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Thirteen Observations made by Lemony Snicket while watching Occupy Wall Street from a Discreet Distance

1. If you work hard, and become successful, it does not necessarily mean you are successful because you worked hard, just as if you are tall with long hair it doesn’t mean you would be a midget if you were bald.

2. “Fortune” is a word for having a lot of money and for having a lot of luck, but that does not mean the word has two definitions.

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The latest craze sweeping Wall Street is a range of iPad cases fashioned from the wardrobe of convicted fraudster Bernie Madoff. Entrepreneur, John Vaccaro bought up most of Madoff's wardrobe at a US Marshals auction of his assets last year, then had them redesigned as iPad covers that sell for between $350-$500 on his website, Frederick James.

The current spike in petrol prices is not primarily a result of anything to do with the freedom fighters in the Arab world. Nor is it a result of OPEC’s production levels. Rather, the spikes are primarily a result of the speculative market on oil. This speculative market is driven by the practices of the biggest banks, who have special exemptions to treat commodities like a casino, who have zero incentive to appropriately hedge their bets, who do not provide the liquidity they were designed to provide, and who generally provide nothing of value to society except to push prices of things higher and higher so that very rich people will continue to invest with them.

Over drinks at a bar on a dreary, snowy night in Washington this past month, a former Senate investigator laughed as he polished off his beer. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail," he said. "That's your whole story right there. Hell, you don't even have to write the rest of it. Just write that." I put down my notebook. "Just that?" "That's right," he said, signaling to the waitress for the check. "Everything's fucked up, and nobody goes to jail. You can end the piece right there."

Nobody goes to jail. This is the mantra of the financial-crisis era, one that saw virtually every major bank and financial company on Wall Street embroiled in obscene criminal scandals that impoverished millions and collectively destroyed hundreds of billions, in fact, trillions of dollars of the world's wealth — and nobody went to jail. Nobody, that is, except Bernie Madoff, a flamboyant and pathological celebrity con artist, whose victims happened to be other rich and famous people.

The rest of them, all of them, got off. Not a single executive who ran the companies that cooked up and cashed in on the phony financial boom — an industrywide scam that involved the mass sale of mismarked, fraudulent mortgage-backed securities — has ever been convicted. Their names by now are familiar: companies like AIG, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, JP Morgan Chase, Bank of America, and Morgan Stanley. Most of these firms were directly involved in elaborate fraud and theft.

One has to think about the efficacy of fines as a punishment for a defendant pool that includes the richest people on earth. Conversely, one has to consider the powerful deterrent to further wrongdoing that the state is missing by not introducing this particular class of people to the experience of incarceration. "You put Lloyd Blankfein in pound-me-in-the-ass prison for one six-month term, and all this bullshit would stop, all over Wall Street," says a former congressional aide. "That's all it would take. Just once."

I drove up [to Wise County]. It was 50 miles. And I got to the fairgrounds. The parking lot was jam-packed. It was a rainy day. I couldn't see any activity outside the fairground gates. Once I went inside, it was such a stark contrast to what was on the outside. People were lined up by the hundreds, standing or sitting in long lines, many of them without shelter, in the rain, getting soaking wet, waiting for hours to get care that was being provided in animal stalls, in many cases, and in barns and under tents that had been set up, like MASH units at a wartorn site. And it was just so startling for me to see that.

I realized, when I saw those folks, that many of them could have been people I grew up with. My relatives could have been there. And they were people who, I learned later, most of them have jobs. They just don’t have jobs that offer insurance benefits. And a lot of them do have insurance, but they’re in these new kinds of plans that insurance companies are pushing more of us into, that have such high deductibles or limited benefits that we can’t get the care we need, even if we’re sending our premium dollars in. When I saw that, it was almost as if I was supposed to be seeing something like that to jolt me out of the complacency that I had been in for all these many years.

