A rant about this "Wall Street" term.

I am sick and fucking tired of listening to knuckledragging Republicans (and ignorant Democrats) talk shit about this nebulous entity "Wall Street" and how "Main Street" (whatever the fuck that is) shouldn't have to pay for "Wall Street" making mistakes/being greedy.

If you're going to bash "Wall Street" please understand wtf it is you're bashing. Because I was (and likely will be again), a "Wall Street" peon. I've worked low level, unglamorous jobs for a number of large financial institutions (and saw one of those jobs go overseas).

One thing that has really bugged me about this whole bail out/stimulus debate is this ongoing assumption that "Wall Street" consists entirely of Bud Foxes spending Grandma's pension on blow and hookers at their multimillion dollar Manhattan condos. Those assclowns, the ones that make the decisions that fuck over the rest of the country, are the tiny percentage at the top. These companies employ thousands of people who never see a bonus, who never get treated to fancy corporate spa retreats, from low level secretaries to mailroom clerks to data entry peons to receptionists. These are the women in business suits running from the subway in our sneakers because we can't afford cabs and a lot of them wouldn't go to our outer borough neighborhoods anyway.

And, as a native New Yorker, I've seen what this Wall Street crisis is doing to my hometown. It's not just about the fat cats at the firms. There are scads and scads of people who don't work for these firms that are suffering too. I'm talking about the mom-and-pop delis and coffee shops that serve the peon workers. The bike messengers. The cleaning and security companies. Not to mention the sheer amount of revenue the city coffers get from these companies, which goes to things like social services, education, etc. to help New Yorkers who never set foot on Wall Street. When Wall Street suffers, everything else here does. It's like a domino effect. The financial services industry is as critically important to this city's survival as the auto industry is to Detroit, or agriculture is to Iowa. And this is a time when all of our bread-and-butter industries are taking huge hits. Too many people who say "fuck Wall Street!" don't understand that when they say that, they're also saying "fuck Manuel in data entry who got laid off and has to wash dishes to feed his kids", and "fuck Sister Odell whose senior center has to close due to budget cuts".

In a lot of ways, the "Main Street vs. Wall Street" class war that's been sparked by the bail outs reminds me of the usual "fuck the northeast librul latte sippers" talk Republicans love to spew. It feels like yet another opportunity for ignorant people to bash NY for being rich and "elitist". Please, for the love of fuck get these "Sex and the City", "Wall Street", TV and movie images of New York out of your head people. Most people that live here are as financially hard up as small town, middle America if not more so. Our asses are broke and struggling just like yours. Meanwhile the people who are fucking all of us sit back and laugh. The fact that a lot of this rhetoric is coming from the very fat cat Republicans in the back pocket of these corporations, whose stubborn adherence to Mammonism and "the Free Market is God" bullshit led to this mess in the first place would be laughable if it wasn't so damaging.

For people who've been making the distinction and not conflating the tiny percentage of irresponsible fuckwits at the top with the wage slaves at the bottom: this is not directed towards you. Flame me if you want to, I just had to get this out.

concentration-camp guard logic to me.

Only one post before Godwin's! A new record.

Few guards were Nazis. They were just working folk, trying to feed their families, doing what they were told.

Godwin remains uninvoked.

And typically hateful bullshit for this site, lately.

:hide:

:rofl:

:D

The argument in the OP is like low-level members of a gang arguing that they are innocent of the crimes committed by the higher-level members, even though the higher level crimes would not be possible without the ceaseless labors of the lower-level members.

The fact that you were a low-level drudge in what is evidently a massive criminal undertaking does not absolve you from its criminality.

That is out of line.

The OP is saying that everyday New Yorkers are hurting, and that we should keep that in mind. You come back with a guilt by association personal attack.

So the person working in a deli in New York is part of "a massive criminal undertaking" and by extension a criminal themselves? In that way, we are all criminals.

What sort of "Left" blames the workers and calls them criminals and concentration camp guards?



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be nice to the poster...They are special ! How many people do YOU know who can connect to the internet with their minds while scavenging for food around thier cave wearing only the fur of animals who died a natural, painfree death tied together with vines and decorated with twigs!

Concentration camp guards knew what was going on, but participated in it because they were "only following orders."

The average slave wage in the financial districts had NO IDEA what kind of insanity was going on at the top.

There's nothing wrong with "only following orders" when you are kept in the dark as to the bigger picture sufficiently to be unaware that your activities are part of an immoral and possibly criminal business.

The Nazi reference would have been a cheap shot if it was accurate. As it is, I feel it's completely off base.

But it's good to know that when I was trying to help people drowning in debt manage their credit cards a little better so they wouldn't be fucked as badly, and helping them recover from ID theft, I was no better than a guard at Auschwitz. Thank God I have DU to enlighten me.

are part of some fascist cleaning women organization.

:eyes:

I know what you are talking about and this attitude saddens me, too. I respect the heck the folks that keep plugging away, thanklessly, and then have to suffer through the insults of people that don't have a clue. I think that a lot of the people in DU that spout these kinds of insults are losers that seek attention, are followers, and don't have the ability to grasp the gravity of this situation.

Good luck with your situation and I hope that this painful part of our lives passes soon.

it refers to the "Masters of the Universe" jack-asses who have sheepf*cked the entire world economy.

Please don't turn the bike messenger, hot dog vendor and secretary into human shields for these sleazels at the top!

