Why Do We Hate The Super-Rich? Poem by gershon hepner

WHY DO WE HATE THE SUPER-RICH?


Why do we hate the super-rich?
Why is derivative
a dirty word for us to which
we’re not forgiveative?
I cannot understand derive-
atives, but that is no
excuse for hating those who live
by buying them when low
and selling them when they are high,
while running off with loot,
like money falling from the sky,
their golden parachute.
If someone could explain to me
just what they are, perhaps
I wouldn’t mind the booboisie
that causes the mishaps
we’ve seen on Wall Street recently,
and all the hanky-panky
corrected with a taxing spree
by Paulson and Bernanke.
It’s now up to the super-poor,
to clean this ghastly mess up,
but hating them provides no cure,
until the bastards fess up.

Writing about the $700 billion bailout of investment banks and thrifts whose failure threatens the entire US economy, Brad Stone writes in the NYT, September 28,2008 (“How We Value the Super Rich”) :
Americans, as unfolding economic events remind us, are of two minds about other people’s piles of money. We can resent the enormous riches generated on Wall Street. At the same time, we can venerate other kinds of wealth — Silicon Valley’s, for example. It’s almost as if there are “good” billionaires and “bad” billionaires in the public consciousness. When the super-rich are loved and admired, or maybe unloved but respected, it is often because people can actually see and enjoy the fruits of their labors. Donald Trump builds office towers and puts his name on them. Steven Spielberg makes movies with nice special effects. Martha Stewart decorates our lives and houses. Tiger Woods, on course to be sports’ first billionaire, hits a golf ball really, really well. The not-so-admired billionaires, particularly the wizards of Wall Street, operate in the shadows of capitalism. We are not really sure how they are making all that money. But we suspect that just a little bit of it used to be ours. In Tom Wolfe’s “Bonfire of the Vanities, ” the investment banker Sherman McCoy attempts to explain his Wall Street job to his daughter. His wife chimes in: “Darling, ” said Judy, “Daddy doesn’t build roads or hospitals, and he doesn’t help people build them, but he does handle the bonds for the people who raise the money.” “Bonds? ” “Yes. Just imagine that a bond is a slice of cake, and you didn’t bake the cake, but every time you hand somebody a slice of the cake a tiny little bit comes off, like a little crumb, and you can keep that.” Sherman is not well pleased about the crumbs, but imagine looking for a way to describe credit default swaps to a child….
The Wall Streeters can apparently walk away from both the flaming wreckage of their storied firms and the smoking remains of the national economy. Daniel Mudd and Richard Syron, former heads of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, are together leaving with $9.43 million in retirement benefits, even after the government took over their companies and canceled their even larger severance packages.To folks in Silicon Valley and those that share their business values, a big payday for steering your company into catastrophe smells. “These are people who want to be rewarded as if they were entrepreneurs, ” said Jeffrey A. Sonneneld, a professor at the Yale School of Management. “But they aren’t. They didn’t have anything at risk.” In the last century, recurring high-profile scandals on Wall Street helped create this image problem. Congressional investigations before World War I into Wall Street’s banking trusts inspired the creation of the Federal Reserve and the Clayton antitrust law. During the Great Depression, Congress investigated the stock market crash and uncovered a variety of unsavory practices by the banks, leading to the creation of public disclosure laws for corporations. The savings-and-loan scandal of the 1980s exposed fresh Wall Street skullduggery and gave the public new antagonists (Charles Keating, Michael Milken) . “There has been a century of scamming, and we’re not allowed to control it because the Wall Street guys always appeal to the American spirit of freedom and innovation, ” said G. William Domhoff, a professor of psychology and sociology at the University of California, Santa Cruz. “But lo and behold, sometimes they screw up and we begin to suspect that it’s all just a big cover for the fact that they want to make extraordinary profits.” Now that the Wall Street wealthy have helped plunge the nation into economic calamity, they have an even more serious public relations problem. Perhaps they should move to Silicon Valley.

9/28/08