Wall Street Wit
This e-mail is doing the rounds on Wall Street, and is proving amazing popular. It is a rare insight into how these people think:
“‘We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s pension plan doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas!
Well now the market crapped out, and even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore ? Guess what – we’re going to take yours. We get up at 5am and work ’till 10pm or later. We’re used to remaining at our desks, working for hours on end. We don’t even need to pee. We don’t take an hour or more for lunch, and we don’t take much time off for holidays. We don’t demand a union to represent us. And we don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is your job, we’ll eat that instead.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders ? We’re going to take your cushy guaranteed-for-life-jobs – you know, the ones that come with four months paid holiday a year. So say goodbye to your overtime and double time, as we’ll be in the market for some of your cushy lifestyle – and we’ll undertake your jobs more efficiently, and with none of your constant whining that the pay isn’t enough and that the working conditions are too tough.
So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without any bonus upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right ? Wrong! Guess what – we’re going to stop buying those luxury items that help make the economy grow, and we aren’t going to leave those 35% tips at our business dinners anymore. And from now on, we’re going to landscape our own back yards, and wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways, instead of spreading that wealth around. There’ll be no more free rides on our backs. Don’t forget, our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.
The difference is, though, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the American middle classes and knock them to the bottom of the food chain.
We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama and his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply, will he survive ? And will all those we displace ?”
I find this quite amazing – the arrogance, the greed, the sense of entitlement, the almost-sociopathic lack of empathy with the millions who have suffered because of their mis-steps. After all, it was the culture of greed in this industry that fed a frenzy of risk taking, ultimately requiring a bailout to prevent a catastrophic collapse of the entire economy. Even with this bailout, the crisis added millions to the unemployment rolls, increased poverty and economic hardship throughout the world, and even resulted in loss of life in some of the world’s poorest countries. And today, while their entire industry is being underwritten by the taxpayer, they demand the right to uninterrupted enormous profits on the back of ordinary people.
We need to go back to the insights of Pope Leo XIII and Pope Pius XI, who warned against this concentration of power, this domination of labor by monied interests. Let’s go back to my favorite social encyclical, Quadragesimo Anno - note the similarities between the conditions described by Pius and those of today.
“In the first place, it is obvious that not only is wealth concentrated in our times but an immense power and despotic economic dictatorship is consolidated in the hands of a few, who often are not owners but only the trustees and managing directors of invested funds which they administer according to their own arbitrary will and pleasure.
This dictatorship is being most forcibly exercised by those who, since they hold the money and completely control it, control credit also and rule the lending of money. Hence they regulate the flow, so to speak, of the life-blood whereby the entire economic system lives, and have so firmly in their grasp the soul, as it were, of economic life that no one can breathe against their will.
This concentration of power and might, the characteristic mark, as it were, of contemporary economic life, is the fruit that the unlimited freedom of struggle among competitors has of its own nature produced, and which lets only the strongest survive; and this is often the same as saying, those who fight the most violently, those who give least heed to their conscience.
This accumulation of might and of power generates in turn three kinds of conflict. First, there is the struggle for economic supremacy itself; then there is the bitter fight to gain supremacy over the State in order to use in economic struggles its resources and authority; finally there is conflict between States themselves, not only because countries employ their power and shape their policies to promote every economic advantage of their citizens, but also because they seek to decide political controversies that arise among nations through the use of their economic supremacy and strength.”
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Thanks Morning for a very cool post. Loved the papal quote.
God Bless
Outstanding post. Do you have a source for the memo?
Commie popes!
I have nothing against businesses. Goods need to be produced obviously, and profit is the necessary motivator. Finance is another matter. Much of what goes on in the financial world is dealing in non-existent things, there are no “means of production”. There frequently isn’t even capital. The scheme that ruined real estate was so complex that even those involved didn’t comprehend it. Or take Enron. It’s no different from the street hustlers and their card tricks.
Minion, would you mind explaining when/why high finance encroached this much into business ?
