Forum Post: Reply to THAT letter from a Wall Street Worker

You can read the original letter & download this one here: http://www.tocamu.com/?page_id=5665

Dear (I use this salutation under protest) Wall Street Letter Writer,

I read your patronizing and cowardly (for not identifying yourself) rant at the 99%. It’s little surprise that instead of apologizing for your part in ruining millions of lives, you resort to the cornered rat’s age-worn threat of, “If I go down I’ll take you down.” Last time I heard it, it was from Gaddafi; before that, Saddam Hussein. What a conceptually impressive ocean you go a-fishin’ in, on those days you never take off.

You write: “For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled.” Who exactly fooled whom? The 99% wouldn’t have sat back and enjoyed the modest prosperity you attribute entirely to your hard work if we’d known what was going on. I suppose we were just too busy doing socially useful jobs to ask questions. You claim we’re your gambling co-conspirators but it’s you, with your Collateralized Debt Obligations (CDOs), your structured Asset-Backed Securities (ABSs) and your Securitized Hedged Index Trades (work this acronym out for yourself) who bet everything on red... that’s our lives, homes, jobs, money and children’s futures. If your intellectual superiority complex can take the hit (incidentally, claiming to be smarter than the dinosaurs strikes me as uncharacteristically humble), consider this: either you’re a lot dumber than you think or you deliberately misled the 99%. That’s called fraud.

Your letter starts with, “We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money.” I won’t explore the sordid relationship between fraud and your priapic rejoicing in an existence devoted solely to money-making. Despite the devastation you’ve caused, you continue to take pride in your work and even boast that you’ll use anything you can lay your twitching hands on, including “fake paper” in the single-minded pursuit of your life purpose. I’ll bet you that 35% dinner tip (followed no doubt in your case by cigars, a few lines of coke, a lap dancing club and a couple of hookers) that your employer has a CSR department. In case you’ve forgotten, that stands for Corporate Social Responsibility. So let me see if I get it yet: you’re encouraged to make money any way you can, and then your employer returns a few dollars in a transparently false PR exercise. For which you get a grossly undeserved bonus. Did I miss anything?

Your narcissistic confidence climaxes in your conviction that you’re at the “top of the pyramid” (there’s another sexual metaphor in there for you to grapple with. Did you read “Liar’s Poker?) You then arrogantly assume if you lose your job that you’ll automatically knock those presently occupying the middle level to the bottom. How reassuring it must be to know you’re superior to the rest of us at anything you turn your hand to. Wall Street and the financial services industry in general play a vital role in the economy and guess what? My family has a significant history in the sector backed by philanthropy (does yours?). As far as I’m concerned, you represent the apotheosis of what slimes and grubs at the foot of the food chain (your metaphor, not mine). I recognized the self-aggrandizing playground bully’s threat in your final paragraph but to whom or to what does “...will he? And will they?” refer? Please remind me - what was it you wrote about being capable of teaching third graders?

In an effort to be constructive, let’s look at stimulating the economy. Here’s an idea: go out and buy some nice clear glass. Back it with a reflective surface and hang it in your home. Better still, put one in every room. It’s called a mirror. If any like-minded friends come round and marvel at it, offer to make mirrors for them too. That way, you’ll actually be creating something tangible and (WARNING: semi-subtle argument follows) socially useful. Pretty soon you’ll have your own business and you won’t have to take my job (in fact I’m a writer and sorry, I just don’t feel threatened). But it’s lucky I’m not a landscape gardener, as apparently you’d have been much better at it than me.

It’s just so unfair when Average Joe uses you as a scapegoat...

Nicholas Stafford-Deitsch

Tocamu.com