On the red carpet for the annual Stand Up For Heroes concert Wednesday night, elites from the military, media, entertainment, and finance mingled comfortably. The comedy-and-Springsteen show put on annually by the Bob Woodruff Foundation and the New York Comedy Festival has helped raise over $20 million in the last eight years, and has brought together some unlikely allies — including this year, when John Oliver, an unrelenting critic of Wall Street excess, performed at the show funded and attended by some of Wall Street's biggest names.
So how do you get Oliver, who recently described hedge funds as "a small group of extremely rich assholes," schmoozing cozily with the Wall Street elite? The magic ingredient is military veterans, a group the HBO host and intellectual liberal crush-object has become an enthusiastic supporter of.
Oliver met his wife, Kate Norley, who served as a medic in Fallujah and Ramadi, at the Republican National Convention in 2008. He was covering it, she was with the group Veterans for Freedom. Oliver went on a USO Tour of Afghanistan in 2013, where he went from gig to gig in a Blackhawk helicopter. The tour was "coolest thing I've ever done," he told BuzzFeed News as he walked the red carpet last night. "You get to pretend you're doing something meaningful with your life."
Oliver is far from the only liberal critic of Wall Street to line up with financiers in support of veterans. Bruce Springsteen, who has headlined every Stand Up For Heroes show, is known as much for his left-wing politics as he is for his rock 'n' roll. At a Berlin show in 2012, he called bankers "greedy thieves" and "robber barons."
But on Wednesday night, some of those robber barons were engaged in a bidding war for the guitar The Boss just finished playing. Bids headed toward $300,000, Bloomberg reported, with the winner set to pick up not just a guitar, but a private lesson and lasagna dinner at Springsteen's home. And a ride on his motorbike.
One of the bidders for the guitar was Richard Handler, whose firm Jefferies has been accused of drug-fueled decadence by a senior banker's estranged wife. And one of the sponsors of the event was the foundation of hedge fund billionaire Steve Cohen, whose firm SAC Capital pleaded guilty to insider trading last year and paid $1.8 billion in penalties.
Earlier that day, several of the distinguished guests were in an auditorium at the headquarters of Goldman Sachs, praising the work Goldman, along with Citigroup and Deutsche Bank, had done to hire and support veterans through the group Veterans on Wall Street. The TV journalist and advocate for wounded veterans Bob Woodruff spoke there, along with General Martin Dempsey, chairman of the Joint Chiefs of Staff.
Dempsey joked that he would be happier "if the most important man in the country was Lloyd [Blankfein], because that would mean everything was stable and we were just trying to improve our GDP." The joke came in response to Blankfein, who earlier said that Dempsey has "maybe the most important job" in the country.
Blankfein was full of praise for the armed forces veterans employed by Goldman. "There is no sacrifice in this, the people that we hire are extraordinary," he said. "Their resumes are good, they're older, they're more mature, they know what they want in life, and I think we've had a terrific experience."
Oliver, a Cambridge-educated British comic who relocated to the U.S. in 2006, said there's "a bit of a misconception that being liberal is anti-military." So, BuzzFeed News asked, would Wall Street's support for one of his own pet causes perhaps soften his often foul-mouthed critiques of the industry?
"No, oh God no," he said. "This is the least they could do."