Hedge fund heavyweight Leon Cooperman was all over the business news today with his "scathing" open letter to President Obama. In this ridiculous piece of myopic pedantry, Cooperman eviscerates the president, blaming him and him alone for the divisiveness and incivility that he believes is destroying capitalism and the precious America that enabled his own ascent to billionaire-dom.

Surprisingly, Cooperman makes no mention of the GOP. He makes no mention of his fellow New York "billionaire" Donald Trump essentially calling the president an illegal alien who has orchestrated the greatest con in history. He makes no mention of Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell's proud declaration that his top priority is to defeat President Obama. He makes no mention of the GOP's unprecedented use of the filibuster to stymie all progress. No mention of House Speaker John Boehner holding the credit rating of the USA hostage and then thumbing his nose at a big fiscal deal during the debt ceiling disaster.

Cooperman instead insists that it is the president and the president's "minions" who are entirely responsible for the rancor and demagoguery plaguing our political system and crippling the magical "wheels of commerce and
progress." Then he regurgitates the GOP's beloved phrase "class warfare." He suggests that it is the wealthy like him who can help the downtrodden and they therefore should not be targeted or nitpicked in any way. He demands that the president become "a transcendent leader" and eschew any sort of "guerrilla campaign" that he learned as a "community organizer in Chicago." (He did not, however, call the president a Mau Mau. It must be the holiday season.)

Interviewed on CNBC as the financial world's sage of the day, Cooperman seemed particularly offended by the president's assault on the aircraft industry--I suppose he means the president's rather amusing disdain for the private jet tax loophole--which, Cooperman speciously argued, is an assault on union workers. He then went on to endorse for president fellow Wall Streeter and legendary best buddy of union workers, Mitt Romney.

Even more hilariously, Cooperman told CNBC that he had joked on a conference call with his investors that perhaps he should run for president himself. He assured the TV anchor that it was just a joke. But he then laid out his 9-point platform for his mythical presidential run. (At least it wasn't a 999-point platform). This economic checklist included--to his credit--an end to the wars in Iraq and Afghanistan, free college education for all returning soldiers, a large WPA-styled infrastructure jobs initiative, a 10 percent tax surcharge on all incomes over $500,000 and a 5% VAT tax on everyone. Cooperman also threw in a few squishy-GOP faves like expanded domestic energy production and raising the social security retirement age to 70.

But look at that list: Cooperman is for a new G.I. Bill, hugely higher taxes on the rich and a massive government stimulus infrastructure build. And he is voting GOP. Good luck with that.

Instead of tearing President Obama a new one, it actually sounds like Cooperman should be billionaire muscling the GOP Congress to pass the president's American Jobs Act.

Reading between the lines, it seems mostly that Cooperman's wittle feelings are hurt. How dare anyone--anyone from the Occupy Wall Street protesters to President Obama--ever say a bad thing about billionaires, hardworking billionaires who only want to help the poor by creating jobs for them and "fill[ing] store shelves at Christmas." A private jet tax loophole is a small price to pay for that kind of humanitarian instinct, isn't it?

The good news is that only 9 percent of Americans approve of this current Congress led by Speaker John Boehner (R-OH). In other words, 91 percent of Americans are apparently smarter than benevolent billionaire Leon Cooperman.

If you have a strong stomach, you can read Cooperman's absurd condescending screed for yourself here.

And you really ought to read the open letter rebuttal of Cooperman by Jill Klausen of @jillwklausen twitter fame. She says it all far better than me.

There are moments where I despair for the fate of this country, because it seems to me that we operate from completely different sets of realities based on the same set of facts. Unfortunately, Jim Cramer exemplifies this kind of "make-your-own-reality" within the media. You'd think he'd have learned after his humiliation on The Daily Show. But no, Jim Cramer unabashedly keeps blurring the lines between business reporting and market advocacy.

Cramer came on Hardball on Friday to insist that Wall Street just hates Obama's guts and they're just waiting for that cuddly Republican to get into office before they unleash all those jobs we all know they have. It's all that taxation and regulations that mean ol' Barack Obama insists on inflicting on Wall Street.

