Seven Red

While I sometimes find Cenk’s commentary a little much, I will admit to loving his comment on capitalist shill Erin Burnett’s summary of the Occupy Wall Street protests. I suppose I’ve already made the utter disdain I feel for the financial and business “news” operation very clear in this post, but Burnett really is one of the worst of the worst, and she’s now been given an even bigger stage than her usual and ludicrous CEO-fawning nonsense on CNBC. It’s an amusing takedown, including the closing line, “Do your job.” As most people looking at this might note, however, Burnett is doing her job, her job being to shill nonstop for corporate thieves as they rob the treasury and suck every dime they can from any program or person they come across.

One of the funnier moments is, to my mind, the comparison of the supposedly weirdo “hippies” of Occupy Wall Street with the truly bizarre get-ups of the Tea Party nuts. I mean, really. What is weirder: the dreads and bongos and nose-rings, or people donning tri-corner hats and Colonial bonnets and carrying around muzzle-loader muskets while hanging bags of tea from their clothing? That’s not fucking weird? At least the “hippies,” for the most part, actually dress like that in their regular lives, perhaps the zombie drummer and Uncle Samta Claus excluded.

I’m coining it! I did a Google search for “contripreneur,” and got this:

Bupkiss. So it’s mine. As you know, I intensely dislike the term “prosumer,” largely because I think it obscures more than it reveals. The actual term for the activity supposedly taken up by the prosumer should be, in my view, the “contripreneur,” an admittedly tongue-in-cheek combination of the contributor and the entrepreneur. (I don’t think it’s any more etymologically senseless than “prosumer,” in any case). And I want to use it to describe a whole set of activities, ranging from micro-finance and the kind of entrepreneurial charity work described recently by Nicholas Kristoff, the more modest contripreneurial activities, like designing tee shirts for Threadless to uploading YouTube videos and the like. Put another way, I want the term to have a broader extension than the “prosumer” because I’m attempting to link prosumer activities to a series of other activities, including, I should note, the way we contribute to our retirement plans and the like, which are mostly now “defined contribution plans” as opposed to the defined benefits plans of the old economy. But for now, I’ll just be staking that information claim, and we’ll see how fast Google’s little bots find my frequent mention of the contripreneur in this blog post titled The Contripreneur. Did I mention the contripreneur?

Apart from assaying my Googlexistence, I’m going to use this term as a jumping off point for getting back into the whole discussion of contribution that I brought up in the Three Dogmas of User-Centeredness post (which has, oddly enough, become a favorite of Israeli spammers), and continued in a few other posts. And I’ll try to do that through several readings of Bernard Stiegler’s For a New Critique of Political Economy, which posits a “Contribution Economy” as an escape route from the crisis of contemporary capital. So, more on Stiegler as I get to it.

On NPR’s Marketplace this week, “business writer” John Carney had about the most ridiculous rhetorical defense of Goldman Sachs that I’ve heard yet. It went something like this: the Securities and Exchange Commission civil suit against Goldman is “overstepping its bounds” because the SEC should be protecting the “little guy” rather than “German and and English banks” (to wit, ABN AMRO – now part of Royal Bank of Scotland – and IKB Deutsche Industriebank, the major investors in the ill-fated ABACUS2007-AC1 CDO). What’s Carney drawing on? There’s some measure of truth to the ideas that he deploys as support for this move. Securities laws were put in place to protect so-called ordinary investors (the haha little guy), and qualified institutional buyers are assumed to have more knowledge, so some requirements are waived for QIB’s from time to time and for very specific deals. So this little nugget of truth gets blown up into the rather absurd notion that Goldman had no reporting requirement on the ABACUS deal for the question at the heart of the case: did Paulson select some portions of the reference portfolio for the purpose of taking a short position on them, and was this disclosed to potential counterparties?  Indeed, we’d think that QIB’s would be even less likely than the ordinary investor to enter into this transaction had proper reporting been done on this point. The canard that QIB’s know there’s “always somebody on the other side” of the transaction has also been floated as an explanation; that may be, but QIB’s don’t usually think that the party taking the other side of the transaction has fixed the result from the get-go, or even had a chance to do so. As is fairly obvious, this is the main reason for splashing ACA’s logo across all the deal documents while never mentioning Paulson at all. Let’s leave out the real problem here that has nothing to do with the transaction itself: these deals – whatever their specifics at the level of finance – were all about a massive structure that promoted impossible home ownership and therefore sank countless “little guys” into debt, foreclosure, and misery. It’s easy to miss this basic point when people talk “ratings arbitrage,” “short positions,” and “QIB’s.” These deals traded on misery; they hurt people – and continue to hurt people. It doesn’t get much more complicated than that, whatever the complications of the transaction structures.

