Dear petulant egomaniacs, please go Galt yourselves

by: Daniel De Groot

Fri Apr 30, 2010 at 22:50


By way of Digby, the Financial Times brings us this bit of free range condensed Wallnuttery, an email that apparently is ripping around the trading desks of greater Randor:


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. 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. 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.

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? 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. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

It goes on like that.  Read it if you can stomach tantrums from multimillionaires.  My thoughts went immediately to the same place as this witty reply found in the comments of the FT piece:


Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to make yourselves feel better. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to discover, just like everyone else, that people tend to gravitate towards jobs they have an aptitude for, and in our case there's probably going to be less demand for abstruse parasitic deal making and tricking people out of their money by lying to them. 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. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. You too would do all of these things if you could make as much money as we do simply by being comfortable with morally bankruptcy.

This person covers all the major glaring points of conceit motivating the original rant, and those eagerly forwarding it.  The biggest being their conceit that they can just up and do everyone else's jobs.  I particularly like his point that working hours like 5am to 10pm has a lot to do with being very well paid to do so, and the motivation to work like that tends to be in short supply at the sub $50,000 salaries most people make, and absent a bonus scheme that is multiples of base salary.

I do agree they're vicious on a level comparable to dinosaurs though.  Go with that line guys.  In fact, I take it back about Galting yourselves.  Please, write more emails like this.  It's better than any ad MoveOn could craft in support of financial reform.  But it's still galling.

Daniel De Groot :: Dear petulant egomaniacs, please go Galt yourselves

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re: e-mail (4.00 / 1)
We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.

bankers?

ROTFLOL!


"We eat what our chefs prepare (4.00 / 4)
for us" more like. These assholes can't do ANYTHING for themselves. They don't know how to fix their own cars, wash their own clothes or even raise their own children. They are the most helpless and dependent people of all.

Montani semper liberi

[ Parent ]
Overachievers without souls (4.00 / 2)
I've worked with these types. They're a breed apart. Definitely smart, hard-working and productive. It's just that they have empty souls and are emotionally stunted. All they know is hard work and success, of the professional and financial sort. And since there isn't a faster and more efficient way of making money in today's world than working in high finance, they migrate to it. It's not that they're lazy or stupid. It's just that they don't and can't relate to others in any deep, meaningful and spiritual way. They are high-functioning soulless predators, super type A's with the heart of a serial killer. Sociopaths with spreadsheets. They don't so much as hate us as they just don't think of us. To them, we don't really exist, except as potential prey, or as occasional obstacles to their advancement and enrichment, to be crushed like unpleasant bugs. Blankfein, Fuld, Rubin, Gutfreund, Gould, Morgan--they're all the same. And they're not like us.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton

Not productive, though, (3.20 / 5)
merely busy. They don't produce anything of value, nothing you can eat, wear, live in or drive. Nothing beautiful. They live lives of frantic activity devoid of meaning, and when they die it's as if they were never there.

Montani semper liberi

[ Parent ]
Oh, they produce (4.00 / 3)
It's just that what they produce is of negative value to the economy and positive value only to themselves. And at the end of the process they get an extra zero added to their portfolios and an ugly acrylic paperweight to show off to each other.

This is not to denigrate the vital and necessary role that finance proper plays in the economy. But what they do isn't finance. It's theft and pillage, of the legal and illegal kind.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton


[ Parent ]
agreed, Sadie (0.00 / 0)
Leaving asside the biproducts of pain and suffering they leave in their wake, what exactly is big finance for?

This is a serious question. They surely don't arrange to finance anything with their own money, do they? Just use the connections inherent in the occupation to put the right people or resources together?

It's been a while, but IIRC, standard construction projects were financed for about the equivilant of 6% of bid price. This compared to 10% for the blueprints and book of specifications created by the architects and engineers. What the current cost of this limited value financial sector is I don't know, but it seems to be much higher. To the detriment of everyone else.

The old story about why the asshole is always boss comes to mind.

Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob..... FDR


[ Parent ]
rateing (0.00 / 0)
I don't understand why this deserves a troll rateing Damocrat.

Government by organized money is just as dangerous as government by organized mob..... FDR

[ Parent ]
Who in the name of God would hire this type of person as a teacher??? (4.00 / 3)
They are proud of the fact that they don't take a bathroom break?????

I can see it now: one of these Galt types gets hired as a teacher and suddenly phone calls are being made en masse to school administrators about the mean teacher who won't let kids go to the bathroom, or who make fun of kids who make requests to go to the bathroom, as well as probably all the snide remarks the Galtian-type will no doubt make about the kids who just don't 'measure up' to their Galtian view of the world.

Biggest mistake EVER would be to hire a person who would be dealing with children~ who we all know learn at different rates yet who are often times grouped together because of age~ and who strongly ascribes to this attitude.

Time for school administrators to bone up on their interviewing skills.


To be a teacher you have to know something about something. (4.00 / 2)
Not gonna happen.

Montani semper liberi

[ Parent ]
Must be a David Vitter fan (4.00 / 1)
Given that he doesn't go to the bathroom, he must wear diapers to work.

"Those who stand for nothing fall for anything...Mankind are forever destined to be the dupes of bold & cunning imposture" -- Alexander Hamilton

[ Parent ]
It's True That Psychopaths Don't Make Good Teachers (0.00 / 0)
But they were once quite popular for exactly the reasons you cite.

Pink Floyd's The Wall, anyone?

"You know what they say -- those of us who fail history... doomed to repeat it in summer school." -- Buffy The Vampire Slayer, Season 6, Episode 3


[ Parent ]
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