Lewis Black put it best: “You don’t want another Enron? Here’s the law: If you have a company, and it can’t explain, in one sentence… what it does… it’s illegal!”
We’re used to remaining at our desks, working for hours on end. We don’t even need to pee. We don’t take an hour or more for lunch, and we don’t take much time off for holidays. We don’t demand a union to represent us. And we don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is your job, we’ll eat that instead.
Spoken like true predators.
If these folks want to find out what real work is like (with no sick time or vacations), I suggest they spend a season or two as migrant laborers.
I wonder if they realize that displaying such obvious contempt for their customers is not the best business strategy.
Mark – I received it as a private e-mail, but you can see it here.
Oh, no, I like this very much. It puts everything in perspective, and it should be widely circulated–especially to that part of the “Tea Partier” element who are Catholics; they need to know that their ideology is in direct conflict with orthodox Catholic Christianity.
What I find fascinating is that no one addressed how much of this is true- you were not complaining as long as they made the US, us and the world rich. They do work more hours with less time off, paid or otherwise, then any middle class worker and certainly the myriad of office workers and teachers that I know. I have worked in a factory, third shift, give me a break about the migrant worker- they won’t be taking their jobs or the factory jobs. And why is it that people who use their education and resources to make money are treated as evil- you are not supposed to judge. And, by the way, ask a migrant worker if they came here to stay a migrant worker or to give their families the same opportunity these workers had. Honestly, nothing like those who have theirs complaining about those who have more and attributing their values on those who have less.
This is what I make of your post, MM–and thank you very much for it. It is most enlightening.
So we do not even know if someone within Wall Street wrote this email at all? It could have been a creative writing major from Hunter College in NY and we simply don’t know.
That said, you will notice that the government has not been calling for anyone’s head in Wall Street on a broad scale and that is because the government including democrats like Barney Frank were one leg of a four legged stool that caused this chaos. Wall Street was another leg. Home buyers were the third leg often taking advantage of stated income mortgages wherein you did not have to prove that you made a given income, you just had to state that you made that income to get the mortgage.
Government figures pressured Fannie and Freddie to make home buying easier for the poor and thus sprouted within the mortgage industry variable rate mortgages etc whose low interest rate was only good for one year after which it reset way above that. Dishonest mortgage salesmen did not make that clear to poor people who then lost their homes. Government should have stopped those and stated income loans and interest only loans but government did not.
Wall Street came in next and took many bad mortgages and combined them with good mortgages within one instrument…CDO’s which should have been illegal per se. Along came Moody’s and Standard and Poors and instead of rating such CDO’s as junk bonds or lower medium bonds…rated them in the A’s because they were getting fees from the brokers who were paying them to rate their instruments.
In Red China all of these various corruption points would have lost executives to the bullet in the back of the head. Here there is this one trader in Goldman who may suffer. Government can’t investigate because the trail would come back to them and to the SEC some of whose lawyers were watching porn for hours rather than watching CDO’s and what was within them.
When all are guilty, there is no clamor for trials. If Wall Street were the only culprit, there would be demands for trials.
You should notice, MM, that neither one of your critics, Bill Bannon or Ann, dares to say a thing against the encyclical (of Pius XI) which you quote, and which is far more incendiary against their beloved financial institutions than the e-mail itself is.
“The issue which has swept down the centuries and which will have to be fought sooner or later is the people versus the banks.” –Lord Acton
Digby
I didn’t even know I was criticizing MM. It pays to read you to keep abreast of what I am doing. I think Popes should stay out of economics unless they are going to stay in the matter til it develops problems. Committment. Think of the early papal praise of unions but then the papacy disappeared when unions were infiltrated with mafia and later when unions by their excessive demands destroyed the auto industry, Greece, and probably more nations to come in Europe…largely Catholic like Ireland, Italy, Spain and Portugal.
The Popes are like the news media: they are in the problem momentarily to praise and then disappear when problems arise.
