Sheriff Andy is, sadly, no longer around to give this Opie a stern talking-to.

So I say we all line up to take turns cock-punching him.

I gotcher US$2,000,000 right here, Pete.

I guess he’s no relation to the folklorist Opie couple. (My first association with the name Opie.)

I also guess he may be one of those small businesses (the truly small businesses) that the Republicans go on about, who will be hit hard by pre-Bush tax rates in ways that might actually and truly affect employees and such. Fair enough. There are a few of those. (Very few, statistically, but those few, and their employees, feel it for real.) But then I wonder, so this comes as news to him? He doesn’t have an accountant or somebody he’s already talked to about all this? Makes me wonder more than a little about his business acumen, and makes me suspect he would have failed anyway, in the “real world” of small business (which is, god knows, incredibly hard work, if a lot cleaner and nicer than mining).

I hope Peter Opie dies in a fire.

Not even kidding.

Shitbag.

A guy who makes 2M but can be staggered by 100K will soon enough become incontinent of feces and water; putting him down now would be more humane (and less smelly) than letting him suffer further.
Consider also the loss of dignity he would be spared.

You didn’t even mention the estate tax that will consume his inheritance to Little Opie. Pity of it all.

Opie had sex?

Canary Wharf Clothier?

This Canary Wharf Clothier, based in Worthing, West Sussex in the United Kingdom?

So a clothing company president who appears to be a refugee from British taxes is whining that his US taxes are too high?

Not only that, it appears his brand name Canary Wharf is intended to evoke the working class image of the docks of London’s East End. Nice.

And let me elaborate on the cynicism of the Canary Wharf Clothiers brand name – the Canary Wharf neighborhood of London is now a major business district and one of London’s main centers of the banking industry, largely due to the government-sponsored redevelopment of the blighted and moribund are after the closure of the docks in the 1980s:

Canary Wharf is located in the West India Docks on the Isle of Dogs in the Borough of Tower Hamlets in East London. The West India Docks once formed part of the busiest port in the world.[6] After the docks were closed in 1980 the British Government adopted various policies to stimulate the redevelopment of the area, including through the creation of the London Docklands Development Corporation in 1981 and granting the Isle of Dogs Enterprise Zone status in 1982

I don’t know Mr. Opie’s company’s direct connection to the Canary Wharfs, but he is certainly branding his company with its image, whether it be nostalgia about it’s working class origins or co-opting the status of its rich banker-class that was created by government funding.

It’s the NY Post, so they lie even about the arithmetic — and as usual completely ignore what “marginal” means*. Filing as a single taxpayer with $2 million in income and zero deductions Mr. Opie would have netted $1,326,066 in 2011.

For the same income after the Bush tax cuts expire, he will net $1,251,507, a difference of $74,559. (This is before the many typical deductions which would make his net income even higher.)

And if $1,251,507 is next to nothing, then I’d love to be making whatever nothing is.

*Most of the other numbers in the article are bullshit, too — some more than others.

I am often staggered to the point of cliff-jumping when I discover that something costs 5% more than I expected. I’m amazed that I’m still on this Earth.

Whether the numbers are correct or not – and it appears that they’re not – I cannot see many citizens actually sympathizing with Mr. Opie’s purported plight.

I have Republican friends, who don’t earn as much as Mr. Opie but who will probably pay a somewhat higher income tax should the BushObama tax cuts for the upper levels go away. They love to whine & cry & vetch from inside their $1million+ homes with ocean views about haaaaaaaard they work and how this horrible tax increase will cause them to cut out one of their three or four very expensive vacays each year.

Boo de effen hooo… where’s the world’s tiniest violin, so I can play it for them???

BTW, my marginal tax rate will most likely go up, too. The only cause for me to whine is that I’d prefer my tax dollars to go help those in need, rather than feeding the gaping maw of WAR, Inc. Sadly I don’t have much choice in the matter. Otherwise, I’m sure that my standard of living will be just fine.

What a buncha whiners!

I’d be interested to know how much his tax rate has dropped over the last 30 years. If the highest increase possible hits him he will still be far better off than he would have been at any other time since Reagan took the oath of office. I’m supposed to be upset because after 30 years of constant cuts for people in his tax bracket there will be one increase? Cry me a river pal.

Curmudgeon that I am, I usually only drive-by comment here when you’ve offended my “liberal purity” sensibilities.

Thought it’d be only fair to thank you for this post, and for many of the others you put up in defense of the exploited, TBogg.

Cheers.

