First, there is no grand conspiracy: The most money begets the most power. The Street's got a ton of money. And hence, power. And they use it: They use vast amounts of big money to make policy. Don't kid yourself: No politician of the modern ilk ever did anything he wasn't pressured into. They are led to water by whoever's applying the most pressure to the elected mule, which is almost nearly always industry. And this industry controls the capital flows of the majority of money that has real power, meaning enough weight to truly move markets, including the shit-eating scrum of our country's politics - that Hades of small-minded rage and bitterness that disservices us continually. But money parts the smile on the jackass, no matter who wields the cart up the steps into the stalls of government.
And financial services, aside from the medical sector (Big Pharma and the like), has consistently been the biggest spending lobby group in America, which is still the largest economy in the world. Open Secrets shows financial services outspending everybody from 1998 through 2005, outpaced since only by Big Pharma, and then occasionally by a bunch of industries oddly lumped into one sector called "Misc. Business." And when it comes to overall spending in this election cycle, The Street can't be beat. It obliterates the competition, as it often does. And don't bring up organized labor. Corporations of all types consistently outspend labor by a country mile: When you're told otherwise you're being made to eat what's inedible. Unions have been marginalized for decades, helped in no small part by both the global race to the bottom of the cheap labor barrel, and also by domestic labor's own recalcitrance. The expendable income of, and what gets spent from, corporate treasuries dwarfs that of what unions can ever muster.
But let's just all get over ourselves and get it straight: The Street's real power is used to write the rulebook that enables The Street to easier get what The Street wants: More money. Fewer problems. Contrary to Biggie Smalls' lyrics but presumed probably, by most of our experiences. The Street nearly always wins because they paid a lot for victory. So: Winning. Mostly. Always. Let's not even quibble: The first draft of nearly every draft of legislation gets written by corporate lawyers from whichever industry hobbyhorse said legislator rode into office on, or needs to remain. Policy is made by those paying for the sausage to get made their way. And this industry, like others, pays for their own, very specifically congealed playbook.
Above are facts. There is no judgment therein. The aforementioned truths are of such a basic, obvious nature, all reasonable persons can easily agree on them, including Wall Street residents, and occupiers, alike. (Please beware of anyone telling you otherwise, because they're condescending to you, and working you, on a need-to-know, Straussian, smile-as-I-demean-you, basis.)
So now that we know the parameters of the field on which we play, what exactly are we playing, and what for?
Let's set out some consensus observations: The Street is occupied, and nervous. So are we all: We don't like what we've become. And I mean "we," as in all of us, Americans, Wall Street residents and occupiers, alike. We don't like this place, this field, this plaza, this square on which we've alighted, full of said "residents" and "occupiers," shouting at one another. But we've been pushed here. Which begs the question: Pushed, by whom? Pushed, by what?
Money.
Specifically, the opportunity, or lack thereof, to make it, and use it to influence.
The occupiers are beating drums to call on the Masters of the Universe for some answers. Quite a few occupiers say they're indebted to a game they feel they've no control over which seems rigged against them. Many say they don't see as much opportunity in what's been marketed as a land of opportunity versus past generations; nor able to work said game on terms they can, want or should be expected to cope with. They question the fairness of said game as it's played, and the ethics - some would more pointedly call conflicts - of those who most control it. Many wonder aloud why they seem to have less opportunity than was accorded the Masters of the Universe themselves, when said Masters were first rising to mere Solar System Capos.
And most of the residents, well, they hate drum circles. Nobody likes drum circles. Nor being singled out. But not all occupiers are drum majors, and not all residents are bankers. And not all bankers are bad, just as not all occupiers are shiftless. There are many, many good, very smart people who work diligently and hard at what they do and add value that extends beyond themselves who do very little to zero harm within and without the system in which they work. But the system as it stands, The Street, has most assuredly failed itself and us. And if you weren't part of the home-hawking machine and didn't overextend yourself and didn't buy a house you couldn't afford during the years that amounted to economic Zenga you were an innocent bystander who nonetheless has suffered the opportunity-zapping and wealth-sapping aftereffects of a cataclysm caused by those who did do those things. And who controls the system?