CRAMER: Okay, first, I’m going to agree with you, that the market has been fabulous, which is one of the reasons I’m always so astonished when people tell me that the problem is Obama. I mean, it’s clear Washington can be dysfunctional, but Democrats and Republicans not getting together. But when you get offline with CEOs, it’s not just Wall Street, but Industrial America, what they tend to say is, listen, we want to add, we want to hire, we want to grow in the United States, but everything is so up in the air and when it gets to the point where we’re thinking about what Washington’s going to do, we know we’re going to be the loser if President Obama is making the decision, because President Obama does not favor wealth creation and corporate profits. Not, the profits are huge. People have made a lot of money, but that is the rap that I hear.

MATTHEWS: What is it particularly when a banker or a rich guy, anybody who’s got to make thse big decisions—well, let’s look at some of these numbers first, because I think they’re really informative. When President Obama took office January 20th, 2009, the Dow Jones Industrial Average closed at 7949. Today, it closed at 11, 509, up from yesterday. That’s a 31% increase since Obama’s been president. Well, that alone sould be, wow, this guy’s good. And then there’s corporate profits. The New York Times cites a study by Northeastern University, and economist reports, “since the recovery began in June of 2009, corporate profits captured 88% of the growth in real national income while aggregate wages and salaries accounted for only slightly more than 1% of that growth.” This is the stuff that causes revolutions, from the bottom, not from the top.
[..]
CRAMER: Look, I’m telling you that when you get off the desk with them, they really just feel like, look, if we got a Republican in there, we could really do a great thing in this country by hiring a lot of people.

My rage meter at Cramer's gleeful dishonesty is just redlining. CEOs are telling him privately that they're just waiting for a Republican in the White House to hire people while Americans suffer through massive unemployment? Well then NAME NAMES, Cramer, you dishonest jerk, and tell us just which CEOs are telling you this and who are acting so treasonously. Because Chris Matthews--to his credit, since you apparently don't believe in offering up these facts to these business owners--pointed out all the reasons that Obama could hardly be considered anti-business. These asses were bailed out by American taxpayers, posted record profits, pocketed nice little bonuses...but they need a Republican in the White House to pass that largesse back to the Americans? Well to put it bluntly, eff that.

And eff Cramer and his ridiculous advocacy for Republican lies.

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The combination of this Washington Post article, with its references to Grover Norquist’s sacred texts, and the Jon Stewart clip below had me highly entertained today:

Far-right Republican fundamentalists have led their party straight into a concrete dead end. No one except their own tiny minority of no tax/no government churchgoers is buying their shtick anymore, and they are trapped. No fact can reach them, because their dogma is too thick. No argument or logic will sway them. Polling showing them losing the issue debate by big numbers doesn’t matter. Appeals to their morality fall on deaf ears.

But now they are in even deeper trouble, because their corporate masters have come calling. The bankers on Wall Street know that while most Americans would feel the effects of the economic consequences of not raising the debt ceiling, they would be the first to feel the pain, and that isn’t acceptable to them, so they are calling in their massive amount of chits. John Boehner being willing to cut a deal with Obama on taxes was the first sign of it; Mitch McConnell turning tail and crying uncle with his rather strange proposal was the second signal. There’s a problem, though: the Republicans have dug themselves so far in with the tea partiers on the lunatic fringe, they are having trouble returning to the land of reality. In the 30 years I have been involved in politics, the Republicans have been one of the most disciplined, lockstep political machines in American history, but today they are in complete disarray. It’s called meltdown, and it isn’t pretty. Caught between crazy tea partiers and big business guys used to having their orders followed to a T, they are in a very bad place.

I have plenty of complaints about Democratic politicians, but at least most of them are sane. The Republicans have locked themselves in a big building that looks increasingly like an asylum, and they are in deep trouble. We’ll see what happens next, but it doesn’t get more interesting than this.

Good strategy. They're really going to look bad if they openly work against financial reform. What they'll do when no one's looking, well, that's another story:

President Obama challenged some of the nation’s most influential bankers on Thursday to call off their “battalions of financial industry lobbyists” and embrace a new regulatory structure meant to avert another economic crisis.

