Against the Stream

Wall Street Self Pity: A Response

There was a bit of a stir this past week when Jake DeSantis, an AIG executive, quit his job rather publicly in the pages of the New York Times. Today, Matt Taibbi offers his considered response:

Then there's the matter of Jake's other job offers. About that: It was apparent as early as last February that Cassano had basically destroyed not only the unit but perhaps AIG itself. The company announced over $11 billion in losses around that time.

If I'm Jake DeSantis, and I'm really innocent, I'm looking for a job that very instant. And I'm taking the first good job anyone offers me. Because by then I'd have realized that I was working for the latest version of Enron. That the man I've been working for the last six or seven years has turned out to be one of the most irresponsible Wall Street villains of all time, a man who single-handedly destroyed the 18th-largest company in the world. If I'm Jake DeSantis, I'm quitting out of moral disgust, because I don't want to be associated with this kind of behavior.

The only reason I'd stay is if I didn't have a choice. Which I feel sure is what happened here. If Jake DeSantis didn't take advantage of an opportunity to get a better job elsewhere with a company that didn't hide billions in losses and make $500 billion bets with money they didn't have, that's his fucking problem.

It gets better:

The notion that I the taxpayer have to pay this asshole a million-dollar bonus because he turned down a better job at a less-guilty company is repugnant to begin with; the notion that he stayed at AIGFP because he expected me to pay him this bonus makes me hate him even more.

But it's all moot, because I feel quite sure it's a lie. As one trader for another firm told me not long ago when I asked what he thought about the need to pay these "retention bonuses" to these "valued employees" at AIGFP:

"Yeah, right. Who would hire these guys? They'd stay for a dollar if you offered it to them, much less a million."

I mean, half of Wall Street is unemployed right now. There are plenty of unemployed traders out there whose resumes don't include such entries as "Worked for years at small unit of AIG that helped destroy the universe; throughout that time was completely ignorant of burgeoning global disaster unfolding 5 feet from my desk."

And then there's this:

But all of this is really secondary to the tone of DeSantis' letter. He acts like he's a victim because he didn't get to keep his after-tax bonus of $742,006.40 in the middle of a global depression. And he really loses his fucking mind when he writes:

"None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house."
First of all, Jake, you asshole, no plumber in the world gets paid a $740,000 bonus, over and above his salary, just to keep plumbing. Second, try living on a plumber's salary before you even think about comparing yourself to one; you're inviting a pitchfork in the gut by even thinking along those lines. Third, Jake, if you were a plumber, and the electrician burned the house down -- well, guess what? If you and that electrician worked for the same company, you actually wouldn't get paid for that job.

Out in the real world, when your company burns a house down, you're not getting paid by that client. It's only on Wall Street, where the every-man-for-himself ethos is built into an insanely selfish and greed-addled compensation system, that people like you expect to get paid in a bubble -- only there do people expect their performance bonuses no matter how much money the shareholders lose overall, no matter how many people get laid off after the hostile takeover, no matter how ill-considered the mortgages lent out by your division were.

You expect that money because you think it's owed to you. But what money? The money is gone. Your boss, if not you, set it all afire. You want the money, but where exactly do you think it's coming from?

Do you just not understand that that money now would have to come out of someone else's pocket? That it would have to come from middle-class taxpayers, real plumbers, people who didn't make millions over the years in equity and commodity trading?

I don't think I could have expressed my own feelings in the matter better than Matt has, swears and all. It's truly a corrupt system we're seeing the fruits of right now, and I would strongly encourage Jake and his boss, and every single person operating in the capitalist economy who thinks and acts like them to "go Galt" right now. Really. I. Dare. You.

We'd be better off without you.

John Rawls' Religion

 

While grappling with the relationship between liberalism and religion in my dissertation, I found myself returning again and again to the John Rawls, not only becauase he was a formational figure in my own thought, but because, in Political Liberalism he elaborated what to me seemed to be a very clear set of limits on what religion was permitted to advocate (on religious grounds) in the public sphere.

I found this troubling, not because I didn't agree with the basic conception of creating an "overlapping consensus" within the public square, but because I was not convinced that such a consensus required us to abandon the partiuclarities of the grounds on which we defended them in order to engage in public debate. In other words, it matters to me that I am a liberal because I am a Christian, and that forms part of the substance of my position on any topic of public importance.

I once shared this with Max Stackhouse, my dissertation advisor, who told me that, on the basis of his personal experiences with Rawls, that Rawls was in fact a believer, but his expereinces of conservative Christianity turned him off of the idea that it could form a public worldview for a liberal society.

In light of that, I was interested to come across this article in the Times Literary Supplement (via Andrew Sullivan):

Those who have studied Rawls’s work, and even more, those who knew him personally, are aware of a deeply religious temperament that informed his life and writings, whatever may have been his beliefs. He says, for example, that political philosophy aims at a defence of reasonable faith, in particular reasonable faith in the possibility of a just constitutional democracy; he says that the recognition of this possibility shapes our attitude “toward the world as a whole”; he suggests that if a reasonably just society is not possible, one might appropriately wonder whether “it is worthwhile for human beings to live on earth”; and he concludes A Theory of Justice with powerfully moving remarks about how the original position enables us to see the social world and our place in it sub specie aeternitatis. Religion and religious conviction are also important as themes within Rawls’s political philosophy. For example, his case for the first principle of justice – that of equal basic liberties – aims to “generalize the principle of religious toleration”. More broadly, his theory of justice is in part a response to the problem of how political legitimacy can be achieved despite religious conflict, and how, among citizens holding distinct religious views, political justification can proceed without reference to religious conviction.

