evil cunt that rapes humanity and legally lives like a mob member.

    They’re the same as the street crims that brag about stacks, sell and steal, and break communities and families with drug addictions and pimping …all while they already have enough to live comfortably.

    Different worlds, same game. …treated em all the same. Mainstream or street.

    There’s really no security here. It’s all still chaos. Quit letting them entice you with a false sense of safety. Regardless of governments and factions we are the ones that need to shape our destinies and we can regain the soul we lost by seeing through their greed, and political and business marketing.

    No sides, live for humanity.

  • Rapidcreek@reddthat.com
    35·
    1 year ago

    There are times when Bernie and AOC aggravate me. Other times I think they’re pretty smart. That’s okay, I don’t have to agree with someone 100% of the time. But, the rich…never in human history has greed trumped common sense as it does today. They use their wealth to promote negative consequences for society., and as long as they put more in their well lined pockets they’re happy. Too much is not enough. Fuck em.

    • azerial@lemmy.dbzer0.comEnglish
      8·
      1 year ago

      At least you can have the freedom to be aggravated by a progressive. I live in Texas with corrupt politicians leading our state. Ever hear of ERCOT? I have, daily through text messages to “conserve energy or else”. Just fix the fucking grid hot wheels. Stop wasting money on idiotic floating barriers that are illegal in the Rio Grande. I’m here for someone that wants to at least attempt to change something.

      edit: punctuation

    • GreyEyedGhost@lemmy.ca
      4·
      1 year ago

      One of the first fire brigades was owned by Marcus Crassus. He’d offer to save your house in exchange for selling it to him at miserable prices and often allow you to rent it afterwards. But you got to keep your stuff in the house, so he wasn’t all bad, right? Yeah, Marcus Crassus was a pretty shitty guy.

  • ConsciousCode@beehaw.org
    27·
    1 year ago

    Now I want to see his reaction when people start breaking out the guillotines because his ilk have made peaceful resolution impossible.

  • keeb420@kbin.social
    26·
    1 year ago

    if youre giving it away than you wont mind paying more in taxes so that more people can use a help up to get healthcare or go back to school.

  • Nepenthe@kbin.social
    23·
    1 year ago

    Hey now, Leon Cooperman has given over $155 million in different grants and charities.

    He just happens to have two billion three hundred and forty five million left over.

    • coyotino [he/him]@beehaw.orgEnglish
      3·
      1 year ago

      Frankly I agree with him, capitalism is great if he and all of his billionaire buddies gave away most of their earnings. Maybe we should have some kind of system, where we force the mega wealthy to give away most of their earnings to fund programs that help out the rest of us. Now what would we call that system? Hmmmmmm…

      • nerdguy1138@beehaw.orgEnglish
        2·
        1 year ago

        Taxes Take All eXcess Earnings for Socialism policies.

        Billionaires are a quirk of capitalism. They shouldn’t exist.

  • Chetzemoka@kbin.social
    21·
    1 year ago

    Oh noes! If he pays more in taxes he might be just regular old dirty rich instead of obscenely-no-one-could-ever-contrubute-enough-to-the-world-to-justify-this-level-of-wealth-accumulation rich. I feel so sorry for him.