The New Face of Thievery

This is it.

Wall Street's newest puppet strikes a pose now for the precinct later.

The new face of head operations at the SEC is a twenty-nine year-old fresh-faced kid whose smile beams from his black-and-white, mug shot-style, widely disseminated photo in a sort of creepy foretelling of more diabolical tricks hidden up Wall Street’s sleeve. What could a 29-year-old with a whopping two years as a worker bee analyst at Deloitte and Touche and five subsequent years at Goldman Sachs know about regulating Wall Street? Absolutely jack dick nothing, that’s what. Adam Storch could be a nice guy; although his choice of profession makes that highly unlikely, I’ll give him the benefit of the doubt for the sake of preserving my relatively healthy blood pressure. After all, as a NYU Stern grad student, he created a website that helped explain “Why Bill Clinton is Awesome:”

Regulation? What regulation?

 Perhaps it’s only a small matter that he also called for rebellion against the 22nd Amendment that blocked Clinton’s re-election for 2008. Whether that call to action was due to elite grad student angst, a cutesy attempt at cheekiness, or a blithe combination of both is not a matter that begs to be analyzed intensively. Storch is just the kind of guy that can be imagined chest-bumping and high-fiving his boy peers while efficiently downing one plastic Solo cup of beer after another from a giant rented keg while exclaiming in a testosterone-induced fit, “Yeah dude! Fuck the system, man! We’re gonna make our own fucking rules! Who gives a fuck?! Yeah! Fuck that!”
 
Based on my totally speculative and biased perception of what Storch must be like, I should be inclined to say that we’re all doomed because he’s going to get in there and bend the rules a little more in further favor of the Wall Street jackals. Well, he is. He is going to do just that, except he won’t be the guy calling the shots and wielding the iron grip it takes to bend the rules. That job will be up to his handlers – the people who promised him a pretty office and a fancy apartment and all the gourmet bullshit he could eat. These are the good folks who are looking out for the best interests of the insanely wealthy 1-percenters of America but are also wily enough to know how to position themselves so that when the papes come, all trails will lead to the fresh-faced kid from NYU. What a sad story that’ll be. I’m joking, of course. To steal a quote from one of the best poets of our time: “If you kiss Satan’s ass, don’t get mad when he shits in your face.” Get your Charmin ready, Storch-man. The shit may brew for years as our societal intestines actively bubble with ever more hijacking shenanigans by Goldman and the rest of the fat cat 1-percenters, but when it drops, it’s gonna be a heavy, dense, steaming, stinking pile.

In the meantime, us average Janes and Joes cannot innocently escape the fruits of this tale, either. Where the fuck is our outrage? How much more fed up do we have to be before we, as a cohesive, united group of citizens-done-wrong do something? Where is our collective call to battle – to war – against these acts of economic assault? How many more times, how much deeper do we have to get fucked before we revolt and finally rise up to demonstrate that we are not fodder for 1-percenters’ growth? I certainly recognize and applaud the efforts of labor unions to demonstrate on Wall Street, but when lunch hour is over and everyone has packed up their signs to get back to the job, has anything really changed? As I ambled through semi-organized crowds over the past couple of protests, the unions were loud, but it seemed as if the snickers of fancy-suited white-collar pros, along with a profound sense of “God, I can’t wait until lunch hour is over so they’ll all get out of here and go back to work,” was the dominant reverberation down the bull’s corridors. Though the unions’ vociferous calls for heads to roll could be heard up and down Broadway from several blocks away, the smug silence of thieves prevailed as it methodically ushered the yells of protest up into thin air.

So, where is our rage in the midst of this modern-day pillaging? What must our predecessors of revolutionist thought be thinking of us right now – those who came before us and endured hell so that we may live the way we do today? A large part of our problem precisely is the way we live today. Since Gil Scott Heron intelligently and accurately declared that the revolution will not be televised, I’m quite certain that it sure as hell will not be downloaded, either. Our exponentially-increasing-by-the-minute dependence on the beauty of technological breakthroughs has made us a society of Blackberry-toting drones who find it humanly impossible to drag our strung-out gazes away from the little screen on which we are texting or updating our statuses. We can’t tear ourselves away for most things – not to inquire how that nice coworker of ours is doing, not to watch that we aren’t bumping into strangers during rush hour movement, not even to check to see if the light is green before we cross the street. Yes, living in an age of gadget proliferation that provides us with instant access to gobs of information and the chance of reconnecting to old friends with a single click is a wonderful thing that emphasizes how far we’ve come from the days of pigeon carriers and parchment paper. Perhaps we weren’t ready to properly handle all this information or its immediate accessibility. As a society, we’re too busy on YouTube watching cats flushing toilets (thank you for that footage, Michael Moore), on Craigslist spewing anonymous hate (no minus points for Craigslist posters just trying to get laid, though), and Twittering every move we make from the morning trip to the toilet to the afternoon meeting to the to the takeout joint for dinner that night. Our passion has disappeared into an abysmal abyss of serial drops, drags, clicks and twits. Who needs to  think when there already exists, somewhere in cyberspace, someone who’s done it for us in the form of streaming video or one-liner Twit?

There it is. The explanation of our absent rage in a generalized nutshell.  Though organizing people and movements is made much easier and effective through our ever-burgeoning growth of new technology, we’ve lost the human connection along the way.  Passion and rage replaced by technology’s bells and whistles that are the neat little  distractions created by the 1-percenters to keep us all from throwing them the fuck off our backs. We keep clicking, they’ll keep leeching. And we’ll believe them when they tell us we like it while they keep pumping for more.

(thanks to Businessinsider.com for the Storch money shots included in this post)