First, let me tell you that the reason for the title will be explained at the end of this post, so bear with me. Let’s just say something about the aforementioned counter-protest smells like a rotting fish, if you get my drift.
Second, this information about counter-protests by the 1% comes to us from the Washington Post blog, by Elizabeth Flock. Rumor has it the Washington Post was once a great newspaper, but that could be just revisionist history, due in large part to the success of a movie made in the 70’s starring Dustin Hoffman and Robert Redford by the name of All the President’s Men. I doubt that the Post has any reporters 1/10th as dedicated to investigating political and financial scandals as Woodward and Bernstein, even if their legend may have been exaggerated since the heady days of Watergate.
But I digress.
Here’s the story intrepid journalist Elizabeth Flock of the Post was assigned to research and write regarding Occupy Wall Street (I presume it was assigned to her, though maybe she decided to write it on her own): the story of the 1%’ers’ counter-protests against the young and poor people camped out on the 1%’s doorstep (yes, many of the OWS protestors are mostly young–compared to me in any case–and/or struggling financially). Elizabeth Flock gives insight into the thinking of the people working for the great financial institutions that destroyed our economy with their reckless schemes, fraud, deceit and thievery, the same intrepid institutions who received 12.5 TRILLION DOLLARS of Federal financial aid and loan guarantees.
Let’s start with the money quote shall we, the one in my title:
A counter-protest/prank has also started on Wall Street, “Occupy Occupy Wall Street,” by two actor-comedians who say they are also investment bankers and are fed up with the demonstrations.
Davram Stiefler and Jason Selvig told the Post they started their movement to represent the 1% because “we worked hard to get where we are, and these people seem like they are trying to take it away.”
Their advice to the protesters was to stop the “woe is me mentality,” and “instead of holding a sign, go to business school.”
(Continue below the fold to find out why I believe WaPo has been pwned by phony counter-protestors)
Yes, if only they had all gone to Business School, all our economic woes would be over. Remember what a great job noted graduate of Harvard’s Business School, George W. Bush did running the Federal Government? Just go to this link and this one to see what a great job he did running the US Federal Government when he was the nation’s CEO in Chief.
Here’s a chart which shows how much Business School graduate Bush helped create the current economic condition of these United States of America:
By the way, I have a brother who received and MBA after he received a PhD in statistics. Sadly, he didn’t work on Wall Street or for any firm in the financial sector so he was laid off this year by a large multi-national pharmaceutical company based out of a foreign country. He was a quality control expert due to his background in statistics. His MBA helped him primarily speak the lingo of all his superiors who knew jack-shit about statistics because they had business, economics and/or finance degrees. He was laid off despite years of great reviews for the work he had done to improve quality and efficiency of the plant where he worked and at other plants operated by this multinational company.
He was fired primarily (and this is supposition, but I believe it is grounded firmly in fact) because he documented that FDA protocols for manufacturing the generic drugs the plant produced had been violated so that the senior executives of the American subsidiary of this multinational company, the subsidiary that technically owned and operated the plant where my brother worked, could keep the plant operating. If the FDA had discovered that batches of some of the drugs being produced were not up to snuff they would have to shut the plant down and that would have cost the parent company money and have been a black mark on the records of the executives who headed up the subsidiary. One added note: my brother was only one of several individuals at his work place who informed these senior executives of this problem and the need to correct it, advice they ignored.
He was fired just before an FDA review of the plant was to occur, at which he was to be interviewed by FDA officials. Oh one more note about my brother’s situation. He wasn’t the only one fired. Almost all the senior management at his plant were fired or forced into early retirement just before the FDA audit. Some jumped ship because they could see the warning signs coming. They all had — drum roll please — finance or business degrees. My brother now works as a consultant when he can get work. He has two children with health problems (one very severe, the other less so) and a newborn baby born less than a month after he was laid off. He’s been lucky to get some jobs, but has had to spend weeks away from his family.
I believe the American higher-ups who fired him had degrees in finance, btw. You want to know the funny thing? The parent company sent their own executives to “review the situation” after my brother was fired and they ultimately fired the same bosses who fired my brother and all those other business school executives to cover-up this scandal and try to save their own asses back home. You see, the senor executives at the parent company had to cover their asses because they picked my brothers’ bosses to head up their American subsidiary. Ironic, isn’t it.
So, what is the lesson of this little anecdote? Having a business degrees is no solution to the unemployment problem caused by lax regulation of the finance sector and their own greed and incompetence (or in some cases outright criminality). Did Messrs. Davram Stiefler and Jason Selvig, who are the so-called organizers of this counter-protest by investment bankers on Wall Street, work harder than my brother to obtain his two degrees? Are they notably more educated than he? I doubt it, just as I doubt that they worked harder the millions of unemployed who also worked hard to obtain their degrees in fields often far more difficult or taxing than Business school.
