Socialism in America

By: Bernard Chazelle

Slithering through the wetlands of freedom, the viperine snake of socialism has breached the firewall of civilization and distilled its poison upon the most innocent, vulnerable members of our society.

I am talking, of course, about investment bankers. While Main Street lives the indolent dolce vita of silky-soft capitalism, the harsh, bleak dystopia of socialism is the daily reality in the parched canyons of Wall Street. Its latest victims? Charles Prince and Stan O'Neal.

These sweatshop laborers used to toil away in the trenches, Chuck at Citigroup and Stan at Merrill Lynch. Through grit and hard work, our two unsung CEOs (which, unsurprisingly, rhymes with "unsung heroes") managed to reduce the combined worth of their companies by 20 billion dollars!

Now don't flatter yourself: are you so sure even you could lose that much money if given a chance? In socialist tyrannies, sadly, no good deed goes unpunished. And in lieu of a heartfelt thank-you from wiped out investors and laid off employees, Chuck and Stan had to take it on the chin: 360 million dollars in severance, right there on the chin!

Some farewell present, I hear you say. But how much is 360,000,000 dollars? "A lot" doesn't quite cut it. The socialist enemy is ruthless and you must be on top of your game to fight it, Comrade. So let me help.

A dollar bill is 6 1/8" long. If you made a roll of toilet paper out of 360 million dollar bills (and lots of scotch tape), you could start in Los Angeles and pull on that roll all the way to Wall Street and then back to LA, covering the road with toilet paper as you go. Then you could repeat this round-trip excursion 6 more times, and you would still be left with 31 million inches of dollar-bill toilet paper: enough to last you and your family until the year 2059 (assuming you stay away from Earthbound Farm pre-washed spinach).

And guess what? You'd still be left with $9.99 + tax: enough to purchase a copy of the "Wall Street Communist Manifesto," the one-page bible of investment banking. It's only one-page long and that page is only one-line long. It reads: "The key to success in banking is to privatize all the profits and socialize all the losses." Or, as rappers on the Street like to put it,

Socialism is for us bankers,
Capitalism is for you suckers.
So, Suck. On. This.

Written by Bernard Chazelle