Trader 1: “They’re fucking taking all the money back from you guys? All the money you guys stole from those poor grandmothers in California?”
Trader 1: “Yeah, Grandma Millie man. But she’s the one who couldn’t figure out how to fucking vote on the butterfly ballot.”
[Laughing from both sides]
Trader 1: “Yeah, now she wants her fucking money back for all the power you’ve charged right up, jammed right up her ass for fucking $250 a megawatt hour.”
[Harder Laughing]
The above exchange, exposed during the contrived energy crisis in California in 2000 and 2001, came to mind late this last week as I watched the stock market inexplicably drop 900 points and then rebound. There are several explanations going through my mind – some more reasonable:
1. The drop was deliberately triggered with the idea that Wall Street traders would profit from certain stocks they had shorted. (This is unlikely since, while it would be possible to trigger a crisis, it would be impossible to direct the outcome in the chaos that followed.)
2. The drop was deliberately triggered with the idea that sharp traders would intuitively know how to play it for maximum gain.
3. The event was spontaneous, and sharp traders intuitively knew how to play it for maximum gain.
4. The event was spontaneous, a few people made a fortune, a lot of people lost.
5. The event was spontaneous, traders were taken by surprise, and chaos, bad and good fortune alike were spread randomly across the spectrum.
I do not know. I suspect that #1 and #5 are equally unlikely. As with every mystery in life, the “side” information, or “unknown unknowns,” as Rumsfeld called them, would illuminate the picture and expose whatever malfeasance was going on. And, since this is the US of A, there will be no meaningful investigation, and we will never, ever, know.
The Enron traders came to mind because most of us are so naive as to suffer from the illusion that powerful people are just like us, only smarter. They have lives and families and children and, of course, consciences. And yet the two Enron traders exhibited exactly the opposite – there is no apparent functioning conscience in either. That’s why they held the jobs they held – bored with mundane everyday life, they sought out the excitement of the game, the trading, the manipulation.
Even the names they gave their various trading schemes … “Fat Boy”, “Death Star”, “Forney Perpetual Loop”, “Ricochet”, “Ping Pong”, “Black Widow”, “Big Foot”, “Red Congo”, “Cong Catcher” and “Get Shorty” … indicate a juvenile fascination with gaming. They are bored.
They are sociopaths. The lives that other 96% of us lead have no interest for them. They don’t care about families and lovers and pets, though they are adept at mimicry. They alleviate the tedium by gaming the rest of us.
Maybe it is only the money, but I think accumulation of money is only a side benefit, as at a certain point these people have enough, and yet never stop.
And this is why our society functions as it does. This is why we are gamed into wars, why we kill millions of people with fancy weaponry from afar, why we are so interested in the Great Game again playing out in Afghanistan. Embedded among us, masked as regular people, are sociopaths – people without conscience.
Some are painfully obvious and easily seen – Cheney and Bush and Rumsfeld, Geithner and Emanuel, and the two traders above.
But most are deeply embedded and working their way around us, scheming, running small and large businesses alike, doing things they could care less about, like selling Internet service in a small town or doing large IPO’s that will eventually tank … whatever the game of the moment is.
Sociopaths dominate our lives. And yet, they don’t care about us. Not in the least. To them we are nothing more than Grandma Millie, and their job is to jam things up Grandma Millie’s ass. They don’t hate Grandma Millie. They don’t love her. They are incapable of either. They are merely doing what they enjoy doing – the only thing that motivates them- the game.
So when I see the stock market inexplicably plunge 900 points, pardon me if I don’t buy official stories about it. Wall Street is rife with sociopaths – it’s Mecca for money Muslims, and the ultimate game.
PS: Allowing sociopaths free run is the modern-day interpretation of Adam Smith’s “invisible hand.” It is the intellectual class acting in service of the financial class that creates these elaborate justifications for their behavior. The price is right.
Piece of Mindful 
For all the reasons above, we should transfer all Social Security payments into an equity account – we’ll make billions, and billions and live happily ever after. They’re coming for grandma.
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If they were candid, I suspect Goldman Sachs’ executives might reason their various scam operations are vital for propping the U.S., and to no small extent, the global economy up, just as the Mafia’s criminal practices have, for more than a century, been indispensible for keeping Sicily’s economy from collapsing. Or, again, consider the officially illegal piracy practiced by England and France in the decades before their exhausted feudal orders were finally overthrown; Francis Drake, one of the most successful pirates even being knighted. It’s possible that understanding the six largest banks are playing this role explains Blankfein’s remark that Goldman is “doing God’s work”, the enthusiastic backing Goldman and Blankfein continue to get from Warren Buffett, the reluctance/refusal of Congress and the Obama Administration to do anything meaningful about curtailing the Wall Street pirates, and Paulson’s “deer caught in the headlights” expression when demanding the $700 billion bailout—an expression Bernanke and Geithner wear every time they are questioned.
The U.S.’ manufacturing base having been exported, we’ve relied heavily on military-industrial-homeland-security expenditures to keep our economy going, creating the requisite international and domestic threats to justify that operation. With CIA assistance, we’ve also taken control of the profitable flow of drugs, major banks laundering the drug money. But even these creative ad hoc undertakings haven’t been sufficient. Ergo derivatives, CDOs, high-frequency trading and half a dozen other criminal Wall Street practices?
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This begs the larger question – has it always been so?
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International banks treat all countries pretty much the way pimps treat their teenage prostitutes. Drugged, battered and abused, and on a tight leash. But that is not their goal. Profit is the goal, which justifies the means.
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