Suze Orman To Bush: "You Owe The American People Every Penny Of Your Fortune And Your Family's Fortune"

In a long profile by WWD's Jacob Bernstein, Suze Orman sounds off on George Bush and blames the ex-president for the financial crisis (near the bottom of the first page):

Sitting in a green room after her TV interviews, she lambasts everyone from Alan Greenspan to Larry Summers to the former president of the United States, who holds an especially dark place in her heart. "Commander in Chief?" she says of George W. Bush, with a mix of disbelief and scorn. "You blew up every single financial vessel we had and if you think you aren't personally responsible, well, the blame starts at the top. There is no higher top than you, SIR! If I were you, I would feel so absolutely horrific that I would take every penny I had and distribute it to anybody and everybody to help them in whatever way I could. You owe the American people every penny of your fortune and your family's fortune."

Orman also calls being impersonated by SNL's Kristen Wiig the “greatest honor of my career" and that often during her show she is forced to stop and think, "Ugh. I’m playing Kristen Wiig."

Read the full profile here at WWD.com.

Watch Kristen Wiig impersonate Suze Orman below:

Comments

[Noodnik]

I blame congress for de regulating and allowing the big banks, AIG, Fannie/Freddie etc to dabble disastrously with gambling on an international scale.

[AMP43]

Enjoy your Doublewide

[mmonarch]

Snarky comment. Your point being what?

[coco51]

that would be true if the POTUS was just a figurehead like the Queen of England!! You seem to forget the Fish Rots from the Head!

[mmonarch]

The President does not pass bills. He only signs them or vetoes them once they have been through the legislative process known as Congress. He can propose legislation. But he doesn't pass it all on his own. Bush vetoed only 11 bills in 8 years. That is nothing considering the number of them that hit his desk. So, coco51, you seem to forget how the U.S. government as a republic has 3 branches.

[bethea3]

Problem is that the De-reg craze started with Regan and has snowballed with every president ver since. A rebuttal to one of my earlier post on this wisely pointed out to me by elephantintheroom that some of the deregulation responsible for this current crisis originated during the Clinton admin. I stand corrected.­and grateful.
In all of this I realize what I had failed to think of is this; did the originators of the deregulations that have adversely affected us have any conceivable notion of the ramifications of their actions?
In the current climate wherein a lobbyist can literally draft a bill for submission it seems unlikely the long-term effects were even in the equation. Anyone who could have offered an opposing opinion was probably silenced in much the same way those with a more socially sensitive inclination are labeled liberal and dismissed out of hand.
The blame game will continue in earnest for quite some time to come. When it starts to settle down, then and only then will the powers that be look at the original regulations and understand why they were implemented in the first place.

[corwin]

It's really hard to take anything like this-or anyone who writes something like this seriously.­Then again,Andrew Sullivan seems to have trouble with gestational length,so who knows what people can believe.

[DogLeg]

You must be a wanna be lawyer. Who else would write vaguely and throw in an ad hominem to prove their cliched stupidity.

Note: There is no question mark. Some questions don't need to be answered. Not because the question is rhetorical, rather the answer has already been given.

[mohawk79]

Laughable.

[olddognewtrick]

The sweetest little cupcake from the Buttercup Bakery.

[Okieborn]

YEAH ! NOW FORK IT OVER !!!

[leftLibertarian]

The Bu$h Crime Family never sleeps and always sucks the blood from America.

[mgd2854]

Yes I agree with what Orman says but our economic crash didn't begin with W. It all goes back to Reagan. The Reagan Administration was nothing more than a coup for the super rich. W. was one of the many Reagan minions.

We need to remind ourselves about the French Revolution and what was at its source? Then later on we had the Bolshevik Revolution where people would go into wealthy peoples homes kill them and steal their assets. Are Americans headed down this road?

[Lerrin]

Agreed- it's unbelievable that Reagan's reign has been so consistently glorified rather than relentlessly villified.

