Weasel Zippers has the bloated moron's diatribe in full, but here's the part I think is worth quoting.
They (corporations, I suppose) took their boot and put it on the necks of the American people and now the American people want that boot removed. Now. Not next year. Now! We’ve had it. Enough is enough. The dirtiest word in corporate America is ‘enough.’ They can’t get enough. They weren’t satisfied with being just filthy rich. They wanted to be something better than filthy rich and this is what they got. They may have stolen trillions of dollars but we are here to say we want that money back.Alan Greenberg unwittingly gave the game away in his autobiographical The Rise and Fall of Bear Stearns. Michael Moore was exactly right when his quote is applied to the investment banker titans like Bear Stearns. They didn't care for you or your business or your job, they just saw numbers, like scores in a video game. They created more and more complex and fantastical financial instruments because they could, because they could get more money from doing so. They didn't support companies that made shoes or watches or cars, they just had spreadsheets with numbers and they wanted those numbers to get bigger and bigger and bigger.
In my Cursillo group is a fellow who is a commercial banker. We were talking about the Wall Street protest yesterday and he said that even he, a professional investment banker of twenty years, had no idea how those Bear Stearns contraptions worked. My friend can point to restaurants and auto repair shops that exist because of his bank. There was nothing comparable in Mr. Greenberg's book.
Michael Moore, unable to differentiate between parasites like Bear Stearns and valuable corporations like Exxon and the commercial banks, would probably hate my friend as well. Michale Moore may be a moron in general, but it's worth noting that some of what he says has localized value.
I think the big problem is that a certain class of "investment bankers" were actually acting as counterfeiters. They were using financial shenanigans to create electronic money out of whole cloth, and then passing it to other people quickly before it was found to be fake. And as a result, they caused exactly the same inflation and wealth destruction that regular printing-press counterfeiters cause
ReplyDeleteI'd be a lot happier if they were actually treated as counterfeiters, rather than as the legitimate investors that everyone seems to want to call them. And the many actual legitimate investors should be as eager to shut them down as anybody.