A Climate Of Fear Has Seized Our Billionaires

According to Forbes Magazine, there is but one voice in the lonely wilderness of insanely rich white men, one voice ringing out above the clattering din of fearful mumbling in our nation's boardrooms and lobbies of our nation's best proctologists: Clifford Asness.

"I run an approximately $20 billion dollar money management firm," Clifford Asness explained in a note that he circulated to friends and investors earlier this month. The note criticized President Obama's economic policies. Despite his company's assets, Asness continued, "I am indeed fearful in writing this. It's really a bad idea to speak out. Angering the president is a mistake."

This, friends, is how fascism begins. Or socialism. I forget which. It's whichever one had the black dude with the jump shot in charge of it.

As far as I can tell--and I Googled on this until my fingertips grew tender--Asness is the only businessperson of any standing to have opposed the administration in public.

Now, perhaps the author of this piece is cursed with some sort of fragile-finger syndrome, the tips of his phlanges crackling and crumbling under all but the merest of touches (although that makes how he wrote this column a mystery) but, ahem, this took me one Google, twenty seconds at most. It isn't technically a businessperson, but it is a whole group of them, all of whom could be purchased in one fell swoop if Obama is displeased with their speech or if Commissar of Black Business Young Jeezy decides that he would enjoy referencing his ownership of Procter & Gamble in his next single.

I understand that there's an element of danger in having billions and billions of dollars at your disposal and making polite criticisms of the President's policy; after all, the GOP ran a terrible ticket against him and yet he still snuck in Black Saboteur Michael Steele to tear down the party from the inside. The real question here, however, is why the author of this piece, a writer for billionaire Steve Forbes' magazine, has decided to have his boss disappeared in the middle of the night for a poorly-written bit of whiny e-mail reproduction. I guess this is how fascism/socialism (facialism?) works.