It’s official: the banks, credit card companies, and Wall Street investors are the worst people in the entire world. Let’s start with
the return to massive bonuses before continuing on to something even worse (spoiler alert: it involves a massive earthquake!).
After the American taxpayers gave them hundreds of billions of dollars to support them through the economic collapse of 2008, many banks and investment firms are returning to post-collapse salaries and bonuses, doling out millions to the exact same people who perpetuated the collapse. To explain this obviously idiotic reasoning, a Goldman Sachs board member (whose firm got $12 billion from the bailout, and made a profit last year of…$12 billion) named Bill George said, “You need the people there to do the job, and if you don’t pay them for their performance, you’ll lose them. And it’s much like professional athletes and movie stars.”
Um, yeah. Except for one thing:
fuck that. First of all, if the people that you need there to do the job
have already caused one of the largest recessions in American history, you probably shouldn’t continue to employ them, much less give them a couple hundred thousand dollars for a job well done. What’s the message we’re reinforcing there, “Hey, the bigger the recession, the more you get paid!”? I would venture to guess that those people are pretty self-interested, otherwise they wouldn’t have engaged in the potentially disastrous practices that they probably knew could collapse the economy and send the country down the toilet. So maybe that’s not the best thing to be telling them, unless we really liked how things looked in all those post-apocalyptic movies. Hey, I want to drive a Death Race car or be as badass as Mel Gibson in
Mad Max too, but the dangers of that kind of outweigh the coolness.
While it’s great that some of the bank presidents are taking yearly salaries of $1 (don’t worry though, they made plenty of money in the past, so it’s not like it matters), the fact that these firms flaunt our current crisis so casually is indicative of the way our system is set up, and it’s only going to get worse unless we fix something. These firms are filled with very smart people, and they’ve figured something out: our economy depends on them. We cannot function without the stock market traders or the national banks to drive growth and provide capital; too many people rely on their ability to mortgage and re-mortgage their house, take out loans, or their employer’s ability to do the same thing during a recession, and therefore keep them employed.
So they’ve actually worked out a pretty brilliant plan: engage in incredibly destructive, hugely profitable (for them) practices, preying on the market with no regard for the long-term consequences for the rest of the country, then when their actions catch up to them, run to Washington. The government will then have two choices: bail them out for a huge sum of money, putting more and more strain on our budget until the debt destroys us sometime in the distant (but not that distant) future, or don’t bail them out, and rename the 1930s the First Great Depression. Given that most people are stupid and have memories of about three weeks when it comes to politics, and their careers depend on what the voters think, the politicians will always choose the first option, basically allowing Wall Street to do whatever the fuck it wants.
That is the first reason why they are the worst people in the world: they are knowingly causing strife to millions domestically and internationally, with apparently no intention to stop, and possibly with the knowledge that it will eventually end the US as we know it (and that might cause some repercussions) in the name of making a quick buck, or a couple billion. There are two ways to end this: make the bailout money conditional, restoring some lost regulation on the economy, and therefore reign in their irresponsibility and provide stability and steady growth, instead of periods of massive growth followed by massive recessions, or find some morally responsible people to oversee these banks…
There is one way to end this.
If you need a little more convincing, and unless you’ve had your head buried in the sand for the last year and a half, you shouldn’t, take a look at
this.
Is that not the most despicable thing you’ve ever seen? In a time of great crisis for one of the poorest nations on Earth, our wonderful and compassionate credit card companies and banks are skimming
charitable donations. As if they’re not making enough money by screwing just about everyone, they feel the need to levy fees on money people are selflessly giving to those in need. Even if you can’t form any kind of empathy toward others, you should at least stay out of the way of people who are trying to help in times of tragedy.
Some people probably think that the portion the companies extract is truly to cover the cost of processing these transactions. While I highly doubt this to be the case, as it’s more than likely computers handle the vast majority of the work, if not all of it, they should be sending all that money through even if it costs them something to do it. If it costs the company a couple million dollars to process those donations fee-free, then they can just take it out of their $10 billion yearly profit. Plenty of organizations and companies have done their part, and theirs is at the very least to facilitate the transfer of charity, if not to give some of their own.
And that, right there, is why these “financial wizards” are the worst people in the world: they willingly and consistently put their clients on the path toward financial ruin to make more money faster, and apparently are so morally bereft that they’d rather take millions intended for starving people than allow the small loss incurred through letting those transactions pass unhindered. These are the individuals that made our country great; willing to put it all on the line and go as far as it takes to achieve massive growth and expansion, and they are the same people who will lead to our ruin if they are not controlled. Rampant, irresponsible risk-taking and the loss of respect for common human dignity, particularly the desire to make money above all else, will destroy our civilization; ultimately, common greed will drive all the power and wealth into the hands of the very few at the expense of the vast majority, and we will relive the Dark Ages.