Never On Sunday

I don’t know whether this repulsive little rant is everything it’s meant to be, but people are certainly heated up about it, crowing how this is proof of the irredeemable evil of corporate culture. Well, maybe. It might simply be a fiction; falsifying information, records, and even entire personalities for political ends and spreading them across the internet before they can be contained has become commonplace: urban legend writ large. If genuine, it demonstrates that at least some portion of Wall Street has been engaged in unrestrained (and largely undeclared) class warfare for some time…as if any more proof were needed. It also demonstrates a certain detachment from the realities of the workplace, and even of the real economy—the one that doesn’t exist strictly as a collection of balance book fictions.

The presumed author claims that brokers used to the high-pressure environment of Wall Street can handle anything. As a teacher-in-training, I doubt this particular sack of shit could teach well, but then, he doesn’t care about that, only about whether he gets paid. He might be a little surprised to find teachers don’t generally pull down $85k a year, though, and might have even more trouble living on that salary if he can get it. (Remember when Congress sought to limit executive bonuses, and the public was informed that $1 million simply wasn’t enough to live on? Yeah.) And I’m not convinced he’s ready to get by on a working salary. I doubt, too, whether he can handle manual labor like landscaping with the ease he imagines. But I’d like to watch him try.

He’s also got a peculiar notion of who’s living off of whose wealth here. The people who make goods make wealth, and financiers skim off a percentage of that. And only a tiny, tiny fraction of them are really dependent on that 35% tip he so proudly claims as largesse. Car dealers can make a comfortable living selling $15,000 cars to the rest of us; they certainly enjoy the commission off an $80,000 car sale, but won’t go hungry for lack of one. The $5 car wash is $5 for everyone; no car wash is going out of business simply from a few Wall Street brokers finding work elsewhere. With the exception of a few luxury craftsmen, producers of real wealth can get along just fine without the big spenders. The reverse is not true.

But, even if this purported email is the genuine article, is it really the work of a real Wall Street banker? Cut off from their working income, the really rich don’t need a landscaper’s salary to keep afloat. They can live off the interest on the interest; the real money is in fleecing the system generally, and in influence peddling, not the trading itself. Finding real work would be counterproductive for the true Wall Street exec; he’s far better off trying to get back into the game, even a game reduced by regulation and oversight. And the real wolves of Wall Street belong to an elite club that will watch one another’s back—off the trading floor, if not on it. Sons of the rich and powerful will have work found for them. It’s the worker bee, the trader who came from among us commoners and desperately wants to be one of the lucky few to be admitted to the club that worries about where he goes if Wall Street jobs begin to evaporate.

The guy who wrote this rant, isn’t one of the big boys new regulation hopes to bring down; he’s one of the little boys who might get caught incidentally in the fallout. Unlike the big boys, he’s genuinely scared. Unlike the big boys, he needs to hide that fear behind a wall of bluster. ‘Cause the big boys will kick him aside without a second glance, and he knows it, down to the bottoms of his narcissistic little toes. Or, just as likely, he’s a troll. Either way, his screed is nothing for anyone to get worked up about.