Filthy rich people behaving like swine—still more reasons for a 90 percent tax bracket

Why is it that possession of large amounts of money generates sociopathic behavior?

I've gleaned the two stories below from the beachy-bitchy-ritzy Hamptons on Long Island, where the sociopaths flock to flaunt the money they got with taxes you paid.

(The rich get a tax cut under Bush, you're about to finance it with cuts in Social Security benefits and Medicare. Or they make a fortune crash landing a bank that wasn't regulated nearly enough to stop their mischief, you pay for it with a taxpayer-financed bailout while they walk away counting their bonuses. And on and on.)

Exhibit A: Yacht witch

busts up steak house

In the Town of Easthampton, the place to eat steak (for whatever reason) is the local branch of a restaurant chain called The Palm. Reports Dan's Papers, the newspaper of record for those who enjoy knowing what the Hamptons rich are up to (or stooping to) :

According to the manager of the Palm Restaurant, a reservation had been made for dinner for four at 9:30 pm. The hour came and went, and at 9:55, the party showed up, not as four but as eight. They asked to be seated and they pointed out that they had a reservation.

The Palm was packed at that hour-it is one of the most popular restaurants in that town-and the hostess asked that the party of eight now wait until they could arrange a bigger table which might take five or 10 minutes.

Instead, the woman who had arranged the dinner, one Amy Paul of Harrison, New York became violent. She grabbed the hostess' reservation book and ripped pages out of it and threw them on the floor, then took off one of her high-heeled shoes, ran out the front door and began shattering the outdoor light bulbs in the fixtures with the heel. Some of the other diners in her party raced out to get her, but she struggled free, ignored the parking attendants, found her car key and drove off in her white 2008 Mercedes-Benz, which was identifiable because some witnesses memorized the license plate as it flew off.

Police searched for her in vain later that evening, and around midnight, alerted the police in Harrison that she might show up there. In the morning, they called the country club that she belongs to, but she was not there either.

Later that day, a person called the East Hampton Village Police and told them that she was a representative of Paul's and would call the Palm Restaurant and make restitution for the damage Paul had caused. This representative said Paul was unavailable to speak to them herself because she was out on a yacht and did not have cell phone service out there.

That evening, representatives for the Palm Restaurant spoke to the police and said they had indeed been contacted by Paul's representative and would not be filing charges against Paul. That ended the incident.

Wonderful! That ends it only if you're rich enough. Imagine if you were a poor black kid who showed up at The Palm, ripped up the reservations book and busted up the landscape lighting. You'd still be cooling your heels in the Suffolk County pokey—even if you could find a Legal Aid lawyer who promised you'd make restitution by washing dishes.

Or as an online kibbitzer noted:

There are some things servants need to understand in this world. That if your tucked in face has made it to a glitzy magazine, have rubbed shoulders with other celebrated delinquents and happen to own a house whose bathroom is the size of your waiter's and busboy's apartment combined then by rights and vanity you have every right when you turn up late and unannounced at your favorite restaurant to throw a temper tantrum and cause a magic scene if you're needs are not immediately met.

After all Amy dear, you earned the right to be fashionably late and if them wenches can't jump six feet high in the air, who are you to then just idly stand there and watch the world point daggers at your heart.

Exhibit B: Rich guy declares himself king and throws commoners off public road

Out in Bridgehampton, another Hampton where money not only talks, but also doesn't have to speak to anyone it doesn't like, the new game in town is blocking public access to public beaches.

In this case, the culprit in question is a man named Robert Simpson, who has a humongous mansion on a beachfront road called Surfside Drive, where houses (even without the ocean view that houses on Simpson's side of the street commands) routinely sell for upward of $2 million. Sometimes way, way upward.

Here's Dan's Papers to tell you the story again.

