This is simply too rich to let go without a little call and response:
We are Wall Street. It’s our job to make money. Whether it’s a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn’t matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable.
You ought to try that sometime. Then you'd be trading things for what your clients know to be fair market value based on what anyone can find in a Beckett's guide, not some gold-plated turds with a AAA rating from Moody's that even your own colleagues don't know what they're worth.
I didn’t hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone’s 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.
Too bad you didn't stop gambling when you were ahead in chips. You didn't, and now you're in need of Speculators Anonymous.
Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.
Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you’re only going to hurt yourselves. What’s going to happen when we can’t find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We’re going to take yours.
No you won't. You'll find some other line of work that makes a lot of money for minimal effort like you always have, like flipping houses or selling cocaine.
We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We’re used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don’t take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don’t demand a union.
Good, because you won't get one, just like the other 93 percent of your comrades in the private sector workforce. But after six months of stacking potatoes at the local Piggly Wiggly, son, you'll sure as hell wish you had one, trust me.
We don’t retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we’ll eat that.
Translation: We've been mooching off you for the last 30 years, and we have no intention of stopping now. We'll simply find another way to do it.
For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping?
You ran some of the oldest and most trusted investment houses into the ground, and you think I'd trust you to manage my kids?
We’re going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America.
You would be, if you were actually living in America. But to get four months off every year, you'd have to be living (and working) in Europe. Most likely, in a union job.
Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half.
Twenty-five percent of the American labor force already has over the last 40 years. You actually think we expect that anymore?
I’ll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.
Sorry. Summer school's been canceled, and the teachers have all been furloughed. It happens in a recession when your state government is billions in the red.
So now that we’re going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we’re going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren’t going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore.
I thought you didn't have time to eat when you were spending 17 hours a day swindling your clients. Get your story straight, man. And where are you going to make $85,000 a year teaching third-graders to read, or digging ditches for a landscaping contractor? That kinda scratch puts you in the top 10 percent of all American wage-earners. Tell me who to talk to, and for that kind of jack, I'll join you. I'm a white-collar professional with 20-plus years in upper-level management, and even I don't earn quite that much.
No more free rides on our backs. We’re going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.
Actually, it's the other way around. We gave you our money to invest, and invest wisely. You fucked up. Haven't you figured that out yet?
The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it’s really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.
For the six million of us who've lost our jobs in the past two years, we won't even notice, sorry to say.
We aren’t dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply … will he? and will they?
Who knows? But here's a suggestion: don't Go Galt, Go Joad instead. Go work for some big box retail store for eight bucks an hour, with no union, no health insurance and one week of paid vacation every two years. Bust your ass and get yourself a promotion after a couple of years to assistant store manager, then to store manager a couple of years after that, and by 2018 or so you'll be rolling in dough: $35 grand a year, give or take, just like the rest of us pissants in flyover country. Then tell us what spoiled little assholes we've been when some privileged little jackoffs on Wall Street gamble away what meager amount of money you've managed to squirrel away in your 401k on some million-dollar mirage in Riverside County, implode the bank that's underwritten your mortgage under a mountain of bad loans, and drive your ass first into foreclosure, then into Chapter 7 bankruptcy. Then remind us again why salt-of-the-earth working-class folks like you are the only ones responsible when the people you trusted to manage your money turn out to be a bunch of corrupt, rapacious thieves with an overinflated sense of their own self-worth. I don't know if anyone's broken the news to you yet, but after 35 years or working real jobs, I can tell you this: today's super-raptor is tomorrow's lunch. (H/t Doug J.)
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