More Agitprop
Digby posted an e-mail sent out by Judson Phillips of Tea Party Nation in which he attempts to show that the Occupy Wall Street demonstrators are ignorant because they are using iPhones and iPads to respond to death of Steve Jobs.
I hate to break it to Mr. Phillips, but Steve Jobs had no love for Wall Street, with very good reason if you knew the history of Apple Inc..
It wasn’t because Steve was an LSD taking hippie who sought enlightenment in India, and became a Buddhist. While Steve was all of those things, and found wisdom in the Whole Earth Catalog, it was what the Wall Street mindset did to the company he founded, that turned him against them. What the ‘professional CEOs’ and ‘professional board of directors’ did to a thriving, successful company, is a case history in what is wrong with Wall Street, and the majority of corporations. The company he returned to had been hollowed out in pursuit of ever higher profits.
If Randians are looking for the “parasites”, “looters”, and “moochers”, they should look on Wall Street, not Pennsylvania Avenue.
2 comments
Yah, Wall Street is the most successful scam in human history. Wealth is *stuff* — goods and services — but Wall Street has convinced a whole lot of people that wealth is pieces of toilet paper with pictures of dead people on it and that the way to be wealthy is to have a lot of that toilet paper. Which, conveniently, their job is to move from point A to point B while letting a lot of it stick to their own fingers. Wall Street produces nothing, consumes very little, actually contributes very little to the economy other than that small service of moving money from point A to point B (something just as doable by a high school dropout security guard thanks to modern computers), yet has somehow convinced a significant number of people that they — who produce nothing — are the “producers”, and that the people who actually produce *stuff* are the “parasites, moochers, and looters”. It is to laugh.
But it seems that there’s a never-ending supply of people willing to make excuses for giant mega-corporations behaving in immoral and unethical manner. It’s as if we have national Stockholm syndrome, where we feel compelled to suck up to and defend the people who are holding us hostage. Huh. What a world.
– Badtux the Baffled Penguin
Most people don’t understand that the main purpose of an IPO is to pay off the venture capitalists. The amount of money from stock sales that is actually involved in any real investments is miniscule.
Visa and Mastercard have financed more new businesses than the NYSE, but people who have never started a business don’t know that. Most people finance themselves with savings or selling their assets. By the time the stock market is involved, the business is already a success.
Venture capitalists are vultures, but they actually risk something, which is more than be said for Wall Street. They don’t hide what they do, but you need you own lawyer when dealing with them.