Without a shot fired, the proposed
new regulations for guns seem felt by pro gun advocates as personal injury. In
public discussions across the country one senses more than guns are at stake;
as if their guns are the last redoubt in a shrunken world where the capacity to
be empowered also had shrunk to Lilliputian size.
This anger at public discussions about
gun control quickly rises to the level of an approaching end of times. Extreme statements are often made—“Obama is a
Tyrant”—but these seem inarticulate representatives of deeper wounds laid almost
bare. Economic wounds, for example, are
hard to talk about in public because they’re born of intimate experience: the loss
of a hoped for career path, loss of home equity, families broken by checkbook
crises, kids that can’t get to the college of their choice.
Other economic wounds suffer from
the extreme social distance between struggling citizens and banks at the Wall
Street level: banks said to be too big to fail, banks behaving in blatantly
dishonest and fraudulent ways. The result is deep wounds of uncertain origin, inexplicable,
and inarticulate.
The latest example from Goldman
Sachs reveals this essentially baffling social calamity; a calamity without a shot
fired. An increasingly acrid New York
Times columnist, Joe Nocera, wrote two days ago
(Sunday March 10th) about the standard fraudulent practice at
Goldman Sachs and other Wall Street firms.
“Once upon a time, in a very different age, an Internet
start-up called eToys went public. The date was May 20, 1999. The offering
price had been set at $20, but investors in that frenzied era were
so eager for eToys shares that the stock immediately shot up to $78. It ended
its first day of trading at $77 a share.”
It soon plummeted because of Goldman’s profitable maneuvers.
“Goldman would routinely under price
the Initial Public Offering (IPO) of stock for a new company but give big
selected institutional investors the benefits of the stock’s first day huge run-up
in price.” They would buy cheap, then sell expensive. The big investors would
flip the stock a day or so later (I.e. sell) and cause the price to plunge. These
same big investors would then rebate a fourth or half of the big first day killing
they made back to Goldman, repaying its “kindness.”
The worst result of the scam was
that if Goldman had done the deal for the new company whose interests it was
supposedly representing, it would have earned $600 million for the new company.
Instead, EToys closed after the crash because it was cash starved.
Toby Lenk, the founder and former
CEO of EToys, was deposed by the SEC about this experience. Nocera reports:
“After the
deposition…the S.E.C. lawyers began to show him some Goldman Sachs documents.
He saw that one big firm after another had been allocated shares — and had
immediately flipped them, even though Goldman had promised that its clients
would support the stock. That’s when I thought, We really got screwed.”
He now has
14 years’ worth of perspective. “Look at what has happened since then,” he
said. “If you think eToys got screwed, what do you think happened to the
country?”
“What Wall Street did to us in 1999 pales in comparison to what
they did to the country in 2008,” he said.
These are real threats everyone
faces today and guns won’t fix it. We've seen intemperate anger before during the Obama years: the bitter 2009-2010
health care debates, the Presidential campaigns, the Tea Party absolutists—all
have this atmosphere of people thinking of themselves as if caught at the Alamo’s
“last stand.” The mood in this gun debate is both dangerous and rowdy because there
is confusion over what or whom to blame for their wounds. It’s a story as remote
to most of us as the Goldman Sachs story illustrates.
Besides Wall Street there is, of
course, the human and social toll and loss of trust from our recent three
wars. Many Americans have fought in one or all of
the failed wars In Vietnam, Iraq and Afghanistan, they’ve returned wounded in
spirit, often in body, with little to show for their sacrifice but the chaos
and massive loss of life left behind. Astonishing
large numbers of them commit suicide. The public conversation easily turns less
on cold facts and more on a growing sense of loss of self and life’s meaning.
This is the place where we should
seek our reconciliation with the wounded because all of us are among the body
count. There is a shared humiliation. A different kind of drone is at work here.
It’s noiseless, dehumanizing, and in daily ways it’s destroying our ideas of
democracy and liberty.