But let’s leave all these questions aside. More remarkable is Carney’s utterly laughable rhetorical positioning. We know that the rhetorical context is anti-bank and, well, pro-little guy. So, how does one leverage this rhetorical context to defend Goldman Sachs, the most vilified “bank” on the planet? Well, you represent the government agency that’s trying to bring Goldman to account as “on the side of” the big banks, and vaguely “against the little guy.” The SEC gets transformed into the Big Government Entity flacking for the Big Banks, while Goldman shuffles and whistles its way out of the room. It really is a breathtakingly cynical maneuver – impressive in its sheer brazenness. There’s no wonder that the Tea Party imbeciles are so turned around and confused.

Witness the spin here

“Resistance is born of desertion.” – Antifascist Partisan, Venice 1943 (qtd. in Hardt and Negri, Empire)

If one could condense the whole Empire trilogy into a nice little slogan, it would probably be the epigraph here: resistance is born of desertion. There are, of course, many ways to interpret this slogan (openness being both the benefit and the cost of slogans in general), but it is linked to broader concepts of exit, exodus, and escape. To situate it within the broader history of Negri’s thought, it’s impossible to talk about the role of exit and exodus without talking about the labor and social struggles of the 1970′s: exit from the union structure of the CGIL, and from the party politics that seemed completely compromised. It was not about arguing for better working conditions, but the refusal of work as such, or at least as it functioned in its capitalist and state socialist forms. The very notion of the autonomous social movement is defined by these forms of exodus from conventional (political) structures. Hardt and Negri will then, of course, add additional forms of exit that play key roles in the series, most notably global migration. It is also in this context that something like political apathy – supposedly one of the  primary villains today – takes on a much different appearance, as would the efforts to prevent it. If the other side of exit is engagement, then the current fetish (especially in my field) for “engagement” starts to look very much like a political project to cut off exit routes. On this point, the general form of power and what we generally promote in our classrooms are much the same: you can do everything but exit. Maybe hold on to that for later. But you certainly see thinkers from something like an Autonomia school (it’s not one thing) trying to work through this idea of exit. When Virno discusses kairos and metis, it’s almost always in these narratives of escape, like in the classical image of metis, with the mouse that quickly locates a hole and dodges into it just as the predator is bearing down.

So I’m late to the game on Roger Lowenstein’s widely discussed column from last month “Walk Away from your Mortgage!,” but it strikes me as a new narrative of exit that cashes out the exodus line from the Empire series in interesting ways. Needless to say, Lowenstein is not thinking of 70′s social struggles or Empire or anything of the kind. His argument, in some ways, could be read as quite the opposite. It’s slogan might be “Capitalism for everybody!” The problem, Lowenstein suggests, is that millions of underwater homeowners are required to hold some emotional and moral investment in their debt, while banks and big capitalist institutions are expected to act in a purely rational manner:

Businesses — in particular Wall Street banks — make such calculations routinely. Morgan Stanley recently decided to stop making payments on five San Francisco office buildings. A Morgan Stanley fund purchased the buildings at the height of the boom, and their value has plunged. Nobody has said Morgan Stanley is immoral — perhaps because no one assumed it was moral to begin with. But the average American, as if sprung from some Franklinesque mythology, is supposed to honor his debts, or so says the mortgage industry as well as government officials.