Doug D.

when we refer to "Wall Street." It certainly isn't the people in the mail room, the receptionists, and the messengers!

I'm objecting to various people's continued insistence on conflating them.

Just as I object to people who scream that we should let the Detroit automakers fail because the executives are greedy, shortsighted incompetent fuckwits, without any thought of how that would affect Joe and Susan on the assembly line. Average working people suffer horribly when things like that happen.

Please read my post again, I suspect we agree more than you think we do. And I'm not really sure how I can explain how hurtful it is that you would accuse me of using working people as human shields to protect fat cats when those fat cats nearly made me homeless when they sent my job to the Philippines. I am the last person on Earth who would defend them. That's not what my post is about.

Plus that finance stuff is sooooo complicated? Yeah, I hear some of it is actually perfectly valid, useful and even important, but I'd rather just dismiss it all as a casino/ponzi scheme so I can feel good about the fact that I don't understand any of it. Misplaced moralistic superiority FTW!

a computer, anonymously complaining and wishing a rain of death and destruction on "Wall Street" car companies, oil companies, and anyone else not meeting some unwritten but strict code of conduct and goodness.

But, there is no excuse for wishing all this destruction while we're already in the midst of the worst employment crisis in almost 80 years. The thousands of people laid off from the financial houses, and then the businesses that supplied their needs, were hardly guilty of anything but holding a job.

Before they're worthy of compassion.

The people I knew and loved in my various financial jobs were not greedy millionaires coming up with new ways to scam ordinary people out of their money. They were people like my friend Tammy at El Banco Humongo that got reprimanded because she used to wave fees on credit card accounts all the time even when it went against corporate policy. Because she was drowning in debt herself and wanted to help someone else out. Not a month later our entire call center was outsourced (a week after I signed the lease on a new apartment). But apparently we deserved it or something for working for Evil Capitalist Pigdogs.

Most recently, I worked in student aid for a for-profit tech school, and I can't tell you how many hours I spent working overtime helping dirt poor kids with shitty credit try to get loans and arguing with lenders trying to get the rates down. Not because it meant I would be rolling in dough (I sure as fuck wasn't), but for our students an education from our school meant being able to earn a living wage as opposed to having to work two or three McJobs because their local junior college was shit.

Me, Tammy, and the countless others like us did not get into these jobs because we wanted to fuck people over. We wanted to keep a roof over our heads and help people. Seriously, for every fuckwit executive snorting coke out of a hooker's navel there are thousands of people just trying to pay their rent and feed their kids, who sincerely want to help people. Unlike a lot of people I don't think capitalism or finance are inherently evil. I've seen the good it can do for people. But unfettered capitalism is wrong, it needs regulation, and no one knows that better than those of us directly impacted by these corporations' shenanigans. I don't think any DU keyboard warrior could possibly hate Jamie Dimon more than I do. I used to see his smug assed face every morning when I turned my computer on, talking all kinds of shit about "principles" while he and his minions were trying to figure out how to send our jobs to India. They ended up going to Manila instead.

One must never, ever, complain about outsourcing. Not even if one has been personally affected by it.

It's symbolic of the decisions made from the people in charge.

We're good at blaming the commanders and not the troops for Iraq, but we're still antiwar. I wouldn't sweat the fact that this distinction isn't being made.

??

I got a nice pen and a free pass to see a movie when a customer raved to my boss about how awesome my service was when she called in tears about having her credit card stolen.

Neither paid my rent that month.

I mean, they aren't the most pleasant places to work, the investment banks. What did you get out of it? Surely you had other options.

What does that have to do with anything?

This comic book view of life you are taking is politically reactionary. There is not an industry in the country that is not involved in this crisis. There is no way for any of us to survive without being complicit on some level. The OP is complaining about simplistic scapegoating.



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n/t

no-one is talking about the bike messengers and their satchels when we refer to Wall Street.

That's the goddamn point. "Wall Street" is not just the greedy fat cats, it's everyone whose livelihood depends on the greedy fat cats. Pro Tip: those people are suffering just as much as everyone else, if not more so, because we're directly impacted by their shenanigans.

We have to punish the former for their bullshit without inflicting misery on the latter.

Right here on this thread.

if you didn't get one or it was modest, so what, they will eventually get other messenger jobs or secretary jobs. Wall Street will recover and life will go on.

Because everyone and their brother are scrambling for them when so much as a hint goes out that there is an opening somewhere. And I know from experience, having spent 6 months looking for even the most menial of office jobs. Even the temp agencies are empty handed. I've never seen it this bad. I would have swallowed my pride and gone back to retail, but retail jobs are scarce.

On the local news, every time they have a job fair someplace the lines are around the block and they have to turn hundreds away. The worst example I've seen so far was at a hotel of all things. A few months ago, this hotel completed some huge renovations and had a job fair for a bunch of new positions, and you should have seen the line that formed. After less than an hour they had to turn people away. For hotel jobs. Granted it was a more upscale place than the Holiday Inn so it likely paid better than one would think, but still. The desperation around here is palpable, and really sad. Unemployment is out of control here, I mean we were already having problems with it to begin with, and this crisis just tore open the wound and dumped buckets of salt in it.

Also, I love how people are completely ignoring my point about how the people who don't even work for Wall Street (not the people folks are dismissing as "hot dog vendors" and shit) are suffering from this crisis because of the domino effect.

:( It's a horrible, horrible time to be out of work.

Doesn't make the private health insurance industry any less predatory, rapacious, and parasitic.