Sunday Funnies

[don]

• Joshua M Brown
• April 30th, 2010

The lobbies of JPMorgan and several other banks were flooded with protesters downtown yesterday, I'm guessing that this was written by a frustrated Wall Streeter in response to the populist uprising. Here goes:

"We are Wall Street. It's our job to make money. Whether it's a commodity, stock, bond, or some hypothetical piece of fake paper, it doesn't matter. We would trade baseball cards if it were profitable. I didn't hear America complaining when the market was roaring to 14,000 and everyone's 401k doubled every 3 years. Just like gambling, its not a problem until you lose. I've never heard of anyone going to Gamblers Anonymous because they won too much in Vegas.

Well now the market crapped out, & even though it has come back somewhat, the government and the average Joes are still looking for a scapegoat. God knows there has to be one for everything. Well, here we are.

Go ahead and continue to take us down, but you're only going to hurt yourselves. What's going to happen when we can't find jobs on the Street anymore? Guess what: We're going to take yours. We get up at 5am & work till 10pm or later. We're used to not getting up to pee when we have a position. We don't take an hour or more for a lunch break. We don't demand a union. We don't retire at 50 with a pension. We eat what we kill, and when the only thing left to eat is on your dinner plates, we'll eat that.

For years teachers and other unionized labor have had us fooled. We were too busy working to notice. Do you really think that we are incapable of teaching 3rd graders and doing landscaping? We're going to take your cushy jobs with tenure and 4 months off a year and whine just like you that we are so-o-o-o underpaid for building the youth of America. Say goodbye to your overtime and double time and a half. I'll be hitting grounders to the high school baseball team for $5k extra a summer, thank you very much.

So now that we're going to be making $85k a year without upside, Joe Mainstreet is going to have his revenge, right? Wrong! Guess what: we're going to stop buying the new 80k car, we aren't going to leave the 35 percent tip at our business dinners anymore. No more free rides on our backs. We're going to landscape our own back yards, wash our cars with a garden hose in our driveways. Our money was your money. You spent it. When our money dries up, so does yours.

The difference is, you lived off of it, we rejoiced in it. The Obama administration and the Democratic National Committee might get their way and knock us off the top of the pyramid, but it's really going to hurt like hell for them when our fat a**es land directly on the middle class of America and knock them to the bottom.

We aren't dinosaurs. We are smarter and more vicious than that, and we are going to survive. The question is, now that Obama & his administration are making Joe Mainstreet our food supply…will he? and will they?"

***

Josh here - Whoever wrote this is a sociopath. I hope he gets pink-slipped.


http://www.thereformedbroker.com/201...n-wall-street/

[don]

Re: Sunday Funnies

A perfect. remedial fit....

SOMEWHERE IN SOUTH FLORIDA

A SATURDAY, 11 a.m. Seniors’ hour at the diner.

An old man with a hearing aid butters his toast. Two Jamaican nurses help a woman with a walker through the door. An elderly mother and her daughter share a stack of pancakes, the mother guiding her fork past the oxygen tube in her nose.

Sitting in one booth with his wife, the former acting boss of the Luchese crime family tucks into his $4 plate of scrambled eggs. He wears a pink Hawaiian shirt, a gold medallion, a brand-new pair of therapeutic sneakers. He is talking about the old days: everything he had, everything he lost.

“How much money?” he asks, responding to the question with a question.

“Awww, tons of money,” he answers. “It’s hard to say how much.”
This is Joe DeFede, a retired New York gangster who oversaw the rackets in the city’s garment district in the 1990s, a perch that provided him with a Cadillac, a driver, three horses stabled at Aqueduct and a home entertainment system columned in the style of ancient Greece. Like many mobsters, he walked through life with dignity and pride and, usually, with several thousand dollars in his pocket.

These days, though, he walks with a faltering step of age and with the weight of financial worry. After a five-year prison stint, legal fees and the crushing costs of creating a new identity — he entered but then left the witness protection program — the boss is almost broke. He and his second wife, Nancy, live on an annual income they said was not much more than $30,000: Social Security, a modest annuity and her pension from 20 years of working in a bank.

“That’s the fear we got,” said Mr. DeFede, 76, a slight man with a bookmaker’s grin who is known as Little Joe. “We try to keep our payments up” — for the car, the house, a recent hip replacement — “but sometimes we can’t hack it.”

Or as Mrs. DeFede, 74, explained, “We’re just scraping by.”

It might be hard to muster sympathy — especially in the midst of a recession — for a guy who once earned his living shaking down businesses and taking illegal bets, even if he served his sentence and testified at several federal trials that helped put his former Mafia colleagues behind bars. But there is no such thing as a Gangster I.R.A., so the DeFedes are living check to check (and under assumed names) on the hard edge of a sharp financial knife.

They are hardly the first to struggle in their golden years when the years that went before were lived outside the law. Before the film “American Gangster” revived his finances, Frank Lucas, who earned — then lost — millions as a heroin dealer, was living in a public housing project in New Jersey. (He is now trying to start his own fashion line.) Henry Hill, a Luchese family associate whose story formed the basis for the movie “Goodfellas,” sells signed posters as well as his memoirs and cookbooks at the Web site goodfellahenry.com.

“These people wind up as desperadoes in a sense,” said Nicholas Pileggi, who wrote, among other things, the screenplay for “Goodfellas.” “They come up with different schemes to survive without a 401(k). Don’t forget, they were hustlers to begin with.”

The DeFedes fit that mold: friendless, jobless and, faced with an uncertain future, living on their wits. Mrs. DeFede has sold jewelry — a ruby necklace, an emerald bracelet — to help support the household and has even written a book about her trials, “Life With Little Joe.”

It is a love story, sort of, opening with a startling scene of a young Mr. DeFede slapping her face. The manuscript encompasses their lives together: from obscurity to opulence, from the bulletproof vest she once found in her husband’s closet to their nervous flight into the federal government’s arms. While one might think a mob moll’s tell-all would make for an easy sale, that has not been the case. Mrs. DeFede’s agent spent an unsuccessful year shopping the book around. The couple still hopes the manuscript will provide them a nest egg. Publish or perish, Mafia style.

Last year, Mrs. DeFede took a job as a cashier at a clothing store. It paid $7.50 an hour and required cleaning toilets. She lasted three days.

As for her husband, she is apt to say, “There’s not a lot of ads out there saying, ‘Wanted: Ex-crime boss of a Mafia family. Ten years’ experience required.’ ”

Not unlike their law-abiding counterparts, they are filled with rage and bitterness — and violent apprehension — at their economic prospects. Mr. DeFede is so suffused with anxiety he sleepwalks and, in that state, literally punches the walls.

“Joe has fights in his sleep, cursing at some shadowy figure from the past,” Mrs. DeFede wrote one evening, jotting down thoughts for a reporter. “He has hit me several times during these episodes. Of course, he didn’t mean to harm me, but after one really bad incident, I was trying to calm him down and I got punched in the face.”

Mr. DeFede was nearing 70 when he got out of prison and discovered that a contract had been taken on his life. He was accused — wrongly, he insists — of stealing nearly a million dollars of Luchese family money. “If I did what they said I did,” he reasoned one night at the dismal bar of a chain restaurant, “you think that I’d be here?”

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/05/02/ny...mafia.html?hpw