More and more, residents with private homes on the ocean are finding ways to block beach access for everyone else but them. They've even arranged this year, for the first time, to begin harassing others who might want to go fish or sunbathe in one particular spot from doing so. This occurred at the sand access roads heading off Marine Boulevard, for example, where guards were posted at beach access roads to the ocean by nearby residents to check I. D.s of those who might want to swim there. It would be okay for the general public to walk a half mile down the beach from somewhere else to get to this enclave, but they sure wouldn't be allowed to go to this beach by using the access roads from these "private" although publicly accessible roads.

A good example of what I consider extremely selfish behavior is the story of a man named Robert Simpson who built an oceanfront home down toward the end of Surfside Drive in Bridgehampton. Simpson's two acres are adjacent to two oceanfront acres owned by the Town of Southampton. Since the settlers landed in Southampton in 1640, a sand road has allowed access from what later become named Surfside Drive to the beach.

The sand road was for a long time considered a right of way to the beach by the Southampton Trustees, an ancient body of officials who were entrusted with the task of providing free access to the beaches, wetlands and bays in that town for the residents for bathing, fishing, clamming and whatever. The trust came in the form of a parchment signed by the King of England in 1686. Its power has never been successfully challenged.

There have been occasions, however, when a determined man with hundreds of millions of dollars set on closing a public access has been able to prevail over a technicality in some individual case if he kept at it long enough and simply spent the Trustees into submission....

There have been occasions, however, when a determined man with hundreds of millions of dollars set on closing a public access has been able to prevail over a technicality in some individual case if he kept at it long enough and simply spent the Trustees into submission.

It took Simpson eight years. In the end not only were the trustees no match for him. Neither were the members of the Town Board who tried to stop him. Today, actually about six months ago, a metal barrier went across this road to close it off. Simpson, who does not even own the land upon which it crosses, has his peace and quiet. The rest of us are the losers.

Because of the errors made by the Town Attorney, today, a steel cattle bar runs across the sand road. It has a chain around it and is locked shut. And it has been put up by the very same Town Board that had torn two obstructions down before!!! If someone were to begin to drown in the ocean by this Town-owned beachfront property, nobody could get to them in any reasonable amount of time. I guess it would be up to the Simpsons to rescue these people. Perhaps the Simpsons could get out there on their front deck and say, "Shoo, go further away and drown somewhere else."

This is what passes for nice behavior in some places. A man has now arranged for an empty lot of oceanfront dunes that belong to the Town and border a beach to no longer provide access for its residents….

...As some people say, all I want is my little patch of heaven and a view of the water and some peace and quiet and maybe a gate or fence to keep others from bothering me now that I have arrived and spent my $15 million.

I think Simpson has succeeded in doing this beyond his wildest dreams. It's everything for him, and nothing for the rest of us.

In East Hampton Town last year when a rich man built a reinforced concrete retaining wall across a protected dune between his house and the beach to keep everybody out-it was even a protected dune on HIS property-the powers that be came in and ordered him to jackhammer it back out or he'd go to jail.

That seems not to be the case out at the end of Surfside Drive in Bridgehampton, where money speaks louder than the law.

Remember, please, that most of the really, really big money in America is made not by people who invent or get others to invent things (Bill Gates and a few other Silicon Valley dudes excepted) but by people who move money round and chip off a little piece of it for themselves each time it moves. That includes the "fee" they charge you for accessing your own money at the cash machine. You pay the grocer. The banker buys a beachfront house.

The best way to discourage this behavior is to tax it out of existence with an excess wealth taxes. The top two or three percent of earners in this country need to be reformed from corruption. And the road to doing this leads straight through the IRS.

Tell your Congressional representative. And next time you're in the voting booth, vote not for the tax-cutters but for those who'd raise taxes on the obscenely rich.

O the horror of it all! It turns out anybody – anybody at all – can unearth a news story or express a political opinion. Without a license!

You can sense, just under the surface, a growing malaise among journalists who work in traditional media – print and broadcast.

Competition from the masses

The latest press concern? That anybody with a tape recorder, or a cell phone, or even with nothing but some intellectual curiosity, can dig up and break news these days – as long as they own a computer.

Gone are the days when somebody first had to take courses from the South Podunk State University School of Journalism and Mass Communications. Or even from the Columbia University Graduate School of Journalism.