Lowenstein suggests that people should consider their house purely as an investment, and act according to the same rational calculations that Morgan Stanley does. Clearly, there’s a lot to be skeptical about here, but there’s also a lot to commend in this view. Mid-twentieth century critique generally viewed capital as transforming everything into cold rationality, but Lowenstein is in some sense right that this view was always mistaken. It’s not that contemporary capitalism is too rational; rather, it’s never rational enough. Or, to put it another way, it was always rationality for the capitalists, and emotion-laden moralism for everyone else (indeed, this structural feature explains very tidily why social phenomena that would seem “residual” in Raymond Williams’ sense are not residual at all). It was actually second-wave feminist thought that grasped this problem, though the solution was – too often – to privilege the emotional dimension (and, unfortunately, the moralism). Its diagnosis was correct, but its treatment plan was often wrong. (Certainly, feminist thought was correct to say that the very distinctions between emotion and reason, affect and thought, were themselves the problem, so I’m using them here mainly as shorthand that keys into Lowenstein’s argumentative framework, not as ontological givens). In any case, with that treatment plan, you end up with even more painful conditions,  like Rogerian rhetoric, the joke we call “business ethics,” and similar sorts of projects, all of which are essentially unilateral disarmament, or exit in a bad way. (Negri always talks about exiting with a weapon.) Lowenstein’s solution is the reverse of this treatment plan: let’s see what happens if everyone actually does behave like a capitalist. The stunned blabber that greeted Lowenstein’s piece speaks, I think, to the real threat it presents, even if few are likely to act on his prescription.

Just before the meltdown (ahem…), I noted in this post that “the proverbial cat that is out of the bag is precisely the conceptualization of the house as such,” which is to say, that the mortgage crisis could only happen because the constant shifting we had all been expected to do between the house as concrete lived space (i.e., use value) and the house as abstract investment vehicle (i.e., exchange value) had broken down, or stuck on investment. But I also noted that this wasn’t a breakdown that was likely to be reversed. Lowenstein’s piece adds an interesting new wrinkle here: yes, embrace the house as pure exchange value for the purpose of making financial decisions about it. There is no moral or emotional dimension to it. I have no doubt that Lowenstein’s underlying assumptions could be read as odious at some level, but they do seem to take the logic to an interesting limit. He notes, for example, that “if lenders feared an avalanche of strategic defaults, they would have an incentive to renegotiate loan terms.” The maddening intransigence of the banks on this question would seem to collapse if everyone acted like…a bank. That is to say, if everyone starts practicing techniques of exit, exit itself becomes a weapon.

I didn’t really have time today to follow up on all that backchannel business, but I do want to take a minute to point to two curious New York Times stories from the weekend. First, probably one of the more interesting unfolding situations is the impending collapse of the Greek economy (“Is Greece’s Debt Trashing the Euro“), which – if the Times and various NPR outlets are to be believed, threatens the very existence of the euro. Apparently, according to the radio, the German taxpayers aren’t particularly keen on bailing out Greece, which they’d be bound to do to avoid a collapse of their own currency, should Greece default on its debt. The Times story is interesting because it presents the the more or less unvarnished perspective of the investor class on the root of the problem: outrageous spending on the part of the Greek government (even called, openly, “largesse!”), “appeasement” of the Greek unions – including, the Times writer notes, even the “prostitutes’” union, which protested “unlicensed competition from Russian and Eastern European immigrants.” Well, we all know the solution to such problems: immediately deploy the austerity measures! The problem is that – and I’m quoting NPR to the best of my memory – policy-makers fear “massive unrest” should that happen. The Times story says the same, wondering whether the 1 million public employees will accept that “the state can no longer meet its commitments” (I suspect “afford their sinecures” was cut by the night editor purely for reasons of vocabulary). Needless to say, the claims of the unions on the government are totally ridiculous, while the claims of the bond-holders are utterly sensible. The article ends with this quotation from Panagiotis Vavougios, the “head of the powerful, 200,000-strong retired civil servants” union: “It is not the workers that should be blamed for this; it is bankers and large capital.” Inverted pyramid arrangement tells you all you need to know about what the writers think of that, but in case you weren’t sure…