So Mr Opie figures he will end up with next to nothing? How much is that exactly? Why do I think that,is , oh I don’t know, a thousand times more than me.

The debate about income taxes needs to include taxation on “Passive Income” aka “Unearned Income”, and make the taxation the same as “Earned Income.”

Whenever I hear my jawb creatuh acquaintances bemoaning their taxes, I offer to trade, sight unseen, effective tax rates with them. When I tell them my wife and I are DINK’s in that phase of our mortgage where we pay more principal than interest (AKA working hard and playing by the rulz) and thus have 100% of our income exposed to taxes, they blanch.

Haven’t had a single taker yet.

And here should be the rallying cry of the working class.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=M7FSddVm90k

Well, “madness personified” seems like a fair description of Mr Opie, but in my universe an outmoded psychiatric term cannot be embodied by an abstract.

Shorter me: Whattadick

Canary Wharf? Where the Daleks fought the Cybermen?

Clothing designer Peter Opie, of Canary Wharf Clothier, made about $2 million this year — and would see his tax bill spike by a staggering $100,000.

Hey Petey: How about I help you make up the differential by putting about $100 G’s worth of my foot in your ass?

Opie needs a drive by whoopin’ by Aunt Bee

UMmm we don’t like to talk about that.

Silly TBogg. You know those kids are takers, not makers!

Oh look, here are some kids who worked in coal mines for $3 a week!

If you raise taxes on the job creators, then the job creators won’t be able to job-create good American coal-mining jobs right here in America.

Because free enterprise and the middle finger of the invisible hand.

Dear Auntie Snow:

Very good catch!

Please take your comments, if you would, and write them up as a diary for MyFDL. This needs a broader airing.

(P.S. — If you don’t, I’m going to steal them and write a diary myself. But I’ll be sure to credit you.)

Thanks very muchly!

PW

They love to whine & cry & vetch from inside their $1million+ homes with ocean views about haaaaaaaard they work

Yeah, I know people like this. MANY people. They bitch about the taxes on their luxury homes going up $320 a YEAR, can you believe the goddam highway robbery? SCHOOL TAX fer chrissake –and their kids aren’t even in school any more!! (So what if the stellar reputation of the local schools is one of the things that made their property value go up in the first place?)

So anyway. Every time they say how harrrrrd they work for their harrrrd-earned money — after a struggle not to punch them in the mouth — I want to ask if they think they work as harrrd as a waitress, a hotel maid, a framing carpenter or a stevedore at the Daniel Island docks, and by the way, isn’t a good percentage of that “hard-earned” money of yours, Jason Terrence Folderol III, actually UN-fucking-earned?

The problem is that I’m never anywhere near these people and that particular conversational gambit except at church functions or in fancy social situations where my 20th century upbringing locks my mouth shut.

I’m sure Mr. Opie and his friends sit around the dining room table nightly, waiting for Cook to bring in the cherries jubilee and port, and discuss how the money-grubbing unions are ruining this country by having the audacity to have aspirations for their children (and themselves) that are clearly above their station. He probably masturbates to a bust of Margaret Thatcher every night. Go back to England where austerity policies are driving that economy into the ditch.

Mr Opie is awful god damn lucky the rest of us don’t kill him and eat him.

Is it just me or do we seem to be hearing more from wealthy whiners since Occupy Wall Street? Thse people are utterly unaware of just what life has been like for the vast majority of Americans recently. For a lot of people in their 50 and 60s who’ve lost their jobs and others who’ve lost their houses, the last 5 years have been the worst thing ever to happen to them. I’m sure any one of them would kill to be earning enough that their taxes would go up by $100,000.

I want to ask if they think they work as harrrd as a waitress, a hotel maid, a framing carpenter or a stevedore at the Daniel Island docks…

Eh? I *have* been able to ask some of my wealthier friends such a question (they forebear to be *polite* to me bc they see me as this hippie throwback Marxist who just can’t help it or something), but the answer is a resounding: R U Kidding???? I – vaunted Country Club Republican who is spawn of Country Club parents who *paid my way* through college and several advanced degrees (I will give them this: they tend to be smart) – work WAAAAAAAY haaaaaaaarder than any serf maid or gardener or dock worker. You (pointing at moi) ARE kidding?? Right?