A trip I took on a corporate jet just a couple of weeks after that experience, flying from Philadelphia, where CIGNA is based, to its healthcare operations in Connecticut. And we were served -- the CEO and I -- lunch on gold-rimmed china, and we were given gold-plated flatware to eat it with. And we were sitting in a very luxurious leather chair, flying in a corporate jet that cost $5,000 an hour to operate, or just the jet fuel alone was $5,000. And for the first time, I was paying attention to what I was doing. And I realized that the people in Wise County and elsewhere in this country were in the predicaments they were so that I could fly around in such luxury to get from one place to another.

America is caught in a confidence or credibility trap, in which the changes, investigations, and reforms necessary to restore trust to an economy or market are rendered unlikely because doing so would expose a pervasive corruption that the principals fear would destroy any remaining trust. It could also endanger the careers of politicians and business people who may have permitted and even appeared to facilitate the control fraud that caused the financial crisis in the first place. Personal risk trumps public stewardship.

The American government is indeed acting as if it is involved in a massive cover-up of a control fraud and corruption that could perhaps be the worst in its history. Many who are looking at this know that all is not well, that there is something not quite right in the current situation. How else can we explain such massive and widespread financial fraud, with so few meaningful indictments, or even ongoing investigations with credible disclosures? And the worst perpetrators appear to be dictating the remedies and reforms to the system.

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Anger is sweeping America. True, this white-hot rage is a minority phenomenon, but the angry minority is angry indeed, consisting of people who feel that things to which they are entitled are being taken away. And they are out for revenge. I am talking about the rich.

If you want to find real political rage — the kind of rage that makes people compare President Obama to Hitler, or accuse him of treason — you will find it among the very privileged, people who are outraged, outraged, at the thought of paying modestly higher taxes.

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/09/20/opinion/20krugman.html

Peter Jonason of New Mexico University believes that narcissism and callousness may have an innate, genetic component. Speaking in New Scientist, Dr Jonason describes the "Dark Triad" of traits: the self-obsession of narcissism, the impulsive, thrill-seeking and callous behaviour of psychopaths, and the deceitful and exploitative nature of Machiavellianism. "We have evidence that these traits may represent a successful evolutionary strategy," he says.

While acknowledging that clinical levels of the Dark Triad traits are certainly socially undesirable, Dr Jonason and his colleagues argue that the traits that underlie the Dark Triad, which are partially independent but moderately related to one another, are best viewed as one particular social orientation towards others and may facilitate people's goals, especially when those goals involve an exploitative social strategy and a short-term mating strategy.

Those scoring high on the Dark Triad tended to be more extraverted, open to experience, and have higher self-esteem. They also tended to be less agreeable, neurotic, and conscientious. "The traits reflect a highly selfish social strategy. High level of self-esteem, extraversion, and openness, along with low levels of conscientiousness and anxiety, may be instrumental in enabling an exploiter to persist in the face of potential social rejection and retaliation."

"In a world where individuals want to avoid being taken advantage of, those high on the Dark Triad, like James Bond, who tend to be more agentic than others, have a particularly difficult task at hand. How to get what they want without rousing the suspicions or retaliations of others? The answer is to be extraverted, open, high on self-esteem, and low on conscientiousness and anxiety while being individualistic and competitive," Dr Jonason argues.

http://www.psychologytoday.com/blog/beautiful-minds/201007/james-bonds-psyche

In January 2009, shortly before President Obama took office, veteran Democratic pollster John Marttila conducted a series of focus groups on a range of issues in the Philadelphia and Baltimore areas. When the conversations turned to the economy, Marttila was shocked.

In the middle of the financial collapse, these people -- men and women of different ages, incomes, races, and political affiliations -- were predictably ticked off. But, he recalls, the "dominant emotional dynamic was self-criticism. They really felt that they had failed. They had spent too much on things they did not need."

The pollster had expected rage at Wall Street and George W. Bush, but the people barely mentioned Bush. Though they were upset at big banks, they were not revved up for revenge. "Their intellectual criticism was directed at the financial world," Marttila says, "but their emotional criticism was directed at themselves."

http://motherjones.com/politics/2010/01/financial-crisis-wall-street-anger