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Occupy Wall Street (OWS) is the most important idea of my professional career. Thing is, I'm sitting on a plane to Boston, not on the sidewalk with a sign. If ever there was a time a movement needed a thought leader, this is it.
I do not represent any faction of OWS, nor do I fully understand what the protesters are thinking. This is my interpretation, my original thoughts, my hope to grow and prosper.
When I started my career on the mean streets of New York, nobody wanted to work on Wall Street. Like the early '80s, the mid-'90s were devoid of the wretched excess that draws large numbers of starry eyed students into the den of wolves. My beginning on the street was under the shadow of the dot-com boom. Who wanted to sell stock when you could make millions in Silicon Valley? It was just another cycle that came full circle a few years back just before 2008. "Bizarre" described my observation of the massive interest in students who wanted to work on Wall Street. Were they nuts? This was the hardest way to make easy money. I did it in my 20s, but it almost killed me, my marriage and my soul.
What went wrong? Capitalism and finance weren't always a team. Adam Smith and Karl Marx didn't need finance to create a modern framework of capitalism. Finance came along afterward, with the hope of enhancing the invisible hand that was sweeping the industrialized world. If we wanted to keep the! machine running faster and harder, the only stimulant that worked was finance.
This is what OWS needs to focus on! Wall Street and Main Street are supposed to be attached, but we lost our way. Somehow the past decade detached capitalism from Wall Street, leaving only finance to fuel it. Hopped up on goofballs is no way to go through life -- you burn out. Like a manic trader who one day couldn't get out of bed, Wall Street has a group of protestors at its bedside like an alarm clock. Look in the mirror. Did any of these young people protesting just recently desire the siren's song? Did we not as a society desire bigger homes with no money down? We must bring the war home and fight the enemy within.
Bring back capitalism, with finance as a modern construct that can help or hinder. Americans want to work and be entrepreneurs. This is why we are not Greece. The outrage on the streets needs to be focused on a return to traditional American values of capital and prosperity. Today we have the last gasp of what Marx called the tyranny of capital. Wall Street took and left the machine with less than what it started with. How can we achieve abundance if we do not give more value than what we take? Growth is not a fat bonus for creating a spread that extracts capital and leaves nothing behind. Bankers need to finance capitalism, not the carry trade. Protestors need to attack from within.
So, go get a job on Wall Street and build something, add value and leave it with more than what you extract. Better yet, start a business and harness the power of capitalism and show by example how finance should be used. This is only the beginning of a new America that can learn faster and change quicker than past generations. Maybe social media has created more value than it has taken.
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