No they simply do NOT see the lower orders as “working hard” bc, to them, “working hard” means that you would actually be making money – if not LOTS, at least enough to live in the “right” part of town, blah blah blah…

If you are a dock worker or bus driver or even a cop or a teacher or a nurse, then you really do NOT know what truly haaaaaaarrdddd work is. And you should bow & scrape & kowtow to your betters and make damn sure that your social betters aren’t taxed very much… so that they can enjoy their fancy expensive houses in fancy expensive gated communities, their fancy expensive cars, their fancy expensive country club, their kids’ fancy expensive private schools (the horror of sending their spawn to mingle with the lower orders! No way!!), their fancy expensive plastic surgery, and their fancy expensive & numberous vacations per year. Because: they *deserve* it! And the others simply do NOT.

After all, that’s what Rush & Fake Noise & their MegaChurches told ‘em! Case closed.

The rich listen to Rush & watch Fake Noise & some go to MegaChurches, where they are told that they are *entitled* to LOTS of money. And if you don’t have LOTS of money, then you are “getting what you deserve.”

No they have no clue, but the wolves are somewhat baying at their doors, as well. They may be self-absorbed & selfish, but they’re not totally blind to what’s going on world-wide.

Hence, they cling & grasp to their overly expensive life-styles, and they’ve been *trained* to blame any issues or concerns on teh poorz, rather than on the 1%. After all, esp those in the upper reaches of the 99% have a single goal of “making it” to the 1%. IF they have to pay more taxes, they might not get there… and get to be even more selfish, greedy, grubby & shitty. boo hooo

Your experience mirrors mine.

I don’t think the rich would deign to listen to low-class Rush or go to mega-churches, where they’d have to mingle with the unscrubbed. They USE Rush and mega-churches as propaganda tools. They have just as much respect for those who do listen to Rush and those who go to mega-churches as Rush does for his audience and TV evangelists have for their suckers. They are scams, run by scam artists and aimed at those who are easily led with few reasoning skills. Throw in God in any context, as long as it’s the context they prefer, and you’ve got them.

Just to make it all more gross, if possible…West India Docks… . That would be those West India docks…you know, the ones where the British made millions upon millions of pounds trading in human flesh, i.e., slavery.

Those would be the docks where the slavers pulled in to resupply, in preparation for the first leg of the Triangle trade, so called. Ugh.

Gross indeed.

sorry for the accidental dup.

Depends. Probably the mega-rich in the .001% & above don’t listen to Rush, etc, and disdain those who do whilst loving that Rush manipulates the masses, whether wealthier or poor.

That said, I know quite a few Country Club Republicans, who are not in the 1% for sure, but are in the upper reaches of the 99%. Believe me, they totally listen to Rush, watch Glenn & Fake *religiously,* and many attend some MegaChurch somewhere. Said Church, of course, caters to their ilk; certainly no poorz need attend.

Believe me, Rush is not just for Southern White Males or trailer park folks or what have you. Rush is revered by many who have plenty of money.

Please take your comments, if you would, and write them up as a diary for MyFDL. This needs a broader airing.

(P.S. — If you don’t, I’m going to steal them and write a diary myself. But I’ll be sure to credit you.)

Dear Phoenix Woman – please do take my comments and write a diary. I am traveling in the UK and don’t have time to work on anything, but this Peter Opie thing just struck me as the biggest bullshit ever. I would be honored if my observation turned into a great diary post by you!!!!!

I would have contacted you directly to tell you so but I can’t figure out how to do it through FDL.

How do they have time to listen to Rush? I thought they worked harder than everyone else. Just work, work, work. Prior to my retiring, I never would have had time to listen to any talk radio because I was, well, working. I do have a hard time picturing a bunch of hedge fund managers sitting in a Mega-church with the hoi polloi. They generally get to be Mega by catering to the average easily-manipulated fundamentalist. And I do realize that all rich people are not hedge fund managers or work on Wall Street.

Oh, and Canary Wharf Clothiers is quite the jawb creatuh!

The board consists of two people: abovementioned Opie (who is the Director) and a dude named Phillips John Pierre Bennett, a dude appointed to the post in 2010 after the previous secretary resigned in 2008. So, for the intervening couple of years, it looks like the Opie show, based in Britain

That’s it. Two people on the ‘Board’, one of them the owner.

They used to be something called Bladen Menswear which was not blue collar enough apparently, so they became Canary Wharf Clothiers in April 2012.

Quite the company – and a great flag-bearer for the oppressive taxes levied on American Jawb Creatuh!

Yes.

Lil’ Opie is a class A doucherocket, but he does something vaguely recognizable as work. All too many of those you describe know nothing – nothing – of what it’s like to literally sweat for your money; say somebody who graduated from Wharton and went directly to Goldman Sachs (aka the Vampire Squid).

