SRF Heavy Industries

Congratulations. You broke everything.

In a single generation, which has to be some kind of record, you’ve eradicated all progress for our nation since the Great Depression. The Land of Opportunity needs a new name now.

I could give you my own sob story — wiped out retirement funds from decades of labor, a marriage shattered and drained dry of love and hope from economic hardship and struggles to find employment, a house rescued from foreclosure twice by huge sacrifices and finally lost when it went down for the third time, a forced relocation thousands of miles away from aging and ailing family to find whatever scraps of work are available, no better off than I was when I left home at 17 to go to college, too old in my middle age to start the family I’ve always wanted and too close to my end years to save enough to retire unsupported — but there are a million stories that are worse. What’s the point of telling you these stories? You are incapable of sufficient empathy to feel anything for those whose fortunes you have strip-mined to add ludicrous layers of padding to your own filthy nests.

You don’t work. You don’t. You stockpile money and claim to make it work, not for you, but for the stockholders — but you are the stockholders. I, and everyone remotely like me — we’ve had to cash out of every last share to be able to eat and have a meager roof. And some of us don’t even have that. You make money for yourselves and yourselves alone. You bought up our shares when we sold them for food.

You don’t employ people — at least not in America. Thanks to the global communication networks we built for you from the prosperity of two generations — including the fruits of a once-great space program that put men on the moon in the technological equivalent of a Studebaker strapped to the top of an enormous missile — you can employ people anywhere in the world where they will be grateful for a mere handful of dollars per day. It’s small businesses — operations owned and run by those in the middle class who have made investments in themselves that pay off — that employ Americans. It’s those people that work, not you. You just sit there and own things. Compare yourselves to them for a moment.

Perhaps that’s where you got your own start: a high school diploma from the best public schools in the world, maybe even a degree or two for which you could pay the tuition with the proceeds of a ten-hour-a-week part-time minimum-wage job, and that got you a decent starting position in the middle ranks. But now the United States is 14th out of 34 OECD countries for reading skills, 17th for science — and a crippling 25th for mathematics. And that’s just high school. It’s cheaper to buy a house than to pay for an advanced degree now. That path is also closed. You broke that too, sucking the money out of the government and the economy that would have paid to keep our schools effective and current.

Or maybe you started without any of that and invested fifteen or twenty years working your way up from the mail room or janitorial staff. But you don’t have mail rooms anymore — our public research and decades of hard work during the good times have eliminated the need. You have an army of temps and part-timers and no fifteen- or twenty-year paths to executive excellence. A five-year stint in a corporate job is exhibiting exceptional staying power. The path of working your way up from the ground floor is closed. You broke that as well.

Or maybe you just had it all handed to you by parents and grandparents who spent all of that sweat on behalf of your feather-bedded backsides.

Barely tapping into your hoarded wealth at all, you buy up small businesses for rights to the patents, to the business models, to the intellectual properties, to the clientele and consumers — and you jettison the human beings that built those tools for you. You perform mergers and efficiency sweeps and you outsource and you squeeze until you no longer have a workforce and are left with pieces of machinery for scraping what shreds of money are left into your festering stockpiles. From which you pay yourselves hugely. For your “hard work” on behalf of your “shareholders”.

And you’ve won.

You’ve won the game — by paying lobbyists and bribing congressmen with campaign funds to draft and pass legislation to make it illegal and impossible for you to lose. You did so by way of your hard-bought 14th Amendment rights protecting ex-slaves and corporations from being deprived of “life”, “liberty”, or property by dint of being “born” or “naturalized” in the United States. Perhaps later you can lobby for the right for your corporations to vote when they turn eighteen, or get driver’s licenses, or marry other corporations (of suitable gender where required by law), or register for the Selective Service, or be jailed or even executed for their crimes, or pay their fair share of taxes — if you ever found a use for any of those rights. But bribery is now protected Free Speech for our new corporate citizens — that have protected rights, but no balancing duties or responsibilities by which to earn those rights, and that serve no greater purpose than to shield their members from legal and financial liabilities.

And then you broke the game, too.

You know it. Look out your windows. Find binoculars, if you have to, to see what’s going on on the sidewalks below you. Look.

Listen to your own body right now. Feel that sick lump in the pit of your stomach that tells you, beyond the shadow of a doubt, that you have done something bad, something for which there is no repair and no forgiveness. Outside your window, however many stories down, your victims gather, those that have the strength, not belly-up and submissive but injured and angry and preparing to balance accounts. The game suddenly means nothing, for you or any of the other remaining players, because the real challenge now is going to be surviving the next couple of years with a hold on any assets at all. Possession is nine-tenths of the law, they say, and the bulk of what you possess now are numbers in a computer somewhere. Same as anyone else. Numbers, as abstracts, have no weight. No intrinsic value. You’ve been using those numbers — numbers that mean groceries and medicine and clothes and transportation and housing to other people — as just a score in your private game.

That lump in the pit of your stomach — that’s the start of guilt, and of fear, and, in health industry parlance, that lump is inoperable. You’ll deal with that nauseating lump in your own way, each of you, but it will follow the same path for all of you: denial, then anger, then bargaining, then that inevitable sickening downward slide….

You’ve broken the game for all of you — and somehow you’ll find that to be worse than breaking the hopes and dreams and lives of millions. And that’s why I hate you — and why I’ll cheer when you succumb to that growing, pustulent, inoperable lump.

If that seems to lack compassion, so be it. I believe it’s fair, all things considered — especially considering the singular lack of compassion you have shown in wrecking the American Dream upon which you yourselves have thrived — and for the numerous deaths you have caused from depression and suicide from loss of hope, from induced poverty and hunger, from medicine and health care procedures that could no longer be afforded, from increased violence that occurs naturally when privation is rampant, from cutbacks in safety and environmental standards or from complete disregard of those standards as people who actually work continued desperately to make their operations at least break even or even yield you profits. These deaths are murder, and unless you try to claim horrendous negligent ignorance, premeditated murder.

You will be held accountable.

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Just now submitted to be emailed directly to Lloyd C. Blankfein, Chairman and CEO of Goldman Sachs, via http://www.occupytheboardroom.org . Go visit and find your own penpal!