Daily Kos:

Morris Pearl, chairman of the Patriotic Millionaires lobbying group, is unlike many of the wealthy plutocrats that many of us justifiably rail against. To be clear, he is a capitalist. But he’s a capitalist with a conscience, and not an oligarch. In fact, his aim is to prevent the slide toward oligarchy that many believe is occurring—or has already occurred.

Pearl was a managing director at BlackRock, one of the largest investment firms in the world. He worked on the Maiden Lane transactions, and assessing the government’s potential losses from the bailouts of Citibank and AIG. Prior to BlackRock, Pearl enjoyed a long tenure on Wall Street where he invented some of the securitization technology connecting America’s capital markets to consumers in need of credit.

Mr. Pearl was not born poor. His parents were middle-class small business owners of six small clothing stores in upstate New York. He went to public schools and the University of Pennsylvania…