EXPOSED: 1% Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society

EXPOSED: WALL ST. OVERLORDS UNHINGED
1% Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society
By Kevin Roose


Several Kappas at the table next to me, presumably discussing the coming plutocracy.


I’d heard whisperings about the existence of Kappa Beta Phi, whose members included both incredibly successful financiers (New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead, hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones) and incredibly unsuccessful ones (Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne, former New Jersey governor and MF Global flameout Jon Corzine). It was a secret fraternity, founded at the beginning of the Great Depression, that functioned as a sort of one-percenter’s Friars Club. Each year, the group’s dinner fea-tures comedy skits, musical acts in drag, and off-color jokes, and its group’s privacy mantra is “What happens at the St. Regis stays at the St. Regis.” For eight decades, it worked. No outsider in living memory had witnessed the entire proceedings firsthand. ...

I wasn’t going to be bribed off my story, but I understood their panic. Here, after all, was a group that included many of the executives whose firms had collectively wrecked the global economy in 2008 and 2009. And they were laughing off the entire disaster in private, as if it were a long-forgotten lark. (Or worse, sing about it — one of the last skits of the night was a self-con\ratulatory parody of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” called “Bailout King.”) These were activities that amounted to a gigantic middle finger to Main Street and that, if made public, could end careers and damage very public reputations. ...

The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality. No self-aware and socially conscious Wall Street executive would have agreed to be part of a group whose tacit mission is to make light of the financial sector’s foibles. Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis.



The 2012 Kappa Beta Phi neophyte class
After cocktail hour, the new inductees – all of whom were required to dress in leotards and gold-sequined skirts, with costume wigs – began their variety-show acts. Among the night’s lowlights:



ABSOLUTELY FASCINATING READ:
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html
http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/revealed-members-of-kappa-beta-phi.html



Their Ideas Of Jokes:




http://www.dailykos.com/story/2014/02/18/1278454/-NYT-reporter-crashes-a-secret-Wall-Street-society-exposing-country-top-financer-s-1-jokes