Oh, here we go. Larry Elkin, financial adviser to the wealthy and all-around embodiment of Wall Street excess, is going to tell us Vermonters exactly how clueless we are.
Vermonters Buy Into A Constitutional Mess Of Pottage
…is the title of an opinion piece on “Wall Street Pit,” a financial website. In it, Mr. Elkin gets all shouty over the dozens of Vermont towns that voted for a constitutional amendment to overturn the Citizens United ruling. Don’t they know their place? They should be tendin’ to the fields, maple sugarin’, milkin’ their spotty cows, and playin’ checkers down by the General Store, not worryin’ their picturesquely bucolic heads with Big National Issues beyond their feeble comprehension.
Larry Elkin is a CPA and CFP, worked for six years at Arthur Andersen, the scandal-ridden accounting firm. He now runs his own firm, Palisades Hudson Financial Group, which provides investment services, estate planning, and tax counseling “to a sophisticated client base.” In English: helping One Percenters amass even greater wealth and evade their tax responsibilities.
His firm is based in Scarsdale, NY. Coincidentally, there’s an article in the March 19 New Yorker by financial journalist James Stewart entitled “Tax Me If You Can” (full article paywalled but good summary here) about the lengths to which wealthy New Yorkers will go, to avoid paying New York taxes. Scarsdale’s a tax haven — from City taxes, if not State.
Elkin, of course, doesn’t “live” in New York — city or state. His official residence is in Florida, which has no state income tax. And he also, mirabile dictu, has a summer place in Quechee. (If you see him at the General Store, give him a dope-slap for me.)
After the jump, we dismantle his unpleasant little screed. Pardon me while I adjust my Oshkoshes and get a fresh sprig of hay to clench in my teeth.
The trouble began when Mr. Elkin was up here on safari, taking a break from Ruling the Universe (TM) and observing the quaint folkways of the natives.
I happened to be in Vermont last week on Town Meeting Day, that New England democratic tradition in which neighbors gather to decide public business.
I didn’t attend because Vermont is just a part-time residence for me; my home and my vote are in Florida. But I was pleased that my neighbors in the Town of Hartford voted to rebuild the Quechee covered bridge, just down the hill from my house, which was destroyed last fall by floodwaters from Tropical Storm Irene.
He couldn’t be bothered rubbing elbows with the natives, but he is gratified that they ponied up to restore his (summer) neighborhood to its pre-Irene spendor.
Quechee is just one of five villages in the town, and there has been some concern that more distant residents would turn their backs on the $1.1 million bond issue needed to pay for the rebuilding. But everyone understood the bridge’s importance to Quechee, a village which also happens to attract a lot of tourists to the area. They come to enjoy our scenic gorge on the Ottauquechee River, which is still easily accessible, and to admire Simon Pearce’s fine blown glass and dine at his excellent restaurant, which is alongside the ravaged bridge and now requires a lengthy detour.
Awww, Larry. You have to spend an extra ten minutes in your Land Rover to get a nice dinner. We feel your pain, really we do. Thankfully those “more distant residents,” i.e. country dirt farmers, saw fit to support their betters.
People know their own neighborhoods, and they usually make good decisions when they get together to hash things out. We don’t have town meetings in Florida. We have homeowners associations and condo boards, and the better ones among them – the ones that invite everyone in the community to participate – work pretty much the same way.
Oh yeah, gated communities and small Vermont towns, peas in a pod. After all, America is a not divided by class; we’re all one and the same. Sure thing, Larry.
So it was disheartening but not entirely surprising to learn that at last week’s meetings, at least 58 Vermont towns voted to endorse a constitutional amendment that would exchange our most precious democratic birthright, the protections afforded by the Bill of Rights and the rest of the U.S. Constitution, in return for a mess of pottage – the overturning of a much-criticized but fundamentally sound Supreme Court decision. In reality, the proposal would exchange valuable rights in return for nothing at all.
Bumpkins! Know-nothings! How dare they?
By “protections afforded by the Bill of Rights,” I think he means corporate personhood. By “fundamentally sound Supreme Court decision,” he means Holy Writ from Pope Scalia. And by “nothing at all,” he means “some semblance of citizen control over our own political process.”
