“Who are those guys?”

by David Benjamin

 

“Sundance Kid: I can’t swim!

“Butch Cassidy: Are you crazy? The fall will probably kill ya.”

— William Goldman 

 

MADISON, Wis.—Once, many moons ago, while researching a book about inventions, I toured a carpet factory in South Carolina. The company was a giant in its industry, with hundreds of non-union employees and millions in revenue. Yet, outside of its community and its particular industry, the company had no “public profile.” Very few people had ever heard of the outfit, nor were the names of its obscenely rich proprietors known to the vast majority of Americans who were walking, lounging, spilling food and cleaning up cat-pee on the company’s rugs.

This is because this outfit was privately held. It had never sold shares of its ownership on a stock market and so, the proprietors had no reason to promote themselves or expose their fiscal underwear to anyone but family, friends and a select cadre of regulators. 

This week, Donald J. Trump departed the clandestine community of the privately held and began hawking stock in his new media company, attracting hordes of his cultists to buy their own personal piece of the Donald and providing him with billions of what one analyst described as “Monopoly money.”

Trump had long since known that his McDuck mystique relied on the opacity inherent in the fact that his eponymous corporation and its galaxy of LLCs, shell companies, golf clubs, hotels and grifts were family affairs, impenetrable to investigators, analysts, journalists and snoops like me. A posse of prosecutors hot on his trail has rendered Trump so desperate for cash that he succumbed the lure of the IPO, spiraling down into a realm of irrational exuberance, cataclysmic caprice, paranoid panic, extraordinary delusion and the madness of crowds.  

The Former Guy is about to learn first-hand that deep within the greatest economic system ever devised, there creeps an army of parasite that feed on its entrails. Every day, almost complacently, our captains of capitalism whimper homage this dark force. Every fault in the nation’s financial life and in the global market traces back to their influence. They are the source of every burst bubble, every bankruptcy and bank failure, every default and foreclosure, every Black Weekday, market plunge, recession, depression and funk. 

We know they are among us and within us, yet we cannot see them, much less stop them. They are our Big Brother, our Sugar Daddy, and the crazy aunt locked in the attic. They are a deadly silent partner to our every enterprise, and the scapegoat to our every flop. Seeming to be everywhere, they are nowhere.

Alone, each one is puny and harmless, like a grasshopper nibbling an alfalfa leaf. Singly, they are neighbors, bosses, employees and fellow workers. But in the countless swarms that drive and stifle the economy, they are locusts, capable of blotting out the sun, laying waste the land and turning the very Earth into a barren skull devoid of solace.

Whenever they are mentioned, with fearful reverence by the ayatollahs of IBM, Microsoft, Ford, AT&T, I think of that exhausting chase in Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid. Saddle-sore and bone-weary, Butch turns and sees, again, a dusty column following—as it has done for days on end without rest or relief—a life-sucking string of pursuers, fifty horsemen direct from the Apocalypse.

Paul Newman says: ”Who are those guys?”

In the movie, they were Pinkerton thugs. In our economy, they are far more sinister and infinitely more numerous. We call them “shareholders.”

But who are they? What do they want from us? Why won’t they leave us alone?

Shareholders are the source of that epitaph that seems to spring, every three months, from some boardroom or another. “It is with a deep sense of loss that we at Pontius Pilate, Inc., announce today the downsizing of another 50,000 identifiable human beings with names, faces and families … We also must close our offices in … We’ve been forced to halt all manufacturing … also regret, as a matter of fiscal prudence … revocation of all health, pension, severance, re-training, suicide hotline and burial benefits … 

It goes on. “… However, the responsibility we feel toward our luckless ex-employees pales in comparison to the duty we owe our shareholders, the faceless fiends who hold us hostage to their anonymous caprice, who feel no corresponding duty to anyone, who threaten every minute to forsake us—millions lost in the blink of an eye—at the drop of a rumor or the eruption of a cold sore on Jerome Powell’s upper lip. We must obey our shareholders, for they make possible for us—the executive elite—our corner offices, our seven-figure bonuses, our leather-lined limos, our offshore nest eggs, our wine, our women, our platinum parachutes … ”

What is a shareholder? Defined by what he does with his money, he’s a gambler—but a mutant of the species with an air of godly retribution. When normal gamblers lose, they don’t cry for blood sacrifice. They don’t demand that the Golden Nugget start firing its dealers and cocktail waitresses. They don’t insist that Caesar’s Palace shutter its restaurants, empty its hotel rooms, dismiss its chefs, fire its maids and bid its whales adieu. They don’t expect the Bellagio to cancel its floor shows, silence its lounge singers, pension off its showgirls and make its magicians vanish. A night of mass losses in Vegas doesn’t imperil the careers of Wayne Newton, Rita Ridner, the Blue Man Group and Cirque de Soleil.

But the shareholder, gambling on oil shares, automakers and General Foods rather than on aces, queens, dice, the NFL and little bouncing balls, expects the whole world to lose when he loses. He belongs to an immense commune of fellow suckers, called a stock market, whose conviction is that the laws of probability don’t apply to them. 

But here’s the rub: Shareholders never appear at the stock market. They never show up anywhere—not even at shareholders’ meetings. Who are those guys?

They are a phantom, a highway mirage disappearing as fast as you approach. They can’t be reached, spoken to, reasoned with or even found. They’re as ruthless as they are ethereal. They bet gleefully on drought, famine and flood, asking only a half-hour’s warning between 9:30 and 4, New York time. Addicted to instant gratification, they see no worthwhile purpose in waiting for anything. They are opposed to any sort of job security. They recoil at labor (especially the organized kind), deplore pension plans, and disdain family values (except as an advertising hook). They oppose the minimum wage, day care, health coverage, sick days, holidays (including Christmas), higher education, lower education, public transportation, public works and peace on earth. Since Adam Smith’s time, shareholders have thrived on war, like a great vulture tearing at the corpses of the honored dead, probing their GI tract for capital gains.

We walk among them daily, passing them on the street, greeting them on elevators, rubbing elbows, touching them. They have no distinguishing marks, no scars or tattoos, no taste, color or odor, no gang insignia or school uniforms—not even flag pin or a club tie. Right now, thousands of them might be massing to invade my life, ravage my credit, wreck my career, empty my savings, foreclose on my home, repossess my car, hock my wedding ring and alienate my loved ones—all because the banana crop in Aruba was bored by weevils.

Maybe the question is not, after all, who they are.

Why are those guys?