The Times does not neglect to inform us that Mr. Vavougios happens to be 80 years old, the suggestion on that point being rather clear. Just the facts, n’est-ce pas?

So, who’s presiding over the current and future Greek bonds that have suddenly been called into question based on the new deficit discoveries? None other than our friends at Goldman Sachs, of course, where Gary Cohn has “positioned his firm to be the leading underwriter of Greek debt — a role that will require it to convince investors that Greece will institute the [...] budget-tightening measures.” Lady, short the euro! If Goldman’s mixed up in this, you can expect a massive downside…for everyone but Goldman.

But that leads to the other long story in the Times from this weekend, which describes in some excruciating detail the goings on between Goldman and AIG that certainly contributed to financial meltdown (for everyone but Goldman, as it were). We already know that AIG was selling insurance like the proverbial Seinfeld car rental joint takes reservations, never expecting to have to pay out on these wacky hedge policies. We also already know that Goldman was buying up insurance like a dude who’s taken out a contract on his wife, which the article portrays as “negative views of the housing market.” Put another way, the people at Goldman believed the housing market was going to crash, and they structured their deals with AIG around that belief. Fair’s fair, right? If somebody’s dumb enough to insure my house with the hurricane bearing down, why not take out the policy, right? But if we may read between the lines on the Times story – in the manner of Russians reading the old Pravda – there is an unstated suggestion in this article (the AIG execs who bothered to be quoted practically hiss it) that it wasn’t merely a belief on Goldman’s part, or merely negative views. It’s a very interesting article that says a lot while also saying very little.

Let me irresponsibly suggest further by returning to our example of the dude and his wife. Suppose you were in a jury trial, and heard that the defendant had taken out large life-insurance policies on his seemingly healthy wife. Then she died inside of six months. Maybe he had a better sense of her wheezing at night? Or maybe it was just a standard insurance buy. That alone would be insufficient for most people to convict. Now, suppose he took out a policy with quadruple indemnity should she be run over by a Zamboni between April 4 and April 8, and lawd but didn’t she step right in front of it on April 5! With nobody else around but the Zamboni driver, with whom our defendant seems to have developed a close relationship in the months before the terrible accident. Yeah, that’s kinda like what the article is saying happened with GS’s insurance buys. “But ladies and gentlemen,” the defense attorney notes, “my client simply had negative views of his beloved wife’s Iceborne Survival Rate!”

Oh, by the way, you, me, and our children’s future?  That’s the icy, flattened wife.

Although I suppose it doesn’t do much good, I do like how Goldman Sachs is beginning to take on the cultural value of an uber-villain. The galling bonuses, even after their practices essentially sunk the whole economy, are bad enough, and set the teeth of most people on edge. That Goldman alums have had their claws in just about everything at Treasury for the past 15 years is even more infuriating in the face of their massive fail. But the pure nerve of Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein’s statement that Goldman is “doing God’s work” is simply too much for most folks, I should think, as unemployment hits 10 plus percent, while GS has a monster year. Certainly, “85 Broad Street” doesn’t have the same ring to it as “Versailles,” or “the Bastille” (85 Broad Street Day?), but you can see the Goldman monolith taking on the same cultural value as the symbol of extravagance and decadence and oppression. God’s work! It’s almost as if he tried to find the most inappropriate thing to say, and then said it. The PR folks must have been face-palming well into the night on that one. In any case, here’s Calvin Trillin, writing in the Nation – and it’s just one of many parodic responses the Blankfein’s nonsense (a Lloyd’s Prayer circulated around Wall Street as well):

On every seventh day the Lord can rest.
He knows that Goldman Sachs will do its best
To work away at that for which He’d hanker:
A pot of dough for each investment banker.

