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Capitalism is Back, Baby! Wall Street Bankers Rejoice: "We Can Say 'Retard' and 'Pussy' Without Fear of Getting Canceled."

You shouldn't need movies like Wolf of Wall Street or Wall Street:

Giphy Images.

… or any piece of Wall Street-adjacent fiction to tell you what you already know. The people who work at the epicenter of our nation's financial markets are a breed apart. And the environment they work in is unlike any in all the world. You can't even compare it to a jungle, because that would be to overstate how dangerous, savage and predatory your typical jungle is. 

And so it seems that the ecosystem of what has often been referred to as Late Stage Capitalism has been tough on even the most apex predators in that biosphere. Like in every other field of endeavor, they've had to bend to the will of the societal norms. To dial back the toxic atmosphere of the workplace. Play nice with others. Watch their language. In short, the times we've been living in have forced The Wolfs of Wall Street to become Golden-doodle puppies. 

That is, until now. According to this report, the big cultural pendulum went as far as it could, and now it's swinging back to the norm. The good times are back. You can say whatever you want to say around the office and the trading floor once more. They're ready to Make Wall Street Great Again. And some of the most powerful, influential CEOs in the world are behind it:

Source -  Last week Amazon announced plans to release a “behind the scenes” documentary about Melania Trump, produced by the incoming US first lady herself. The tech giant reportedly paid $40mn for the exclusive deal just weeks after it donated $1mn to her husband Donald Trump’s inauguration committee and committed to livestreaming the ceremony on its Prime service. …

Bezos’s rush to cosy up to the Trumps has been matched by corporate executives across America, as tech billionaires, financiers and the leaders of some of the US’s best-known consumer groups hurry to adjust to a more conservative zeitgeist. …

Companies are scrapping diversity, equity and inclusion departments, cutting their support for racial diversity charities, and dropping out of climate change groups. They are also scrubbing anything that could be perceived as “woke” from public statements, corporate documents and advertising. …

Last week, social media group Meta exemplified all the developments at once. It dropped its content moderation policies, added longtime Trump friend and Ultimate Fighting Championship chief executive Dana White to its board, shifted its chief diversity officer to a new role, and dropped its goals to boost racial and gender diversity among its managers and suppliers. 

Founder Mark Zuckerberg later joined a podcast hosted by Joe Rogan, who backed Trump in the election, and lamented the rise of “culturally neutered” companies. “I think having a culture that celebrates the aggression a bit more has its own merits that are really positive,” Zuckerberg said. …

Apple’s Tim Cook, Google’s Sundar Pichai and OpenAI’s Sam Altman all joined Meta’s Zuckerberg and Amazon’s Bezos in pledging $1mn to Trump’s inauguration fund. …

 Even the way people on Wall Street talk and interact is changing. Bankers and financiers say Trump’s victory has emboldened those who chafed at “woke doctrine” and felt they had to self-censor or change their language to avoid offending younger colleagues, women, minorities or disabled people. 

“I feel liberated,” said a top banker. “We can say ‘retard’ and ‘pussy’ without the fear of getting cancelled . . . it’s a new dawn.”

"A new dawn." Well if being able to say "pussy" and "retard" at work without fear of retribution isn't a sign that happy days are hear again for the finance crowd, I don't know what is. In order to have Free Markets, you've got to have Free Speech, I suppose. I mean, how were you supposed to handle it before when someone was doing something retarded or acting like a pussy? Open the Mirriam-Webster app and look for a proper word in the thesaurus? One that wouldn't get you fired? It's got to be hard enough to make your margin calls or figure out which stocks to sell short so you can make a pile without having to use your "polite company" words all the time. Now these guys are free once again to let the sailor talk fly so they can focus on the much more important task of growing my 401K.

This has got to be Karl Marx' worst nightmare. The people who own the means of production exploiting the labor of the working class as always. But also free to call the lumpen proletariat nasty names like it's pre-Bolshevik Russia all over again. Worse still, the plutocrats are coming together to bend the knee to a Manhattan real estate tycoon they were united in opposing about 10 minutes ago. A guy, ironically enough, who made the most infamous use of the word "pussy" in the history of the country, just with a different definition of the term. 

For the rest of us, we'll see how this goes. My guess is our democracy will survive. In fact, the harder the Word Police work to enforce the Language Laws they themselves write without giving the rest of us a vote, the more people just want to use those words. In the late '80s, Congress actually held hearings on swear words in music. That resulted in warning labels on CD cases. And a generation later, we've only gotten more swear words.

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To use the example of the two words that anonymous banker is all excited about, has their been a more quoted comedy scene in the last 20 years than this?

And this video has 542 million views with 9.1 million likes:

Yet in spite of them, the republic has not fallen. 

Besides, when analysts at DEI firms are running around using much worse words than these:

… I don't think what a bunch of investors call each other around the office is our biggest problem. We'll be fine. You do you, Wall Street.