S'il y a un groupe qui a prospéré aux États-Unis au cours des quatre dernières années, ce sont les «super-riches», comme le rappelle Chrystia Freeland dans cet article du numéro courant de l'hebdomadaire The New Yorker. Et pourtant, plusieurs des 1% sont furieux contre Barack Obama, qui ne les traiterait pas avec le respect qu'ils méritent.
Si vous souffrez de haute pression, je vous déconseille la lecture du reportage du New Yorker dont je cite deux extraits dans le texte :
"It's a question of tone," Cooperman said. "The President makes it sound like the problems of the ninety-nine per cent are caused by the one per cent, and that's not the case." Yet some of the harshest language of this election cycle has come from the super-rich. Comparing Hitler and Obama, as Cooperman did last year at the CNBC conference, is something of a meme. In 2010, the private-equity billionaire Stephen Schwarzman, of the Blackstone Group, compared the President's as yet unsuccessful effort to eliminate some of the preferential tax treatment his sector receives to Hitler's invasion of Poland. (...)
Evident throughout the letter is a sense of victimization prevalent among so many of America's wealthiest people. In an extreme version of this, the rich feel that they have become the new, vilified underclass. T. J. Rodgers, a libertarian and a Silicon Valley entrepreneur, has taken to comparing Barack Obama's treatment of the rich to the oppression of ethnic minorities-an approach, he says, that the President, as an African-American, should be particularly sensitive to.