NY Mag: I Crashed A Wall Street Secret Society

Yep. I remember during Occupy, there was bunch of pictures and video released of one of Occupy Wall Street's attempts to march into the Wall Street area where they encountered a bunch of these people looking down at them from a balcony, taking pictures and drinking champagne. It infuriated a lot of the protesters.



What amazes me is how many defend these kind of attitudes/behaviors of the financial elite. I often ponder the reason why. Is it that these defenders believe that they can become like the financial elite or is it fear? Fear that, if they do, the anger will then be directed at them or fear that the elite may retaliate against them?

I remember getting into an argument with one of my family's former employees on the subject of taxing the wealthy. He'd worked a just above minimum wage low level job in my family's business, which was worth $32 million at the time. Although he was making less than $30k a year at the time, he was rabidly defending the wealthy against increasing taxes. The rub was that my father, who was, even a reduced state, still making about $360k a year, fully supported a tax increase on himself as did I. So you had basically a poor person defending the rich and a still reasonably wealthy person asking to be taxed. Irony at its worst.

Never understood this phenomena.

It's all about where you are at and what's expected of you next. Of course you didn't see anything too over the top near the blackjack table- you have to act a certain way in proximity to large amounts of money because money is treated as sacred. But I know absolutely for sure that you can run up behind people in a casino on the strip and stop a punch one inch from the back of their head repeatedly on your way to the garage, run across the top of a line of cars, strip down naked, pee off the side of the garage and then put on a giant teddy bear costume, and head back into the casino, and nobody will say a word to you until you reach the gaming floor- then they will tell you to take the mask off, and that's it. (and for the record this was a local hustler and his mark that I followed around for entertainment value, not my own behavior)

It's the same anywhere- you don't screw around with the money making, and if you run out of money you get the heck out, but if you've paid off big for the day and you've got more to spend tomorrow, there's usually a separate area, away from the people they still need to get more money out of, where you can do anything you please if it will make you come back and spend big again next time. And for the people at the top of something as lucrative as wallstreet, those places probably have the resources to wear out timeless classic sins and invent whole new ones to replace them.

All in good time, friends. They think they're untouchable, but they will get theirs. It's inevitable.

I completely agree Lucky4u- this has always baffled me as well! Minus the obvious shills, there are many people who regularly brown-nose every move of the elite. It's almost as if they assume if they do it long enough and loud enough, that some of the wealth will trickle down to them just for being supporters! lol It also seems that their favorite retort, when questioned about such behavior, is that "you must be jealous". *grin* Not in this lifetime or any other, for that matter!

I have witnessed the same as you mentioned, where poor people are often the ones defending the rich. It truly makes no sense at all; it's like the slaves are defending their masters. They cannot see the bigger picture of WHY they will be kept poor for the foreseeable.

The elite don't need any more sycophants, and they mock them just as much as they do the rest of us "unwashed masses".