Gone are the days when you had to intern – as I did – for some small town paper like The Troy (Ohio) Daily News and the now-defunct Paterson (New Jersey) Sunday Eagle before you could get launched as a cub reporter – also as I did – for The New York Post. 

At that point, you finally had a credential that enabled you to stand in the crowds during a presidential election rally phoning in “color.” Or, at 3 o'clock in the morning, you got to ring a doorbell and throw a pair of bleary-eyed parents into shock by saying, "Your son just got killed in a drunk driving automobile collision on Pitkin Avenue. What kind of a boy was he? How was he doing in school? Was he ever drunk before? Who were his friends? Did he have a driver's license. How was he doing in school? Why was he on Pitkin Avenue?"

Instead, whoever you are these days, if you see something you can say something – and potentially get worldwide exposure for it. You can even show the world a record of the event that  you shot with your cell phone.

Journalism major?
Big freaking deal.

The problem with college majors in journalism is that most of the courses are how-to lessons in journalism that you could pick up on the job.

Each hour spent in a journalism class is an hour that is not spent studying history, or government, or sociology, or science. So journalism students learn mostly technique, not perspective. You learn how to interview, how to construct a pyramid-structure story that enables editors to chop off your copy to fit from the bottom up. You learn (maybe) where and how to check public records. Okay, I’m for that part of it.

You also learn the “ethics” of making sure that if you quote one person, you also quote “the other side.” That’s called “balance.”

"What color is the sky?
Here with another point of view is..."

While the theory of “balance” is good, it doesn’t always serve the purpose for which it’s intended. If you quote some dude as saying “The sky is blue,” you then have to go out and find somebody willing to say, “No, the sky is brown with orange polka dots.”

In the name of “balance” the traditional press has given a podium to flacks, hacks and fools willing to say we’re actually “winning” the war in Iraq, or that Social Security is going down the tubes and can be saved only by “privatizing” it, or that God created dinosaurs the day before he created people, and then buried the dinosaur bones to test our faith.

All these claims are patently ridiculous, yet all get placed before news audiences as “reasonable” alternatives to what is obviously the truth.

“But we’ve always misreported
the news this way.”

People get accustomed to doing things the way they've always done them. So it’s not surprising that newspeople are so accustomed to having a lock on news that they get their bustles twisted out of shape by the “amateurs” who scoop them on every level – from national news to small town stuff (as you’ll see if you read on) involving a political candidate who failed to obtain a $100 license for a bed and breakfast.

No fair! A mere“amateur” discovers
Bill Clinton’s potty mouth.

The national story, in this case, involved Bill Clinton. Good ol' boy Bill launched a potty-mouthed denunciation of a journalist who made him look bad in Vanity Fair magazine. Reports the Los Angeles Times (with what one senses is a thinly-masked explosion of outrage):

The 61-year-old self-described "failed writer" and amateur Web journalist helped create two of the most unexpected moments in the 2008 election -- most recently on Monday, when she recorded former President Clinton's fiery denunciation ("slimy," "dishonest") of Vanity Fair writer Todd Purdum. The latest incident cemented Fowler's place as the unlikely face of the new-media revolution that is remaking presidential campaigns. Online videos can dominate the evening news. Or an unpublished novelist "with absolutely no journalism training" can alter the national debate.

Well, “alter the national debate” might be going a tetch far in this case, especially since that alteration is an unsupported claim in a newspaper of national standing.

Absolution for the 

Los Angeles Times

But let’s forgive the L.A. Times. The folks in the newsroom there must be suffering the hellish agonies of the scooped. Heck, it’s a good story, and they didn’t get it. Instead, someone “with absolutely no journalism training” got the story ahead of them.

Let us instead pick up the tale in the New York Times which horrifies us – O, what horrific horror! – with this nugget:

The woman, Mayhill Fowler, who calls herself a citizen journalist, wore no credential around her neck and did not identify herself, her intentions or her affiliation as an unpaid contributor to Off the Bus, a section of The Huffington Post.