There are those of that ilk who do work hard – physicians, for example – and I don’t grudge them a dime of what they earn (‘earn’ being a key word here). They worked damned hard to get where they are, and if they earn a half mil or a million per year that’s fine by me. Similarly with someone like Tim Berners-Lee, who for better or for worse changed the world and the way we live in it. (Nobody is worth what Bill Gates is worth, but at least he’s giving a lot of it away.)

That being said, the one trait folks like this all share in common – company owners, CEOs, hedge fund managers, whatever – is that none of them will be walking around with holes in their shoes no matter what their tax rates are, so what the fuck are they complaining about? They already receive enormously favored status over the proles; witness various bailouts. UAW contracts? Fuck the auto workers and their union contracts, they have to pay for the fuckups of company management – Rick Wagoner, let it be noted, drove away with a miserable $10 mil in severance when he got fired from the presidency of GM. Compare and contrast with those working for AIG’s financial products division in 2009, who got their bonuses – sanctity of contracts! These people earned those bonuses!

These people really do not understand why a fair percentage of the U.S. populace would enjoy seeing them swinging from lampposts…

Fuck them. Because why? Because fuck them.

I think I hear tumbrels in the distance… Oh look, the first one has a space specially reserved for this Opie douchenozzle!

I’ll be out back, sharpening my pitchfork and scythe.

I’m not talking about hedge fund mgrs. I don’t know any. The relatively wealthy people I know are attorneys, doctors, scientists & some in upper mgmt positions in bigger corporations. They earn bet $250k to less than a $million. Certainly not 1% but doing nicely nonetheless.

Mostly they do work long hours & have advanced degrees. They listen to Rush during their commute. Not kidding. Also watch Fake Noise while eating dinner or at the gym. A few are religious & attend the likes of Saddleback “church”. Others are atheists but wouldn’t say so at the country club.

These people only feel a “pinch” bc they choose to live large & expensively. They all have new cars & expensive everything. But they feel entitled & Rush tells them to be mad at poor folks. Classic divide & conquer. They prob do work hard but feel entitled to live lavishly & then are mad when it’s a push to make ends meet for the 4th vacation or the wife’s latest plastic surgery or the country club fees. None of them are really struggling other than from their own self-made debt.

Yes. See my comment above. The people I know do work hard but do not see how privileged they are & how much they have. They tend to be greedy & selfish & definitely don’t give a shit about anyone who is struggling or hungry. Rush has taught them that it’s their own fault for being lazy that they’re not making it. It’s all that Randian bullshit “libertarian” crap that they love to justify their greedy selfishness with. And in fact most of the folks that I’m thinking of all love to call themselves libertarians. And they love to pretend that they had no help along the way & “made it” all on their own. Talking about a bunch of middle to upper middle class white people whose parents paid to send them to good schools & paid for all of their advanced degrees. Often Dad had contacts that helped get started in their first job blah blah.

I don’t resent the advantages they had that helped them to be successful. But I resent their dishonesty about how & why they got ahead plus I resent their arrogant condescion towards working class people who are working just as hard or harder but struggling to get by. To look down on them & blow them off for being lazy is beyond disgusting. And then to endlessly whine about taxes is becoming unendurable.

These are not the legacy idle rich but they are nearly as revolting.

Thanks ever so much! Will do.

womanphoenix AT yahoo DOT com

heck, most people would be glad just to have the 100K.

PhoenixWoman… have fun. Canary Wharf Clothiers (Uk) Ltd., isn’t even a U.S. company (http://www.cdrex.com/canary-wharf-clothiers-uk-limited-853429.html), and I wonder how many jobs he really creates in the United States, since they don’t seem to have retail shops here. Perhaps he creates jobs in… oh… Bangladesh, El Salvador, etc.?

Oh, and here’s Peter Opie’s old website… “Bladen International” (http://bladeninternational.com/) being the former name of Canary Wharf Clothiers (Bladen is apparently a seller of “semi-bespoke” menswear in U.K.)

anytime the company’s website lists the email of the ‘director of the Board’ as the primary contact and the website is ‘under construction’, you know they are a thriving business creating hundreds of jobs.

You just know it.

So, shut up.

Frinstance the lovely and talented Todd Henderson of blessed memory.

Done!

http://my.firedoglake.com/phoenix/2012/12/29/the-unspeakable-peter-opie/

Thanks for link. Well worth reading, esp the comments that follow.