Indeed, I suspect there are thousands if not millions of people who have business, finance or economics degrees who are unemployed or underemployed because the companies who (allegedly) employ Messrs. Davram Stiefler and Jason Selvig just happened to be “Too Big to Fail” and thus received government assistance so they wouldn’t collapse after making decisions that crashed the global economy. Without that massive Federal intervention and bailout (i.e., corporate socialism) I highly doubt Messrs. Davram Stiefler and Jason Selvig would still be employed (allegedly) as investment bankers. They’d be out on the street. Good thing the government they so despise was around to pick up the pieces after the geniuses, the so-called smartest people on the planet, the “job creators” on Wall Street, etc. wrecked the economy with their derivatives scams.
So, Messrs. Davram Stiefler and Jason Selvig, would you like some pâté or caviar with your whine about the stupidity and/or laziness of the Occupy Wall Street protestors?
Or are you misleading the media about your careers as investment bankers? Here’s what I found on Google about Davram Stiefler:
Davram is an actor/comedian from Grand Junction, Colorado. He has performed comedy all over new york city, including co-producing and hosting a stand up comedy showcase entitled “Unhand Me Sir!” He is thrilled to be part of Gorilla Gorilla – but enough about him…
Here is what I found about Jason Selvig after I Googled him:
A little-known actor has launched an online bid to raise cash to fund a trip to Los Angeles so he can propose to pop star Avril Lavigne.
Jason Selvig wants to raise $5,000 to cover his travel costs and expenses – and strangely enough, people are already pledging to help him succeed via funding platform website Kickstarter.com.
Here’s a link to the corporate services provided by UCB Touring Company, the comedy and theatrical company with whom the “Davram Stiefler” I found on Google is associated:
Meetings, parties, presentations, product launches, videos, role playing, retreats, workshops, training sessions, conferences… weve [sic] rocked them all. Each event is customized to suit your needs. The possibilities are endless — and the greatest creative talent pool in the country is at your disposal. Call today to find out how you can make your next event extraordinary
So are these really “investment bankers” or are they two entertainment professionals hired by some Wall Street firm to stage a fake counter-protest? I suppose, they could be simply pwning Elizabeth Flock at WaPo and the other news outlets that have covered their protest, but something tells me they wouldn’t be doing this for free.
In any case, you now know how much credibility to give Elizabeth Flock’s reporting on the so-called counter-protests by the 1%er’s for The Washington Post. She didn’t even bother to Google their names or find out if they are investment bankers as they claim.
In fact, she would have been better off not reporting on this dubious “counter-protest” at all until she had ascertained if Stiefler and Selvig really are who they claim to be –investment bankers as well as actor/comedians. Perhaps, if she were a “real journalist” she would have looked into whether they merely actors and comedians, whether they were hired by someone or some entity to make this little show, or if they were just trying to get their fifteen minutes of fame as a result of this stupid publicity stunt. Instead, it appears the only investigative reporting she did was to take this article in Exception Magazine and this YouTube video and then included this nonsense in her article:
While many have said it’s clear that the bankers are making fun of the protesters, Stiefler and Selvig insist the “protest is very serious to us.”
Notice how here she calls them “Bankers” after previously identifying them as actors who claim to be investment bankers. She has presented no basis in fact for calling them bankers other than their own self-asserted claim. She sprinkles what is likely a hoax by Stiefler and Selvig in with other quotes from various sources, some anonymous, who are generally dismissive of the protests. A superficial reading of her article leaves you with the impression that Stiefler and Selvig are really investment bankers. Here’s some more material in her article where she gives credibility to their claim that they are bankers representing the “1%”:
New York Federal Reserve’s board of directors Kathryn Wylde agreed with the two wayward bankers, Public Radio International reports, saying recently that if the protesters actually “talked to the people working inside the banks and on Wall Street … they would find they have far more in common with them than what divides them.”
Now if they are bankers, she should have confirmed who employs them. If they are merely actors, she should have ascertained if this “prank” was their own doing, or if they were hired by someone to walk around claiming they were real bankers. She did neither. She simply presented them as credible spokespersons for other Wall Street bankers, brokers, fund managers, etc.
Now these guys’ comedy act may be a bad joke, but the fact that Flock even included them in her reporting and spoke of them as legitimate counter-protestors to OWS without confirming any facts about their claims is truly an awful example of theater of the absurd. Such is what passes for journalism in one of America’s “Great Newspapers.” Maybe some editor told her to balance her prior coverage of of the OWS protests. If so, she wrote a slipshod piece, and any hack writer could have done better.