While her digital audio recorder was visible in her left hand during that encounter last Monday, she says, she did not believe Mr. Clinton saw it. “I think we can safely say he thought I was a member of the audience,” she said in a telephone interview on Friday.

Newsweek writer twists
his own bustle, too

The same Times article has Jonathan Alter, who writes for Newsweek, huffing – accidental pun – “You identify yourself when you’re interviewing somebody. It’s just a form of cheating not to.”

Wait a second, Jonathan. Just wait a second! Who’s getting cheated here? Seems to me it certainly wasn’t the readers of the Huffington Post, who were given a vivid insight into the irascible personality of a man who might have been a highlyu influential “First Hubby.”

So why the outrage? The Times quotes Jane Hamsher of the blog Firedog Lake as saying, the purpose of identify-yourself-guidelines is “to “protect this clubby group of journalists and their high-ranking political subjects, and keep access to themselves.”

Let’s look at it another way.

"Excuse me, Mr. Hitler, are the
awful rumors about you true?"

Let’s say I’m a newspaper reporter in 1941, and in the name of “balance” I identify myself to Adolph Hitler, and ask, “Are the reports true, Mr. Hitler, that you are exterminating Jews in concentration camps?”

“Of course not!” barks Hitler, “This is just vicious anti-German propaganda, nothing more.”

On the other hand, suppose I sidled up to Hitler without identifying myself and asked, “Say mein fuhrer, how many more Jews do we have to exterminate before they’re all gone?” And suppose, his guard down, he replied, “Not long. We killed a million already and we’re gassing ten thousand a week right now.”

You’re telling me that if I broadcast that quote, and revealed he admitted the horror of what he was doing to the world before another five million innocent human beings died, I’d be unethically “cheating” – right Jonathan?

America’s first blogger
used a printing press

Remember that America’s first freedom of the press case – the colonial uproar that made the First Amendment so important to the authors of the constitution, involved not a “trained journalist” but a printer who was publishing his own opinions – the 18th Century equivalent of a blogger today.

His name was John Peter Zenger, and if you missed history class because you were too busy studying journalism, you can read more about his case here.

Of course, it isn’t always bagging big game that offends the “trained” press.

Shock that a blogger unearths
a small town "scandal”

Consider exurban “Dan’s Papers,” a rich, fat weekly in New York’s most fashionable outlying vacation colony, “The Hamptons.”

Dan Rattiner, the founder, editor and former publisher is a talented writer, raconteur, and observer of the Hamptons scene. He built his journal from a simple broadsheet to a behemoth he recently sold for $19 million.

Dan was writing his paper in the style of a personal blog before the word blog was invented. I begrudge him neither his hard-earned bucks nor the bully pulpit he still retains on Dan’s Papers after the sale. But I do begrudge the tone of a recent “20-Something” column written by his son, David Lion Rattiner. Young David complains:

Thanks to "On The Beach Blog," a personal blog about Westhampton Beach, that town's Deputy Mayor, Jim Kametler, is finding himself in the middle of a scandal.

O, the scandal of it all!

Just so you are aware, in order to get a proper permit for the bed-and-breakfast, a $100 application fee is required each year, and Village Code approval must be obtained. You also need to register with the Suffolk County Treasurer's Office to get a certificate of registration. Not a whole lot of work, but needless to say, the Deputy Mayor didn't get that paperwork, and a man with a computer wasn't about to let him get away with it.

Got that little elbow in the ribs concerning “a man with a computer?”

Nevermind that Dan’s Papers, other local weeklies and the big daily Long Island Newsday missed the story until the “On The Beach Blog" uncovered it.

Axes, grinders and love

Young David’s piece goes on to imply that that the On The Beach blogger has some axes to grind with the mayor. So what? Since when is there a law that you have to really, really like and admire a guy to expose his illegal activities? And come to think of it, might Young David have an axe to grind with bloggers who scoop him?

Heck, it’s getting to the point where some kid who has a 30 column-inch sinecure because his father started a newspaper simply can’t tell where the next scoop by some untrained journalist is going to come from.