As He looks down at us from high above,
The Lord’s not interested in peace and love
And such as that. The Lord has got this itch
To see the Goldman Sachs folks filthy rich.

He wishes they had more than what they’ve got–
Another house or two, another yacht.
His hopes for these to whom he gave the nod:
More money, as the saying goes, than God.

One of the great cultural victories of neoliberalism was to convince people that there was something virtuous and even socially valuable in the kind of high stakes finance capital operations run by Goldman and similar entities. It’s not surprising that these people would squander away their cultural capital with the same recklessness that they squandered away their economic capital. The more Goldman starts to appear culturally like the old octopus cartoons of the oil and railroad trusts, the more pressure will presumably be put on the government to reverse 30 years of free-for-all dereg. Though, to be fair, any pressure on Goldman still seems years away. The problem, of course, is not GS itself, and perhaps we shouldn’t deal in such symbolic villainy, but it’s a pretty good place to start, and besides, they seem all too willing to do it to themselves. Hubris ain’t attractive.

Disneyland is presented as imaginary in order to make us believe that the rest is real, whereas Los Angeles [is] no longer real, but belongs to the hyperreal order and to the order of simulation. – Jean Baudrillard

How could we have all been so blind? Keith, one of the FBI agents, summed everything up very simply: “I’ve never seen a place like this,” he told me. “You were all living in Disneyland!” - Eleanor Squillari, Bernard Madoff’s secretary, in June’s Vanity Fair

In my ongoing morbid curiosity about my former employer, Bernard Madoff, I read the recent Vanity Fair article by Marc Seal, “Bernie Madoff’s Private World.” It’s the companion piece to the April article also written by Seal. The June article, however, is essentially co-written by Madoff’s long-time secretary, Eleanor Squillari, so you really get an insider’s look at the operations over there. Now, you may know that I’ve been basing all my Madoff posts since Bernie got arrested on this post, which I wrote long before any of this mess hit the fan.  Of course, since then I’ve learned that I worked in the heart of the Madoff fraud, probably sending out fraudulent statements to clients/victims. The Vanity Fair article adds another dimension to that, and some – to me – jaw-dropping updates. The article is written in the first-person from the perspective of Squillari, Bernie’s secretary. Here, then, are the relevant portions:

The 17th floor was a different world from where we worked. Whereas the upper two floors were modern, with everything state-of-the-art, on 17 the corporate image didn’t seem to matter. The desks were close together, the computers were antiquated, and the printers were old ink-jet jobs, not the laser printers we had in our offices [tpspn: it's funny that I remembered the main printer in exactly this way, that it impressed itself so clearly on my memory]. …

The two people who ran the floor, Frank DiPascali and Annette Bongiorno, had once lived next door to each other, in Queens. Annette handled Bernie’s seasoned clients and managed her staff on 17. Short, tough, and overweight, she was rigid and guarded at work. [tpspn: compare my description of her in the original post as "She was a completely round woman, maybe 4 foot 8, implausibly round like a circle drawn perfectly by hand. She was an Italian from Brooklyn who had started off as the founder of the firm’s secretary 25 years before, when it was a very small operation indeed. She’d then made the inevitable ascent to office manager and then operations manager, largely behind her tyrannical personality. Some of the impeccably educated full-timers noted bitterly that she’d never been to college. I saw her make at least three of these people cry in the eight weeks I was there."]…[M]uch of her wealth had to have come from Bernie, whom she had worked for since he started his business, in the 1960′s.

