Dear Dirty America

ADAM MICHAEL LUEBKE

Usually I get a sliver of satisfaction when high end investment bankers and Wall Street executives commit suicide. Call it a personal defect. Write about how insensitive I am in the comments section. But you know you feel that tingle of vindication when you read about another Wall-Streeter doing a swan dive past the plastic corporate logo bolted into the side of the high-rise building in which he works.

The one-percenters will bemoan this as class warfare. They will liken themselves to the greenish, bluish gray ‘smut’ that spreads over the golden ear of corn in the fall. To those with an inexperienced, unrefined palate, corn smut is ugly and seems a blight on something beautiful, yet, truthfully, they’ll claim, corn smut is a fine delicacy like no other on the planet, and that some cultures and tribes pay top dollar or at least spend their entire afternoons scraping together enough of that gray smattering of bacteria and infection off the healthy ear of corn to make a meal of it.

But these kinds of people are not normal, and they are not to be trusted. Just as corn smut threatens a healthy, bountiful crop, so do these top tier investment bankers, and they need to be wiped clear from our society. I don’t care how. We just need to be rid of their greed and attitude of gaining wealth at the expense of others. Suicide is not a terrible option for these people. And neither is paying penance by working the oil fryers at the local fast food joint for the rest of their lives.

There are many reasons to feel good about an act as morbid as flinging one’s self off a corporate tower. For one, the person took his own life. My hands are still clean. It was a personal decision. Secondly, when you have so few scruples and such a decrepit personal system of ethics, as to be an integral cog in the machine that has brought down over 90 percent of American prosperity and well-being for families, small business owners, children, and the elderly, suicide seems not only fitting, but mandatory.

But I’m not taking heart tonight in what at first seemed like positive news: seven bankers in the past few weeks have jumped to their deaths from the tops of their respective banking buildings. The latest was a JP Morgan investment banker who threw himself from the top of a 30-story building in Hong Kong’s central business district.

The fantasy is romantic, of course. You can imagine the offices filled with suits and ties working frantically to find ways to bundle and peddle billions of dollars in junk loans and manipulate the prices of commodities.

In a moment of clarity, the Wall Street banker understands in rare depth the pain and suffering his company has caused tens of millions of Americans, and billions of people who are affected by a deathly sickened world economy that continues to have its life force sucked out and frozen in offshore banking vaults.

Yet, the bankers who are leaping off the shiny glass towers should not simply be a sign of victory for the common man. Rather, it could signal an ominous trend that should have us asking, What’s going on up there? Is there something we should know about? Is there a financial crisis coming around the bend that will be so catastrophic that these men, who are usually able to stomach destroying local economies the world over and leaving millions in long term poverty, cannot handle it?

Zero Hedge has also been speculating a possible market plunge:

…the “Soros put”, a legacy hedge position that the 83-year old has been rolling over every quarter since 2010, just rose to a record $1.3 billion or the notional equivalent of some 7.09 million SPY-equivalent shares. Since this was an increase of 154% Q/Q this has some people concerned that the author of ‘reflexivity’ and the founder of “open societies” may be anticipating some major market downside.

It’s not like our mainstream media would warn us to start saving up for yet another significant economic crash. They wouldn’t even hear of it in 2007. Every economist worth their salt was warning the public, but the dinosaur media outlets called them loons and fear mongers. And then the market crashed. Millions of jobs were shed or outsourced. Banks needed taxpayer dollars the US government didn’t have.

It turned out to be a socialist party for the ultra-rich. If you turn down your television set, you can still, if your ears are decent, hear the roaring sound of our prosperity and opportunity being sucked up and out of our local communities and institutions. America is being extracted, Dylan Ratigan shouted on MSNBC. “Tens of trillions of dollars are being extracted from the United States of America.” Not much later he lost his show.

The greatest financial, white collar robbery in the history of the world happened. The TARP bailout was only the tip of the iceberg. As the Independent Senator from Vermont, Bernie Sanders, found out when his push to sue the Federal Reserve turned up that the independent financial regulatory institution had sent over $16 trillion to banks across the US and Europe, as well as multinational corporations like McDonald’s.

They weren’t even going to tell us! And that was only a partial audit of the Fed.

So even if the entire board of Goldman Sachs executives held hands and jumped from the top of their taxpayer-subsidized tower, we have a far worse social disease to cure, and a thorough cleanup would probably be impossible.

We’ll never eradicate corn smut, even if corn smut become conscious of itself and tried to wipe out its existence on earth after it became weary of sucking the nutrition out of something nutritious and offering nothing in return, except the ugliest mixture of color and texture.

I’m convinced that all each of us can do, down here, below the glass kingdoms of Wall Street and its well-connected tapeworms, is protect ourselves from becoming so decayed. Shine with the most radiant of colors–peace, love, truth, understanding. Be an example for the others closest to you, who will notice your behavior and your interactions with people. And when you notice a speck of smut, wipe it away and rub it between your thumb and first finger until it disappears.

Let it remind you of what you could have been consumed by, had you set the wrong intentions of greed, manipulation, selfishness.

[“Jump, you Wall-Streeters!” from Cybergrace; corn smut photo by H. Zell — both from Wikimedia Commons]