[Davwbaird]

These are the times that try men's souls, It is the time of the great reckoning when we will live behind walled compounds. My outlying walls are now 4 feet tall and growing. The brier hedge is impregnable.

We are on the edge of chaos.

[solarian]

here is a line from wasp by eric frank russell - the people who started this war will pay with there money and there lifes. the story with a car 4 big tough men and a wasp flys in and they crash and die its only a wasp insignifigant

[StevieTheK]

Hopefully Mr. Russell, whoever he is, didn't actually write those words verbatim.

[liberal54]

Let's not forget about DICK. I would really like to know - if, indeed, there's a way to know after all the accounting hijinx that went on - just how much Halliburton, KBR, Blackwater, et al - scammed from the American taxpayers, and how much went into Dick's pockets as a result.

Why hasn't someone frozen their assets and started procedings for war crimes and racketeering?

[batmanindy]

Pot meet kettle. I agree with suze but also believe she should give her money all back too. afterall, she told everyone, max out your 401(k) and invest in stocks for the long run. She was no more an expert than you or me. She just parroted the conventional wisdom of the day and did it with some pizazz so people watched her, she got 'famous' and sold some air time and books. BUT let's be fair, all while giving rotten advice. Soyes, boo sh should retunr all of his fortune but I say Suze too.

[lillibelle]

I could not agree with you more. Bush took laissez faire to a ridiculous degree but Suze was the snake oil salesman continually urging "girlfriends" to invest in the stock market. The buy and hold myth peddled by the investment houses and "experts" like Suze was one of the biggest frauds ever foisted on the individual investor.

[hippydippycal]

Agree and add Dave Ramsey to that mix. Suzie wanted to sell books a couple of years ago and Ramsey was charging the public to attend his seminars in all the holy roller churches, praise the Lord, old Dave made a killing giving crappy advise.

[greymom]

Wait a minute. Suze advised people to invest their money, but only what they could afford to lose. Most of her advice was for people to stop spending lavishly on credit cards for things that they did not need. Her philosophy was to have only a car payment and a house payment and no credit card debt. She also advised people to diversify their investments, and the closer one was to retirement, the more stable investments one should have. Dave Ramsey says the same thing and his big emphasis was to pay down debt, tighten belts until debt was paid down and start fresh buy paying cash for everything.

True, the stock market caught everybody unawares but Ramsey and Suze did advise fiscal conservatism.

[Dynamohum]

Finally a VOICE OF REASON. Suze did try to protect the working class.

[bethea3]

Just think of how the privatization of social security would play out right now. I once worked with a defrocked Wall street-er in 2002 caught with his hands in the cookie jar who said it was the only way to go. I told him if the American public couldn't elect the right man for president, how could the average Joe pick the right mix of stocks and securities to insure their future? Why invest your future in something you have seem go bust (the dot.com bubble)? I told him speculating with current expendible assets is one thing. Leveraging your future could have you eating dog food when you sixty-five.
Of course my opinion was disparaged in front of my peers because he had worked in the market making $100k per year plus and I had only been a lowly debt collector of sub-prime mortgages.
I only wish I could run into that fool today. His money was tried to the very securities defaulting today and he assured me he would retire by 2010..

[JDHART]

Where was Suze Orman a couple of years ago?

[lillibelle]

Telling everyone to buy and hold stocks. Even last autumn, she was recommending the stock market. Only Daria Dolan was urging investors to exit the stock market pronto.

[Leakman]

Suze Orman is a fraud. She spews out advice that is just practical common sense, packages it as her own insightful advice, and sells it to the drones out there, whom instead of learning on their own, listen to this twit.

[jdw1981]

Suze Orman gives good practical advice to everyday Americans who aren't getting multimillion dollar bonuses by robbing the taxpayers. I think you must have her mixed up with that Cramer guy.

[EuroRant1]

Really? I have been screaming at my parents about these very same "common sense" money ideas & advice for years ... along comes Ms. Orman and my parents act as though Moses just descended Mt Sinai for them.