These concerns lie at the heart of Rawls’s later account of political liberalism. Rawls’s own attitudes towards religion and their development over time are thus of extraordinary interest, both personally and for the understanding of his thought. The undergraduate thesis and the later reflections are relevant to such understanding in two different ways. First, they display the profound engagement with and knowledge of religion that form the background of Rawls’s later views on the importance of separating religion and politics. Unlike many liberals, Rawls was not the product of a secular culture. Though his Episcopalian upbringing was, as he says, only conventionally religious, everything changed during his last two years at Princeton. He developed the religious convictions so vividly expressed in the thesis, which conveys a strong sense of the reality of sin, faith, and the divine presence, and which has as its first “fundamental presupposition” that “there is a being whom Christians call God and who has revealed Himself in Christ Jesus”. Rawls’s emphasis throughout his mature work on the importance in the lives of the faithful of religious convictions – he describes them as “non-negotiable” and as “binding absolutely” – and the need for a theory of justice to take them seriously drew on his personal experience of religious faith.

The problem, as I see it, is that Rawls' theory of justice takes the binding character of these religious beliefs seriously in a way that simultaneously excludes them -- qua beliefs -- from a meaningful role in public discourse. The "thin" conception of public good that he advocates needs, somehow to make way, not merely for the "thick" moralities of religion, but for a realm of "thicker" conceptions of the good, that is, thicker than the minimalist Rawlsian conception, but not the full-blown impositional worldview of absolutist religious faith.

My position is that religious belief can be deeply held without being absolutist, and without being non-negotiable with regard to conceptions of the public good. This would, however, seem to cut against both those brands of religious conservatism that consider any deviation from their conception of the good to be a moral travesty, and Rawls' conception, which excludes them entirely.

Hard Economic Times Benefit Bad Libertarian Fiction

News Item:

In the wake of global economic downturn, sales on Ayn Rand's classic libertarian apocalypse novel Atlas Shrugged took a marked jump on Amazon over the past few weeks. ...

Atlas Shrugged is possibly Rand's most famous novel, and recently was credited with inspiring the videogame Bioshock. When the world's economy begins to circle the drain, a group of industrialists and geniuses retreat into a remote mountain hideaway, using a scientific McGuffin to drain energy out of static electricity. Without the rugged individualist capitalist types participating in society, the world falls deeper into dystopian bureaucracy and finally the people demand that their evil collectivist leaders be ousted in favor of John Galt, the leader of the techno-industrialist enclave.

It's actually a perfect novel for sour capitalists to be reading as Barack Obama takes the reigns in the US and hints that the banks are soon to be nationalized, and government social programs expanded. [via io9]

Yup, and all the conservatives are threatening to "go Galt" on the rest of us if Obama raises the top marginal tax rate to 39.6, you know, like it was back in the years of economic desolation known as the mid-1990s.

Health Care Reform

Via Matt Yglesias, Howard Dean on why genuine health care reform has to include a "public option":

Let me just agree with Matt's point on this:

I don’t think it’s the appropriate role of progressives in the United States to be pushing for subsidies and mandates for insurance companies in exchange for the right to regulate the companies more tightly. That might be an improvement over the status quo, or not, depending on how it played out over subsequent years’ worth of legislative battles. I think it’s important to fight for a public option which, as Igor Volsky notes, is a wildly popular idea as well as sound policy.

Kennedy

Matt Yglesias offers insight into the unwarranted admiration that people in my age group seem to have for President Kennedy:

Now of course if you could take the Kennedy-Johnson years as a whole, then divide them up into one presidency that was dominated by Vietnam and another one that’s responsible for Civil Rights and the Great Society, then you’d have one shitty president and one great president. A lot of people seem to have basically decided to divide things up this way and call the shitty president “Johnson” while the good president is called “Kennedy.” That, however, doesn’t have a great deal to do with reality.

This rings true to me. Alas, Kennedy himself did little of either the good or the evil of the 1960s, while Johnson did both much good and much evil. It's kind of a shame he doesn't get more credit for the good.

Watchmen: The Cartoon Series

Ah! My eyes! The pain!

John Yoo Needs to Go to Jail

Really. He does. Here's the New York Times account:

The opinion authorizing the military to operate domestically was dated Oct. 23, 2001, and written by John C. Yoo, at the time a deputy assistant attorney general in the Office of Legal Counsel, and Robert J. Delahunty, a special counsel in the office. It was directed to Alberto R. Gonzales, then the White House counsel, who had asked whether Mr. Bush could use the military to combat terrorist activities inside the United States.

The use of the military envisioned in the Yoo-Delahunty reply appears to transcend by far the stationing of troops to keep watch at streets and airports, a familiar sight in the wake of the Sept. 11 attacks. The memorandum discussed the use of military forces to carry out “raids on terrorist cells” and even seize property.

“The law has recognized that force (including deadly force) may be legitimately used in self-defense,” Mr. Yoo and Mr. Delahunty wrote to Mr. Gonzales. Therefore any objections based on the Fourth Amendment’s ban on unreasonable searches are swept away, they said, since any possible privacy offense resulting from such a search is a lesser matter than any injury from deadly force.

The Oct. 23 memorandum also said that “First Amendment speech and press rights may also be subordinated to the overriding need to wage war successfully.” It added that “the current campaign against terrorism may require even broader exercises of federal power domestically.”