"We Are Enlightened Entrepreneurs"

Since the Occupy Wall Street movement began, the article below was anonymously written. One of my dear clients sent it to me. It’s been circulating around ‘the Street’ and many insurance companies, wending its way to many who serve financial markets from estate attorneys to CPAs and beyond. People either smirk with pride or shake their head with grim acceptance after reading it. I wrote the response that follows.  Let me know your thoughts...

We are Wall Street…we are smarter and more vicious than dinosaurs.

“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. 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, it’s not a problem until you lose. I’ve never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

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. 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.

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. 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.

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.

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?”

Source Unknown

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We are Enlightened Entrepreneurs. It is our job to create value. While you pride yourself on thinking it doesn’t matter what fake paper you trade, it actually does. I’m sure you would trade not only baseball cards, but virtually anything that could make you money. But you forgot something...real investing isn’t about gambling, it’s about wisdom. That means applying knowledge, experience and understanding to serve people (but since you speak Tyrannosaurus Rex, that probably doesn’t compute).

Yes, the market crapped out. Why? Because you and most Americans took a stupid pill and violated the Natural Laws this country was founded on. Yeah the ‘Occupy Wall Streeters’ are misguided in blaming you as their scapegoat, because each one of them is personally responsible for a bunch of bad decisions that led them to their drum circle beneath the flag.  But dude c’mon, you guys believe in max profit and in earning it by stretching the rules as long as you don’t get caught, and you know it. You write ‘God knows there has to be a scapegoat for everything?' God? To Wall Street and the government, if God exists He has “In Money We Trust” tattooed on his forehead.

You better hope no one is keeping score because some karma is about to run over your dogma.  Here’s why...

You scoff at ethical concepts of Enlightened Entrepreneurship like

1. People are assets

2. Purpose counts

3. Principles matter

4. Profit validates value created in the marketplace

While those ideals sound passive, gullible and weak to an unconscious capitalist, they actually produce more revenue for all stakeholders.

You aren’t Wall Street. It is an ideal bigger than you and I. It is a symbol of free market innovation and genius that no one has the power to destroy but Americans themselves. Hussein and Bin laden tried to take it down...how’d that work out for them? Our current president and liberal tax-hikers and over-regulators don’t have the power to do it because there are enough independent thinkers in this country who are about to fire them. They’re one and done. It is the enlightened entrepreneurs in the U.S. who are the real source of currency in America. 

It is we who are still creating real value and real jobs.

Intentionally waxing patriotic, I remind you that you’ve been entrusted with a sacred duty. You’re privy to a primary flow of information that affects the lives of real people in the secondary market. It is an important service that needs doing and we’re counting on your integrity. You get paid the big bucks to serve that ideal honorably.  Think about that tonight when you hit the bong and/or the scotch to help you sleep. (Do even self-proclaimed ‘vicious dinosaurs’ have a conscience?)

I know some of you are ethical, and I agree you guys work really hard and have off-the-charts Mensa scores. But your level of emotional intelligence and spiritual consciousness is low. Really low. Not that those qualities have any current relevance to you, but as your hubris inevitably pushes you deeper into darkness, look those two things up. I also agree that the unions and pensions that once served us have, in some cases, made us weak. But you cite 'holding a pee' and taking 'half-hour lunches' as impressive?  What impresses me is a single mom who works and raises three kids by herself, not someone who eats leftover dinner from someone else’s plate. Was it you who macked the leftover room service I left outside my door last week at the Marriott?

Do I think you’re incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? No. You could, you just wouldn’t be very good at it because you think it’s beneath you. Oh sure, you’d be a good boy for a little while until the kids bore you into justifying hitting on the kindergarten teacher or planting Mr. Weinberg’s new Japanese maple in your own backyard. Hey once you’ve established the “kill what you eat” mindset, it’s a hard habit to break isn’t it?

I agree you are smarter and more vicious than dinosaurs. I’m certain you’ll survive President Obama, the unions, Joe Mainstreet, the economy, and the blaming masses you sneer at. The question is, will you survive yourself?

Steve D’Annunzio