Sunday, March 01, 2009

Warnings For The Creative Class

The Confluence: "...The truth is, it isn’t possible to know everything about everything. There are limits to how much time out of our very busy lives we can dedicate to learning someone else’s area of expertise. That has always been the danger of the 401K, IRA and pie-in-the-sky Grover Norquistesque wetdream of private Social Security accounts: We’re busy and we have to trust people to handle our money responbsibly. Needless to say, they’ve really let us down and now we are faced with the sometimes overwhelming task of learning the rules of this high-stakes financial risk game.

The past several months have left me feeling a bit like Neo in the Matrix after they pulled his headplug and the world is revealed as it truly is. I should have taken the blue pill. What I see is not pretty. I see a lot of shallow CEOs, oblivious to the fates of the people whose money they are entrusted with, determined to protect their lifestyles at any cost. I see traders, addicted to adrenaline, looking for fixes and laying our nest eggs on the line for the rush of a big payoff. I see corporations walking away from their future obligations because the people who work for them put their faith in them and deferred their compensation for promises that were never meant to be kept. I see a government that was bought and paid for by these people and who will sacrifice the working class to pay its debt to its backers. I see a Whole Foods Nation that doesn’t realize that it entered the ranks of the working class a couple decades ago in the era of Reagan’s “voodoo economics”..."

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