Wow, what an attitude toward the “Magisterium,” Bill Bannon! Can I remember that the next time the popes weigh in on “gay marriage” or the “criminalization of abortion”? It’s funny how folks like you think that these are religious issues but the working of people to death in the sweat shops of the Third World (which I’ve seen with my own eyes) is not.
I’ve never written a word about abortion or gay marriage. So you are seeing such things in a vision.
Perchance you are given to stereotypes as a result of this vision.
What you are saying is that the Magisterium is unaccountable for its words. Paul, the central figure of the epistles, held Peter accountable in Galatians…but who’s actually reading. In 1520, some Catholic should have stopped Pope Leo X from defending burning people at the stake for heresy in Exsurge Domine. No one did. It was a lemming moment. In 1585, some Catholic should have told Sixtus V that putting castrati in the papal churches so that women would be silent in Church was a bad idea. No one did. It was a lemming moment. In 1253, someone should have told Innocent IV that bringing back torture for heretics in Ad Extirpanda was a bad idea since Pope Nicholas had condemned it in 866. No one did. It was a lemming moment. And such moments continue.
Ann,
An excellent point. . . but again, why the contempt for their investors?
It seems to me that the proper resonse to that e-mail is to relaize that investing has a degrading effect on character, just as gambling does, or any other vice.
Is that what Wall St. wants us to believe?
Digbydolben,
I read the post at your blog, including this line: “THIS is the attitude of the economic plutocrats that the idiots who support the financial policies of the Republican Party …”
You do realize that President Obama was Wall Street’s preferred candidate in 2008, right? And that Wall Street has given $11 million to the Democratic National Committee during this election cycle, but only $7.3 million to the GOP? Or that Goldman Sachs gave 75% of its cash to the Democrats in 2008, and 70% to the Democrats in this election cycle?
Here’s the point. Neoliberalism in America comes in two flavors: You can get the Republican brand, with pro-life sprinkles and small government sauce. Or you can get the Democratic brand, with Green crunchies and gay rights rainbow swirls. It’s the same bullshit funded by the same people. The Democrats and Republicans are two dead ends in the same blind alley.
Mark Gordon, you are absolutely right, and I have become completely disillusioned regarding Obama. While I think the Republicans are worse–because more militaristic, more nationalistic and, basically, more racist (at least in some parts of the U.S.A.), I agree with you that Obama is a tool of the plutocrats. However, I also think that pressure CAN be put on him to make him less so, by his “base.”
Other than that, however, what can anybody with a social conscience informed by Catholic doctrines regarding justice and political responsibility do. What do you suggest? Hasn’t almost everything been tried?
Digby,
I think we may be reaching the point at which refusal is the only option. Refusing to be governed. Refusing to allow ourselves to be further implicated in the culture of greed and death that permeats the political and legislative process in the United States. Every assault on human dignity, from abortion and ESCR to poverty, capital punishment, war and torture, is sponsored, enabled and extended by these parties, with their armies of yesmen, admen, pollsters, spokesmen/hucksters, petty bureaucrats, lawyers, and kingmakers.
Dorothy Day said “If we rendered unto God all the things that belong to God, there would be nothing left for Caesar.” We should be so busy with the corporal and spiritual works of mercy that when Caesar comes to our door, we have no time, no money, no blood, and no votes for him and his well-heeled, well-connected friends. Nate Wildermuth is off to do that. We should each of us in his own way be doing that, too.
This is real and fake. It’s real because some sociopath actually wrote and meant it…over a year ago. It’s fake because it is not making the rounds of trading desks but the rounds of blogs. It’s just a recycled bit of non-news, chewed up and spit out and stuck to the bottom of a grubby desk and found by somebody silly enough to start chewing on it again in an attempt to serialize the mindset of an industry full of workers with very little accuracy. Might it be possible that there are plenty of people in finance who might be at least as good of human beings as you, dear Minion, and worthy of being judged the same?