Just another small example is a couple I know, both well educated with advanced degrees. Probably earning upwards of $350k per year combined. Continuously whine about taxes… endlessly. Yet when their first daughter got married, they spent almost $300k on the wedding & all related expenses (gown, various showers, what not). $300,000 on one wedding at the height of the depression in 2008! Let me repeat $300,000 on one wedding.

Gag me with a spoon. Of course, they buy new cars at least every other year. Yet these self-absorbed shitheads ceaselessly whine about taxes and give similar “excuses” to what the law prof does in his whiney screed.

The people who spent $300,000 on one wedding LOVE Rush Limbaugh & only watch Fake Noise.

And now I’ll stop whining about those who whine about taxes!! ;-)

I think the Saddleback reference reveals that we live in the same neck of the woods, the relatively unacknowledged ground zero of the mortgage meltdown. The whiners around here are exactly as described: overextended and smug.

The people who complain about how high the car registration fees are, when they’ve never kept a car long enough to find out that those fees drop as the car gets older. (Especially if they’re leasing luxury cars. Not living in my universe.)

I had to listen to one of them, around 2006, complaining about the guy in his company’s mailroom (law firm, IIRC) who was renting an apartment and past 50 years old. The ideas that most people don’t make enough money to buy hoses, and might not want one when they’re getting old, doesn’t seem to have crossed his mind. (He was a beckwit, anyway.)

I didn’t keep the title of his book, but Al Franken spotted a quote from Barbara Tuchman that I missed:

In her book A Distant Mirror: The Calamitous Fourteenth Century, Barbara Tuchman writes about a peasant revolt in 1358 that began in the village of St. Leu and spread throughout the Oise Valley. At one estate, the serfs sacked the manor house, killed the knight, and roasted him on a spit in front of his wife and kids. Then, after ten or twelve peasants violated the lady, with the children still watching, they forced her to eat the roasted flesh of her dead husband and then killed her. That is class warfare. Arguing over the optimum marginal tax rate for the top 1 percent is not.

– Al Franken

Split time bet Northern CA & Southern. $300k wedding was up north. People with $mill+ house that they threw another $400k to remodel to their expensive tastes + has ocean view are down south. All Beckerheads who constantly whine about taxes & how taxes are ruining their entitled lives. And oh yes they’re all libertarians.

That’s from his classic tome Lies and the Lying Liars Who Tell Them.

And yes, Franken is white-hot smart. Plus, he has an infinite capacity for hard work over long periods of time, particularly if he feels he has a score to settle or a debt to pay.

In the case of retrieving Paul Wellstone’s Senate seat from Norm Coleman, it was both. It was his financial and moral support that kept the lights on — literally — in the Wellstone campaign’s office back in 1990 when nobody outside of Franken and Wellstone and his people thought Wellstone could win.

To see Wellstone and his memory smeared so Coleman could win — and then bare weeks later, to see Trent Lott, the same man who pretended to be oh-so-offended at the “partisan” nature of the Williams Arena event for Wellstone, say flat-out while eulogizing Strom Thurmond on his 100th birthday party on the floor of the Senate, that America would have been better off if Thurmond’s violently racist renegade “Dixiecrat” 1948 presidential campaign had put him in the White House — and to know that the same media that picked up on Lott’s and the other Republicans’ pre-planned smears of the Wellstone event almost before it happened would sit and ignore White-Citizens-Council Lott’s tongue-bathing a fellow segregationist — that sent Franken into a fury so deeply lasting that it made him run for that seat — and win it.

By the way, we can trace the first big flowering of the progblog movement to the media’s ignoring of Lott’s partisan worship of Thurmond so soon after Lott pretended offense at the Wellstone memorial. Atrios made his big break with hammering the “respectable” press on this over and over until they were forced to notice. (And even then, the only reason Lott got forced out as Senate Majority Leader was because Bush wanted Bill Frist, who Karl Rove saw as a far more pliant fellow, in his place.)

Ah yes. Those with enough money to buy fancy expensive new cars every year or two but who whiiiiine almighty about the DMV tax. Why should these vaunted libertarians have to pay for the roads & bridges they drive on?? Let the serfs & peons do that for them.

If known CROOK Daryll Issa hadn’t run Grey Davis out of office for spurious reasons, CA would’ve collected the appropriate & legal DMV fees and CA would not be in quite the financial bind that it’s in now. But who needs judges & courts? Who needs cops & fire fighters & pub sch teachers?? Certainly not the libertarians …. until they do. Then they whiiiine with no sense of irony about poor services.

Hope taxes go up. Won’t hold my breath. But I’ll be prepared for yet more butthurt whiiining if they do.