When I first saw a few days ago the righteous and hilarious “rant” supposedly written by a Chicago financial trader as a rebuttal to Occupy Chicago, I had a suspicion I’d seen it before. A quick visit to Google confirmed what nagged at the back of my mind: It actually has nothing to do with the Occupy movement, because it was written a full year and a half before Occupy Wall Street was an up-twinkle in AdBusters’ eye:
The Atlantic, April 30, 2010: “Quote of the Day: Wall Streeter Vows to ‘Take Your Cushy Jobs’”
Wall Street Oasis, April 30 2010: “We eat what we kill”
…etc.
The fact that it was “an anonymous email supposedly making the rounds on Wall Street” a year and a half ago doesn’t make the rant any less amusing in 2011, but we should be careful before claiming — as some leading blogs have started doing over the last couple days — that it’s a Chicago trader’s response to the Occupy movement.
Somebody just printed out an old email and used it to embarrass the Occupy Chicago protesters. That’s all.
Good catch!
Organically-induced crowd-sourced fact-checking…that’s what gives the right side of the blogosphere a refreshing advantage over its group-think leftist counterparts.
“Fake But Accurate.”
Don’t these other blogs know about search engines?
Sloppy work, very sloppy.
This reminds me of the “Paul Krugman” Google+ account.
Hey, Zombie, add one more major blog that’s quoting that piece as though it’s connected to the Occupy movement.
You know, I can feel the ranter’s pain. Really.
He, and his kind, are more saurian than he suggests.
Bipedal reptilian predators were once abundant and ruled the world for 150 million years. And then, they were gone. In the eye blink of a geological second.
I suspect that the next dinosaur extinction will come about in the next 5 to 10 years, when personal technology will make Wall Street traders obsolete. There are a lot of middle men in financials that will be selling buggy whips.
If you are in a business that makes products or provides a service, you know that the fastest way to lose your market position is to let the bean counters helm the ship. Remember GM and the glory days of design by financial committee that brought you the Aztec?
I work in an industry that is competitive and capital intensive. These folks would not survive in it. I can be replaced, but it would never be by the Wall Streeter, unless he is willing to completely retool for it.
There was another famous group of one trick ponies that decided that it’s members were the critical components of an entire industrial sector and that they were so essential to the process that anything they wanted, they should get. Ronny Reagan fired every one of them one afternoon, replaced them within a couple of days and the airline industry never missed a beat.