But even Wall Street, the system can, and has, been a force for good. The Street has done capital-raising that matters in a wider sense, in that it has bestowed value beyond self-dealing or enriching only or mostly itself. Some would say too rarely. But it has taken risks which have resulted in few if any victims. But again, some would say too rarely. What appears to predominate is the opposite: The Street seems to be continually shown to work too often at what appears a zero-sum game, in which it takes none of the risks for making most of the bundles when the risks can be shifted onto someone data-deprived or less informed, while disclaiming any responsibility for the aftereffects or consequences of the actions regardless of facts and circumstances. This, even though, it doesn't have to be this way. Business done ethically and fairly is business done well, makes one money and proud to be in said business. That there hasn't been a crisis of conscious on Wall Street is appalling, because it shows an appalling lack of self-reflection among so many in this industry, and hence, very little leadership to be admired, beyond kudos for surviving as the toothiest shark in the tank. While sad, that should perhaps surprise no one: As that's the game, as sharks opt to play it. But if being nice means you've retired, then what does being ethical mean?
But even Wall Street, the system can, and has, been a force for good. The Street has done capital-raising that matters in a wider sense, in that it has bestowed value beyond self-dealing or enriching only or mostly itself. Some would say too rarely. But it has taken risks which have resulted in few if any victims. But again, some would say too rarely. What appears to predominate is the opposite: The Street seems to be continually shown to work too often at what appears a zero-sum game, in which it takes none of the risks for making most of the bundles when the risks can be shifted onto someone data-deprived or less informed, while disclaiming any responsibility for the aftereffects or consequences of the actions regardless of facts and circumstances. This, even though, it doesn't have to be this way. Business done ethically and fairly is business done well, makes one money and proud to be in said business. That there hasn't been a crisis of conscious on Wall Street is appalling, because it shows an appalling lack of self-reflection among so many in this industry, and hence, very little leadership to be admired, beyond kudos for surviving as the toothiest shark in the tank. While sad, that should perhaps surprise no one: As that's the game, as sharks opt to play it. But if being nice means you've retired, then what does being ethical mean?
And look: No one will ever laud anyone else who takes advantage of another's lack of knowledge of what they're being sold. True, it's a tough world out there. Caveat emptor: buyer beware, or fool get taken. But whenever you sell something to someone without the same full good faith and disclosure that you would require for yourself, don't expect to be liked, ever, in return. For hoodwinking a fool. Again, who after all, has the preponderance of responsibility with the knowledge available? How conflicted, responsible, self-reflective or unmoved in answering this question one feels, we guess, depends on how due north one's moral or ethical compass tends to point.
Fact is, there were causal actors - real people - involved in the crash, who worked to create the wreckage we've been left to deal with. Homebuyers who purchased a home they truly couldn't afford, and The Street: These were the two main causal actors. No one disagrees with that. But again, in what essentially is an equation of dealer and junkie, lies an ethical question: Which, the junkie or the dealer, possesses the information and presence of mind that would foist some sense of moral responsibility or ethics into these transactions? Who was/is best equipped to take advantage of the other? With whom, if there is an imbalance of power, does the advantage and disadvantage lie, in such a relationship? The junkie or the dealer? The consumer or the bank? Which led us here? And who made the policy that shaped the system with which the vast jobs and wealth in the last years was able to so easily and quickly be destroyed and remain gone? Occupiers, residents?
Essentially, what are we - meaning, all of us, Americans - saying, or doing, amid all this?
It seems obvious that: We're having a conversation about America. But what is it? What should it be? How do we get there?
Before we tackle that, let's quickly break the house of sticks that obnoxiously plots this conversation as a struggle of capitalism versus socialism. No one who isn't a shit-slinging shill knows that's not what this conversation is about, at all. No reasonable, honest person wants the country to become socialist, because all reasonable, honest people know a completely socialist economy begets patronage, apathy, inequality, resentment and political monarchy, just as one with huge income disparities does. And just as no reasonable, honest person wants the country to become completely, fundamentally market-run, because hell, the banks can't even handle the full rigors of capitalism and the market: For shit's sake, we, the people, the taxpayers, are the banks' biggest financial backstops aside the Fed. That's been proven. The banks don't expose themselves to the disciplines of the market. It's too tough out there, after all.
