A Note To Hedge Fund Managers: Go To Hell

I’m imagining a happy, productive community of sturdy, hard-working individuals, the kind who populate the fantasies of Republican pundits. I see farmers growing food and carpenters building homes. Dad is going to the office, promising little Skippy that he’ll hit him some fly balls after work. Mom looks on from the kitchen window with a dreamy smile. The milkman wears a bow tie and a paper hat. The local butcher is a jolly, avuncular fellow who knows everyone’s first name, not because the company orders him to but because he’s a genuinely friendly guy. Every little boy has a paper route and wants to grow up to be Henry Ford.

The bustling sounds of progress are everywhere. Everybody works and contributes. No one slacks. It’s the place Peggy Noonan dreams about after the brandy and Valium have kicked in. Rush ponders it during his refractory periods. He tries to explain its wonders to his bed mates, but thirteen year old Dominican hookers just don’t get it. It’s the place that dastardly old phony Reagan always conjured up to distract us from the real business of America, which was being conducted by the savings and loan industry, Oliver North, Nicaraguan Contras and Salvadoran death squads.

Funny, I look around this prosperous community of busy, industrious bees, and I don’t see any hedge fund managers. They’re just not there. I see lawyers and bankers who do, after all, perform necessary services, but no hedge fund managers. No commodities traders or currency speculators either, unless they are the figures dangling from a gibbet outside of town. The sun rises and sets on a community that is happily oblivious to the dark arts of financial chicanery. The hedge fund manager simply has no place. He is as useless as tits on a boar, as granddad used to say. Nothing but an extra mouth to feed. Hand him a broom or tell him to get the fuck out of Dodge. No. Make him buy his own broom. You have to teach these moochers self-reliance.

If you were stuck on an island, what would the hedge fund manager contribute? Advice? “Don’t build that boat yet, Frank, there’s too much uncertainty in the market. Sand castles are a much sounder investment.” He’d be the first one to recommend eating the children should cannibalism become necessary, and he would steal off other people’s plates when they weren’t looking.

Once again my biases are showing. I’m sorry. It’s just that, well, uh, how should I put this, I can’t stand the greedy motherfuckin’ cocksuckers, okay? But just to show you that I’m not a hard guy, I would say that I don’t dislike like them simply because they are greedy mutherfuckin’ cocsuckers. I dislike them because they are nothing but greedy mutherfuckin’ cocksuckers. If any of these turd blossoms ever said or did anything thoughtful or original my attitude might soften a bit. They don’t, at least not publicly. None of them ever display any genuine wit, learning, creativity, originality or even charm. They have no interesting hobbies or pursuits. Inside they are no different from the NASCAR rube down the block who, if you handed him twenty million dollars, wouldn’t have the imagination to do anything more intelligent with it than buy fifty flat screen TVs and collect vehicles. Their idea of a high class outing seems to be sitting in the luxury boxes at a football game. Some of them mindlessly hoard bullshit art, but that’s just an investment. Like most Americans, they don’t really have any intellectual dimension to their lives at all. They just consume consume consume the same trashy and vulgar shit as the rest of us. Their fortunes enable them to do it to a truly decadent and disgusting excess.

These are the soulless motherfuckers who put bumper stickers on their cars that say “He who dies with the most toys wins” and really mean it. Know what I’m saying?

Yet we put these greedy ass bores on a pedestal and let them get away with serious felonies that would land us serfs in the poke. The greedy mutherfuckin’ cocksucker in the linked article was guilty of a hit and run. His defense lawyer argued that his greedy mutherfuckin cocksucker of a client fell asleep at the wheel because of sleep apnea that was brought on by, wait for it, the “new car smell” in his Mercedes. It sounds to me like he may suffer from affluenza as well, but this story is a couple of years old and that bogus concept hadn’t entered the language yet.

The judge ordered jail time but suspended the sentence. The victim, who wasn’t killed but had been badly injured, was pissed. The judge didn’t care. He said, “There is nothing I can do in this courtroom to make your life better. You can be stuck or continue on a path of healing.” Someone might remind the judge that his job isn’t to make the victim’s life better but to enact justice. Then again, what would you expect from someone who uses cheesy, Oprahfied phrases like “continue on a path of healing”?

The district attorney had already dropped the felony charges down to misdemeanors. Why? Let him explain in his own words: “Felony convictions have some pretty serious job implications for someone in Mr. Erzinger's profession …” Indeed. Luckily they don’t have serious job implications for the rest of us. It’s refreshing to see such thoughtfulness in a DA. Normally they’re such meanies. He continued: “When you're talking about restitution, you don't want to take away his ability to pay.” I was a legal clerk at the DA child support enforcement office for several years. We used to take people’s licenses away all of the time, and many of these people, tradesmen like plumbers and carpenters, needed their trucks. Taking away their licenses was almost tantamount to taking away their jobs. Guys would be in the office complaining about this every day. Wanna know how much difference it made? Doodley squat. To get their licenses reinstated they needed to pay something like the equivalent of three months child support plus a hefty penalty fee. Almost no one could afford it. Once we got your license you were basically in a world of shit, just as we planned. When it came to restitution, we didn’t give a rat’s ass about taking away one’s ability to pay. We grabbed you by the nuts and squeezed.

Meanwhile, greedy mutherfuckin’ cocksucker Martin Erzinger whined about the “slanderous media campaign” against him. Sounds to me like baby needs a nap. I suggest Mr. Erzinger abscond to the nearest showroom, sneak into the backseat of a Mercedes and let that soothing new car smell waft him to sleep.

Two side notes. Mr. Erzinger was forced to take a leave of absence from his job. Miraculously, Vail didn’t collapse. Two, do you suppose some of Mr. Erzinger’s clients golf with the judge or the DA?

And I don’t wanna hear about their compassion. I get sick and tired of the media doing puff pieces on these grifters by showing us their warm and fuzzy side. I know a lot of financial elites donate to charity. Big whoop. I’m sure Jamie Dimon is a swell guy who loves his kids. So did a lot of the guards at Auschwitz. (I know he’s not a hedge fund manager, but he’s part of the same criminal tribe.) I’ve no doubt that when he bumps into Bono on the slopes at Davos every year, they shed a few tears for the poor and the dispossessed. “Believe me, Bono, if I could make everyone an economically viable unit in the New Global Economy I would, but I can’t. So we’re just gonna have to lower my taxes and cut Social Security instead.”

“That’s so deep, Jamie. Wanna come back to the lodge for a Pilates session with me and Deepak? Niall Ferguson’s going to stop by.”

“Then it’s a date!”

My contempt runneth over. Sorry. And sorry for all the foul language, but I felt the topic justified it. It always stimulates a certain, uh, intensity of feeling that requires the kind of strong emphasis that profanity so usefully supplies. Yes, I seriously used “turd blossom”. I’m fully aware of its origins. Credit must aways be given where credit is due. George W Bush popularized a slang term that, in my opinion, has enriched our language.