The chief backer of the amendment is Sen. Bernard Sanders, an independent (he calls himself a socialist) from Vermont and self-appointed scourge of the rich and powerful, a persona that appeals to modern Vermonters. His professed goal is to reverse the Supreme Court’s decision in Citizens United v. Federal Elections Commission, which is a misguided objective in itself. However, the language of Sanders’ proposal would go vastly further – much further, I’m sure, than his fellow Vermont citizens took the time to explore before they gave Sanders their thumbs-up.
Bernard? Does anyone actually call Bernie Sanders “Bernard”? Not since he was six years old and his momma was calling him in for dinner. Which is Mr. Elkin’s intent here: belittling Sen. Sanders through obviously false aggrandizement.
Too bad us Green Mountain Yokels are too clueless to see through Bernard’s act.
Elkin then spends a couple of tedious paragraphs explaining why Bernie’s amendment would turn the Bill of Rights into toilet paper, before getting on to the “myth” of corporate personhood:
Corporations are merely aggregations of people. To insist that corporations lack the same rights as the people who own them, manage them or work for them is to argue that we forfeit some of our rights when we combine our efforts to accomplish things we could never accomplish individually.
Or, as Mitt Romney so trenchantly put it, “Corporations are people, my friend!” Yeah, corporations are “merely” gatherings of people. With the combined financial, social, and political power to run roughshod over the interests of actual people.
Corporations aren’t people, Larry, any more than a rampaging colony of army ants is simply an aggregation of individual ants. There’s a huge difference in mass and destructive power.
Without corporations and similar entities, an enterprise like Apple would merely have been Steve & Steve’s Computer Company, destined to expire when the collaboration between Steve Jobs and Steve Wozniak ended, or when Steve Jobs died. Without corporations we could not have car companies, or medical centers, or cellphones, or electricity delivered to our homes. No enterprise could grow larger than the efforts of a handful of people could make it, or last longer than the lifetime of its founders.
Which is completely irrelevant because nobody — not even Socialist Bernard Sanders — is calling for an end to corporations. We’d just prefer that corporations not be able to purchase our political system lock, stock and barrel.
Sanders’ proposal would not stop at stripping free speech rights from corporations and their shareholders. It would strip all constitutional protections. Corporations would not be entitled to due process, or to be free of state interference in interstate commerce, or to be protected from seizure of their property or from illegal searches. Any sort of Gestapo-like tactic would be fair game when directed by the federal government against a business enterprise.
Yep, there’s the inevitable Nazi comparison. Must be almost done with the column.
Did residents of 58 Vermont towns give any thought to this? I very much doubt it.
No, because we’re so easily duped. Say, Larry, I was thinking about buying a bridge. I hear you got a nice one down in Brooklyn.
They may be willing to elect an avowed socialist to the U.S. Senate, and they may have an unreasonably strong sense of persecution by what they perceive as moneyed interests from faraway places (the same moneyed interests to whom they happily sell second homes, ski lift tickets and bed-and-breakfast lodgings), but Vermonters are neither stupid nor antidemocratic.
Gee, thanks, Larry. We’re commie pinko dupes, we hate rich people who helicopter in and act in a condescending manner (maybe he’s already gotten dope-slapped at the General Store), but we’re not stupid.
I feel so validated, now that Larry Elkin, CPA, CFP, member of the cabal that came thisclose to crashing the global economy and that had to be bailed out by America’s rubes and dupes, has formally told me I’m not stupid.
They just allowed themselves to be led by an ideologue who spends most of his time in Washington, D.C., fighting a class war that has not been relevant for generations.
Say, maybe Bo Muller-Moore can print a bumper sticker that says “Brainwashed By Bernie.” It’d look purty on the bumper of my Subaru.
Town meetings work really well on matters that town residents know something about, like the importance of our covered bridge in Quechee.
Stick to small-town stuff, you peasants! Get to work and fix my goddamn bridge! Chop-chop!
But unless everyone guards against being manipulated and bullied into going along with the crowd, town meetings can also degenerate into mobs.
Ooooohhhh, manipulated, bullied mobs! Well I remember the appalling TV news reports about the Reign of Terror on Town Meeting Day. Such horror, such senseless bloodshed. To me, the worst of it all was the mass guillotinings in Stowe.
Last week’s votes in Vermont are an object lesson in what can go wrong in small-town democracy. It is one that, fortunately, won’t do any harm in the long run.
…because, after all, we are still the Masters of the Universe. Suck on that, you rubes!
p.s. Vermont Tiger posted an excerpt from this piece and gave it their imprimatur. I, for one, am shocked that our Internet neighbors think so poorly of their fellow Vermonters.