Annette’s staff of six were mostly low-level, clerical women, many of them working mothers, who probably made no more than $40,000 a year. They were young and naive, with no background in finance, so they weren’t able to connect the dots. Annette allegedly instructed them to generate tickets showing trades that had never been made, at least two of them reportedly told prosecutors, and they simply did as they were told (Bongiorno has not been charged with any wrongdoing.

I knew these women. Two of them, Winnie Jackson and Semone Anderson, would come up to 19 every day to deliver figures. Whenever I went downstairs, they were always busy doing paperwork while Annette watched them like a hawk. Once, I remember Annette had the phones removed from her employees’ desks after she became concerned that they were making personal calls. She treated them like children. …

In Annette Bongiorno’s area, located across the floor from Frank, were Winnie and Semone and four other women. Every day I would receive a report with all of the figures from Winnie or Semone and another report of wire transfers from the cage.

This is amazing to me because it’s just as I remember it. But more than that. I closed my other piece with the following:

I never really quit that job. I just called the temp agency one Monday and said I wouldn’t do it anymore. The woman at the agency was really upset, since the firm had apparently started speaking to her about hiring me full time, a revelation so absurd that it simply floored me. They hired Tasha instead.

Now here’s the jaw-dropping part. Temp #1, or “Tasha,” in my previous post is Semone Anderson from the Vanity Fair story. She started the same day I did, and they were set, according to the temp agency, to offer me the position that she eventually took. This is curious to me. I get in there and last about 8 weeks before the mind-numbingness of it all finally kicks in, and I just drop it, the whole job. Here’s how that really happened. I was up in Binghamton for the weekend visiting she, who was still in college at the time. I was supposed to take a bus home on Sunday night, but I just said fuck it. We even got to the actual bus station before I decided to stay another day or two. What about Madoff? she asked me. Fuck ‘em, I said. I’ll find something else. I remember calling the agency early Monday morning and telling the rep, who was notably upset, first because I was bailing on a perfectly good revenue stream for the agency (I believe it was called Cross Temps) for no apparent reason, and second because they get some payoff if you’re hired full time. I turned to she when I got off the phone: “I think she’s pissed,” I laughed. Well, they got the payoff for Tasha/Semone. What’s incredible to me is that she stayed there for the remaining damn near 13 years, and is so inextricably mixed up in this now world famous and historical Ponzi scheme that her name is appearing in Vanity Fair and the Wall Street Journal! For a job that I fairly casually discarded on a whim, and pretty much left behind without ever looking back.

It’s an odd thing to think about, I guess. But it also goes to two points. First, these finance jobs are the route to some kind of bourgeois life for many working class people in urban areas. Tasha/Semone started at Madoff by stapling and folding on the same slushy January day that I did. Thirteen years. It was her career, and would have gone on in that manner no doubt for as long as they’d pay her. Indeed, Madoff himself and DiPascali and Bongiorno (the latter two haven’t been charged with anything, of course – though this shocks me) all have fairly modest upbringings, like all the fraudsters in the last few financial debacles. (I also sense a pattern that might explain why they were going to offer me that job, even though I openly considered it beneath me, as arrogant as I was: the qualifying characteristics for taking care of business on the 17th floor seem to be 1) Queens, and 2) a distinctly Italianate name. And in finance, a double major in history and English might as well be “no college.”). But the second point sort of derives from the first. Certainly, this Madoff fraud is outrageous and historical in scope. But it’s Disneyland, see? But maybe with a twist: Madoff is presented as real in order to make us believe that the rest of the mess on Wall Street is imaginary. It functions as the displacement for the whole Madoffian financial system, in much the same way that my colleague over there  in Japan right now sees the swine flu as a metonymic displacement of globalization anxieties. We’re crazy about Bernie, to put it another way, because we all work for Bernie. And it goes without saying, I should add, that we all have our money with him.

Byron Dorgan arguing against Gramm-Leach-Bliley, November 4, 1999.

