Danny Schechter - ColdType

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David Russell who worked on Wall Street for 20 years says
the culture there rationalized pushing the limits and skirting
the law: “Wall Street hires extremely smart people, these are
people who have gone to the best Business Schools. These are
people who have been trained and over-trained. They have
been licensed and all this stuff. You can’t tell me after you’ve
learned how to digest a financial statement, like these guys
have, that you didn’t see something wrong with those books.
That’s bull. Absolute bull.”
Despite protestations, he says the people on the inside
knew what was happening but didn’t care as long as they got
big payouts: “They saw it but their attitude is, man, that’s
gonna hit me, let me see if I can get a couple of more of these
checks and then once I’m gone, the house of cards falls apart.
Who the hell cares?”
Russell believed that these bankers had been getting away
with this for so long, they started to forget it was illegal in the
first place: “These people knew they were putting out infected
stuff but because the system was rigged for such a long time
they got used to getting away [with it]. They were allowed to
be illegal for so long that they didn’t even know that they were
illegal until somebody called them on it.”
Clusterstock.com confirmed Russell’s point this way: “There
is a sick psychology of entitlement on Wall Street that was
created during the bubble years. Many simply cannot believe
that they do not deserve huge pay packages. Their brains have
not caught up with the idea that they are working in broken
institutions that would be unable to pay to keep the lights on
if not for the fact that Washington has given them billions of
taxpayer dollars.”
It seemed hard for Russell to talk about it because he had
benefited from the system and was once an admirer of Bernie
Madoff because he was considered a market leader. In the end
he was shocked: “I think that none of us, including myself who
worked on Wall Street for 20 years, I never ever expected, I