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One-Percent Jokes and Plutocrats in Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/i-crashed-a-wall-street-secret-society.html

I’d heard whisperings about the existence of Kappa Beta Phi, whose members included both incredibly successful financiers (New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead, hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones) and incredibly unsuccessful ones (Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne, former New Jersey governor and MF Global flameout Jon Corzine). It was a secret fraternity, founded at the beginning of the Great Depression, that functioned as a sort of one-percenter’s Friars Club. Each year, the group’s dinner features comedy skits, musical acts in drag, and off-color jokes, and its group’s privacy mantra is “What happens at the St. Regis stays at the St. Regis.” For eight decades, it worked. No outsider in living memory had witnessed the entire proceedings firsthand.

As I walked through the streets of midtown in my ill-fitting tuxedo, I thought about the implications of what I’d just seen.

The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality. No self-aware and socially conscious Wall Street executive would have agreed to be part of a group whose tacit mission is to make light of the financial sector’s foibles. Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis.

The second thing I realized was that Kappa Beta Phi was, in large part, a fear-based organization. Here were executives who had strong ideas about politics, society, and the work of their colleagues, but who would never have the courage to voice those opinions in a public setting. Their cowardice had reduced them to sniping at their perceived enemies in the form of satirical songs and sketches, among only those people who had been handpicked to share their view of the world. And the idea of a reporter making those views public had caused them to throw a mass temper tantrum.

The last thought I had, and the saddest, was that many of these self-righteous Kappa Beta Phi members had surely been first-year bankers once. And in the 20, 30, or 40 years since, something fundamental about them had changed. Their pursuit of money and power had removed them from the larger world to the sad extent that, now, in the primes of their careers, the only people with whom they could be truly themselves were a handful of other prominent financiers.

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Intéressant, mais la conclusion de l'article est beaucoup trop facile, comme si l'auteur savait déjà ce qu'il écrirait avant même d'y aller. C'est pas parce que des gens font de l'humour bas de gamme à un gala professionnel qu'on peut tirer bien des choses sur leur psychologie. On a pas mal tous déjà eu à supporter avec le sourire des sketchs médiocres à des spectacles d'école ou des langues qui se délient quand on se retrouve à table avec des collègues.

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Mais quand on parle de centaines de personnes et uniquement de professionnels, ce n'est pas de l'intimité. Normal qu'ils fassent des blagues sur la finance et qu'ils n'y disent pas qu'elle est mauvaise, si c'était une réunion de managers de fast food on s'attendrait pas à ce qu'ils racontent que leur bouffe est néfaste pour la santé.

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