You're correct but be a little easy on your critique of Ms. Orman ... because you wouldn't believe how many other drones are out there like my parents?

[Fernando]

And yet she makes a good point here.

[siegfried]

No, Bush owes the people of the world life in prison. Personally, I would prefer that he be drawn and quartered, but life is the most he can get at the Hague.

[CeeCee]

"instead of learning on their own"

Surely you jest. If they could learn it on their own, they wouldn't be asking anyone else. Feh!

[Charmskooldropout]

People wake up. The dems are just as corrupt as the repugs. How did Papa Kennedy make his initial money? Do you really think the dems in congress are not living the cush life and reaping rewards too? The whole system has become so distasteful to me it makes me ashamed. I wish we could just throw the whole damn bunch out and start over. No lobbyist, no special interest groups, limited terms for Congress, etc..

[LeAnn Cammack]

Maybe the D's are just as corrupt but they didn't burn down the nation while sticking their fingers in pies. The R's set fire to the place and now expect us to believe they know how to catch the arsonists and trusting them to do so.

We are in a monumental crisis and I find it odd that people are not anti-government and anti-D when the R's and the government that did this to us in the first place are now out of power. We trusted them and it was like trusting the NRA to write gun control laws. The loopholes were big enough to drive buses through. We can't just be anti-government now; we have a new president and Congress has to find its way to lead while getting the R's to follow, come up with a better idea that is not based on Reaganomics, or GET OUT OF THE WAY. We need to support our president and keep our voices heard. I understand your frustration; I get frustrated too because the people who are really responsible are glibly blaming Pres. Obama and the D's, who I know are not perfect but they are not solely responsible for this gigantic mess.

Frankly, I'd rather trust government right now; at least you can vote the bums out. You can't oust a corrupt CEO nearly as easily, and they can rob the country blind with no consequences, as long as the Right People Get Rich.

Enough is enough.

[mmonarch]

The Dem's didn't burn downt he nation while sticking their finger's in the pies? You're joking of course. Go to Opensecrets.org and look up some of the campaign money that the TARP companies have donated to the Dems (GOP too). But the leaders of the group in this past election were the Dem's. Also Dodd's fingers in the Countrywide pie. Not paying taxes? That's a nice chunk of change. Check out Rangel. Pres. Obama took $2.5M from TARP companies alone for his campaign fund. Go look.

[LeAnn Cammack]

"are not anti-government"

should read "are anti-government"

Darn my typing.

[lmvd3]

Yes, but the Republican's screams for the past twenty years, calling for deregulation, is a HUGE part of this financial fiasco. If we had laws, and laws with teeth, than the sub-prime mortgages would not have happened, which contributed to the rest of the financial collapse. If we had salary and bonus caps, than the government bailout would not have used taxpayer money to pay these corporate guys $4 million "bonuses" for utter and complete failure on the job. We have regulations to maintain order and curb crime, and that includes those at the top echelons who have been getting away with everything, including financial murder for personal gain. It's high time we regulate, again, and that would come from the Democrats, and certainly NOT the deregulation Republicans. Deregulation is the Republican party's most essential and core political value.

[mmonarch]

You are preaching to the choir. No one on Huffpo wants to hear what you have to say. Daddy Warbucks Kennedy was a rumrunner during Prohibition. So much for Camelot. All politicians, even the current Fearless Leader have come up through the political swamp. And the people here, seem to think that not an ounce of mud stuck to them on the way up. Gee, Pres. Obama took $955k from Citi as campaign donations. Overall from 6 TARP companies, Pres. Obama took over $2.5M. Yep. Cover your hears and your eyes folks. But first go look it up at Open Secrets.

[Troubledwawa]

Good for you Suze!

[dora rice]

Thank you Suze Orman. Not only his money he made during his time in Washington, but then he should be put infront of a criminal court. Nothing less is fair.

[AbbieHoffman2]

..........­.B.U.S.H. s.h.o.u.l.­d. S.H.A.R.E a. C.E.L.L. w.i.t.h. .M.A.D.O.F­.F.