Now we got all these folks here who know a lot more about this than I do, I must admit, who say, “Well, except we’re creating firewalls. We’ve got subsidiaries, we’ve got affiliates, we’ve got firewalls.” They’ve got everything except common sense. Everything except common sense. And everything, apparently, except a primer on history. I just wish before people would vote for this bill they’d be forced to read just a bit of the financial history of this country to understand how consequential this decision is going to be. Now, I obviously am in a minority here. We’ve got people who’ve dressed in their best suits, and they just think this is the greatest piece of legislation that’s ever been given to Congress, and we’ve got choruses of folks standing outside this chamber who’ve spent their lifetimes working to get this done, to say “Would you just forget all that nonsense back in the 1930’s about bank failures and Glass-Steagall and the requirement to separate risk from banking enterprise? Would you just forget all that? God, time has moved on, let’s understand that. Change with the times!” We’ve got folks outside who’ve worked on this very hard and who very much want this to happen and we’ve got a lot of folks in here who are very compliant, to say “Absolutely, let me be the lead singer.” And here we are.

We’ve got this bill, which—I’ll bet—five, ten, fifteen years from now we’ll be back thinking this bill like we thought of the bill passed in the late 1970’s and early 1980’s in which this Congress unhitched the savings and loans so that some little sleepy Texas institution can gather deposits from all around America and like a giant rocket become a huge enterprise and guess what? With all the speculation, and the S&L’s, and broker deposits, and all the things that went with it that this Congress allowed, what did it cost the American tax payers to bail out that bunch of failures? What did it cost? Hundreds and hundreds of billions of dollars! I’ll bet one day somebody’s going to look back at this and they’re going to say “How on earth could we have thought it made sense to allow the banking industry to concentrate through mergers and acquisition to become bigger and bigger and bigger, far more firms in the category of too big to fail, how did we think that was going to help this country?”

You may remember my description of the ancient equipment I worked with at Madoff, posted here. I put it like this:

The operations department – where I worked – had an old dot-matrix mega printer, a preposterous machine roughly the size of a mature rhinoceros. The full time people would run these reports, then they’d come out of the printer, then we’d have to separate them, collate them, staple them, fold them, put them in envelopes, and finally run them through a Pitney-Bowes, all manually. Oh, I shouldn’t forget: since the printer was, even then, this ancient relic probably bought second-hand from the fucking Phoenix Program, it spit out the paper on turning wheels, with those absurd little punched-out circles on the paper edges supposedly aligning everything, the kind you still see on some government forms. So, before collating, stapling, folding, inserting, and stamping, we also had to rip the alignment edges off the reports. Thousands of them. Of course, since the giant dot-matrix was ancient, and since this technique for printing things was never very smart in the first place, the damn thing kept misfeeding, so somebody had to stand by the printer all day preventing and correcting the misfeeds, which usually occurred when more than, say, six consecutive reports were printed in a row. Thousands of reports.

I just read this article, in which some other employee discusses the goings-on on the 17th floor (where I worked, in the heart of the fraud, or as the article calls it, the “nexus of the Ponzi scheme”). He says the following:

The employee says he only saw the 17th floor, where the fraudulent Investment Advisory operation was located, about two times. He noticed the out of date computers and the old-fashioned dot matrix printers which printed out paper with green and white stripes. The computers he saw were about 15 years old, including one system that “is not even around anymore—miles away from modern Windows technology. And the statements I’ve seen from victims don’t look like my statements from Fidelity. They had primitive typefaces, as though they had been typed on a typewriter. Nobody sends statement like that, so maybe it was done to create the illusion of old-fashioned transparency.”

He learned that those who staffed the 17th floor were less than knowledgeable, often uneducated, often appeared incompetent. “There was this one guy, who had worked there his whole life who generated the statements but he would often not get them out on time.”

There is no doubt in my mind that I was printing and sending out the fraud statements. You should also notice, if you read the article, that I didn’t exactly change all the names in my account…