http://www.nytimes.com/...

It wouldn't be Saturday morning without another New York Times hit piece on the OWS protests, but today's offering is actually fairly balanced, and quite revealing insofar as it profiles the attitudes of individual Bankers and financial services Executives towards not only the protests themselves, but also as to their own crucial role in the U.S. economy as the driving engines of prosperity.



“Most people view [#occupywallstreet] as a ragtag group looking for sex, drugs and rock ’n’ roll,” said one top hedge fund manager. “It’s not a middle-class uprising,” adds another veteran bank executive. “It’s fringe groups. It’s people who have the time to do this.”

Some of the well-heeled parrot the "Bloomberg Doctrine":

“Who do you think pays the taxes?” said one longtime money manager. “Financial services are one of the last things we do in this country and do it well. Let’s embrace it. If you want to keep having jobs outsourced, keep attacking financial services. This is just disgruntled people.”

In other words, the patriotic financial service sector is perfectly prepared to high-tail it to India if you suggest regulating their freewheeling behavior, cutting their taxpayer-supported salaries or (gasp) impose some sort of Draconian financial transactions tax. One wonders whether the speaker has ever contemplated the reasons why he thinks "financial services are one of the "last things we do in this country and do well." But that would require accepting his original premise as true--which it's not. In fact, based on objective, current economic data, we apparently do not do "financial services" very well at all. In fact, "financial services" have cost US taxpayers several trillion dollars in lost worth and costly financial bailouts, leaving a wrecked world economy and literally tens of millions of irreparably shattered lives in their wake. In fact, were it not for the reckless disregard of the "financial services" industry most of us would be better off right now.

But back to the "longtime money manager:"

He added that he was disappointed that members of Congress from New York, especially Senator Charles E. Schumer and Senator Kirsten Gillibrand, had not come out swinging for an industry that donates heavily to their campaigns. “They need to understand who their constituency is,” he said.



Stark reality from the longtime money manager. He is their constituent, and no one else. Definitely not the million or so unemployed or underemployed in the greater New York area.