Speaking in the bankers’ backyard, at the Cooper Union in Manhattan, Mr. Obama castigated a “failure of responsibility” by Wall Street that led to the financial crisis of 2008, and he pressed his case for what he called “a common-sense, reasonable, non-ideological” system of tighter regulation to prevent any recurrence. He took issue with the claim that his proposal would institutionalize the idea of future bailouts of huge banks.

“That may make for a good sound bite, but it’s not factually accurate,” Mr. Obama said. “It is not true. In fact, the system as it stands is what led to a series of massive, costly taxpayer bailouts. And it’s only with reform that we can we avoid a similar outcome in the future. In other words, a vote for reform is a vote to put a stop to taxpayer-funded bailouts. That’s the truth. End of story.”

He said scrupulous business leaders had no reason to resist his regulation plan. “The only people who ought to fear the kind of oversight and transparency that we’re proposing are those whose conduct will fail this scrutiny,” he said.

He wants the following items included in the final bill:

Protect taxpayers from too-big-to-fail firms

Impose the Volcker rule, named for former Fed Chair Paul Volcker, which stops firms from making large bets with their own money, or “proprietary trading”

Make derivatives trades transparent

Create a consumer protection agency

Institute pay reforms to give investors a say over executive pay.

Market reaction? A shrug.

(emailer Savino sent this in yesterday:)
As a former Wall-Streeter I often watch CNBC's Wall St. stock program, Mad Money with Jim Cramer. Just 5 minutes ago, Cramer was recommending a mine-safety stock, because (as he declared over and over again and the headline ran below his report): "There has been too much negligence in the Bush Administration."

Why is this big? Because Wall St. (and CNBC) have traditionally had such pro-Bush leanings. But Cramer's bottom line was "we're not partisan here... we're just looking to make money, and the Bush Administration has been negligent."

Download | play -WMP Download | play -QT

Other juicy tidbits: "Mine safety violations have increased 15% in 2005." (That a paraphrase)
And: "This is not the first mining tragedy under Bush."

He also referred to the Philadelphia Inquirer's Sunday story, headlined: "Under Bush, mine-safety enforcement eased"

The ironic thing was that I had been planning to write a positive piece this morning about Obama’s remarks on housing in yesterday’s Twitter town hall, as I was pleased he was acknowledging the mistakes of his housing policy, and was hopeful that this statement — along with the outstanding news this morning of new Treasury rules forcing banks to give some mortgage relief to unemployed homeowners — signaled a tougher stance on Wall Street. And I was hoping that Christine Varney’s departure from the antitrust division at the Department of Justice might give an opportunity for someone more aggressive to be appointed there, so my mood was pretty good before I saw this morning’s all-hope-dies-here headline on Social Security. Oh, well. This administration has specialized at raising progressive hopes one minute and crushing them the very next.

The question now on Social Security is what exactly is on the table and what isn’t. The statement the White House put out this morning is this:

There is no news here. The President has always said that while Social Security is not a major driver of the deficit, we do need to strengthen the program and the President said in the State of the Union Address that he wanted to work with both parties to do so in a balanced way that preserves the promise of the program and doesn't slash benefits.

That not slashing benefits part of the statement sure sounds good and makes me feel better, but what does working with the Republicans in a balanced way mean? They want to cut benefits, not raise the payroll tax. And Social Security — unlike Medicare and Medicaid which include a lot of payments to providers that can be tinkered with in different ways to potentially lower costs — is all benefits. So is it on the table or isn’t it? The White House says the President is opposed to cutting benefits, which is wonderful, and I’m grateful for them reiterating that in the wake of the news reports this morning. But if you put it on the table, that means benefits might get cut, which is a disaster for the middle class, and a disaster for the Democratic Party. It would break the Democratic coalition into pieces, do more to alienate the base than any other thing the President could do, alienate seniors, who have never been too crazy about Obama anyway and who we need to move toward us in 2012, take away the political high ground Democrats seized because of the Ryan budget’s attacks on Medicare and Medicaid.

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