And despite the toxic, sewer-belching lies of the roving gang of political hack asshats working out their psycho-pathologies of middle school disenchantment as adults: No doctor with a scintilla of morality waits to receive money before working to save a human patient that's dying in front of said MD. And while the bill may surely be in the mail, that kind of market fundamentalism would rile a portion of the crowd around this fictional doc to pummel his cash-upfront, Ayn Rand-t-shirt wearing self to the point where he needed a doctor; a good, real one, who would first work on the dying patient with no incentive but his own morality.
Let's additionally dispense with the "fault" question; meaning, who was at fault for our current economic predicament, as that's really up to this:
Who do you have more empathy for: The junkie (the delusional homebuyer), or the dealer (The Street). As we've determined, policy goes to the highest bidder. And gaggles of individuals acting separately with disparate goals and no money, lose nearly every time to organizations with highly disciplined purpose and fat lucre.
What we can most definitely all agree upon about our recent economic past is that too much of what was being sold was shit. Shit that a good deal of us didn't ask for by the way.
Speaking of, know this, all you blame-deflectors out there who publicly display nary an ounce of self-reflection: There are a lot among us Americans who didn't buy any homes or sell any real estate and who also weren't mortgage bankers or regulators during the time when those counter-parties created the volume-versus-sanity froth that caused the whole global economy to crater into the shithole under the outhouse where we now all slosh. So those folks who didn't buy overpriced real estate nor were bankers the last eight or so years: We didn't contribute one iota, not at all - not one bit - to what caused the meltdown. Yet we suffer just as bad as everyone else for its jobless, growth-less aftereffects. There's the voting block to court and respect.
A quick word about regulators: The Street paid for the system it got. Regulators are nearly always feckless foot-servants when the system rewards them for being so. Regulators nearly never act timely or often enough appropriately because they're afraid to, and essentially, paid not to. Regulators are terrified of stepping over their place behind an imaginary line that delineates the free market from a destructive market when all the while there is no line because there is only one market that possesses more or less of each characteristic, free and destructive, all the time. So it's safer for them to do nothing. So they largely do that. Nothing. Their fear is real. Careers hang in the balance based on the whims of the shakedown that is our politics.
Part of what the occupiers find so egregious, however, are the outsized incomes wielded by folks they see as essentially creating the very problems that has led to this country's jobless rate and indebtedness. And they form a convincing argument that a system only fails because of it's builders' failures. A system requires people to run it too. Many see a system that enriches the people working within it the most, who seem to take little time to reflect on whether doing so works to disenfranchise or even impoverish those outside it. We all agree a salesman needs a buyer. Demand desires a supply. We agree on the system - that capitalism works. But we also agree that the system works best, and most ethically, when opportunities to enter the playing field are even and terms are transparent to all parties involved. The occupiers that are reasonable and honest aren't protesting the tenets of the capitalist system, they're protesting over the lack of adherence to the tenets of the capitalist system, professed as free and fair by its leaders, who seem to change those rules whenever it bests suits the whims of the most expensive suits. In other words, the occupiers are having a buyers revolt. They're protesting the sellers' ways of playing the game that we all agree we want to play. But only when the rules of the game provide a fair shake to each team on the field.
But we digress.
What responsibility entails: reflection. What reflection begets: Sense?
Glass-Steagall shatterer, former Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill, says: ‘Split up’ the big banks, which amounts to a call to glue together the regulatory vase he himself (and others) crushed some 13 years ago. Flowers promised but yet received.
Easy for him to say, perhaps. Harder for those who could do it, to do it; certainly. Not impossible, though, not likely, either. But:
Some other VIPs agree with the ol' Bensonhurst-to-Greenwich, Conn., feller.
