AUGUST 11, 2011
Has anyone seen this guy?
Or this guy?
Maybe someone has seen these guys.
No? I could’ve sworn someone would know these guys. After all, they’re all over the news. Day in and day out, there’s a new picture like one of these plastered on the front page of CNN, right under a headline like “Stocks Tank on News of Bernanke Hemorrhoid.” Some of the shots are oh-so-dramatic. Like this one.
I get it. Some really heavy shit went down on the trading floor on this day. That’s the story, right? Guys were making loud phone calls, waving their arms around, and covering their faces in agony or to sneak a hit of blow. Numbers started off higher earlier in the day, and then they went lower, and these guys are really unhappy about it.
But fret not, dear reader. You should not be unhappy. These guys all over the news, the ones you see upset and stressed out about the Dow losing 1,000 points, you shouldn’t be sympathizing with them. You should bereveling in their loss. For every one of them who runs crying to cut up a line in the bathroom, one of us—the hardworking yet underappreciated masses of the world—should be celebrating.
We should be celebrating because these are the defeated faces of people who are part of an institution dedicated to making a living on our backs. These guys’ jobs consist of shuffling assets back and forth to shake money out of them—assets that, at their cores, are bits and pieces of every person in the world who is stuck working his life away so that corporate bigwigs and investors can get rich doing nothing. That is the role of the stock trader, a profession made up to facilitate skimming the life from whole populations. These are what their faces look like when it’s going badly for the parasites.
You might be tempted to think, “Wait, those guys work really hard. There are tons of numbers and graphs everywhere. They must be really smart to do all that.” Yes, they tend to be smart, or at least good money managers. Some are really smart. Their work can be demanding and stressful. But that doesn’t automatically validate what they’re doing. It takes smarts to rip off tourists with a three-card monte table; it’s demanding and stressful to kidnap someone. But you wouldn’t be happy with someone who did those things to you, and you shouldn’t be happy with stock traders either. Their job is to trade money that has been claimed by a slothful overclass that makes a killing maintaining a financial edge over ordinary schlubs like you and me.
The kicker is that each one of those guys on the trading floor is just another one of us lowly, workaday schlubs. He has his fingers in a lot of wealth, but so does a bank teller. He’s just another dude hired to keep the machine running. He’s part of a broad hierarchy of workers and managers, just like you are in that place where you spend eight hours a day wishing you were somewhere else. Except he has a direct role in the skimming-your-money department.
Those big numbers that always come up in the business news—the Dow, NASDAQ, and S&P indexes—are all measures of how much the investing class is making from your work. Stock values are abstractions of the profits that corporations gain by paying you too little and charging you too much for everything. They arrange things so that we keep buzzing around the hive and they keep collecting the honey, and stock trading makes it a lot easier for them to quantify all of the loot.
Next time you see one of these sad, pensive, or stressed-out faces on your mainstream news outlet of choice, remember one thing: his job is to keep track of how badly you’re being screwed by corporate tyrants. That’s where he decided to put his talent to use, helping the overclass rip off the poor, huddled masses. He doesn’t deserve your sympathy.
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