In light of the existence of entrepreneurs like Elon Musk who use private business to better the world, I've wondered what it is about corporations in general that causes them to behave sociopathically. Why, if business can be progressive and beneficial, is it so often parasitic and predatory? Occupy Wall Street had hit on a pretty decent understanding of the causes of psychotic corporate behavior: The abstraction of business from concrete production and sale of products and services to an esoteric exercise in finance, with money being traded light-years away from anything resembling the operational decisions it enables or the people who benefit from them. In other words, a private entrepreneur who closely holds his own business can be good or bad, but they are a lot easier to hold accountable or reward with reputation than people with overlapping webs of financial stakes whose interests are advanced by proxies of proxies. Wall Street, for lack of a better term, is crowdsourced crime.
Now, I'm not claiming that stock trading in general is an inherently criminal enterprise - plenty of legitimate businesses with non-horrific ethical records are publicly traded. However, criminal enterprise - both white-collar and more traditional forms - is by far the overwhelming beneficiary of a system that allows people to make money without having any legal responsibility whatsoever for the process by which it's made.
If, for instance, I hand a gangster a million dollars to invest in an illegal enterprise, then I am guilty of a federal felony and may end up in prison for the rest of my life. But if I invest a million dollars in a hedge fund managed by the Russian mob to launder their drug money, I can't be prosecuted for that - and most of the time it wouldn't even be me doing the investing, but a broker. I know nothing about it, and have no obligation to know anything - I just pay and get paid: See No Evil, Speak No Evil, Hear No Evil...just give lots of money to Evil and make zero effort to know how it's being used. But even when they do know, there is no possibility of accountability - investors on the open market have no liability for the actions of corporations they own under any circumstances. They have no liability even when they directly elect the boards that hire the executives who make the decisions.
Mob laundering, terrorist financing, and foreign military conflicts are just the most extreme and starkest examples of the kind of activity that Wall Street enables, but it's designed to serve the entire spectrum of criminal enterprise as well as simply rewarding shady, irresponsible, and predatory business practices among otherwise legitimate companies. Because there is no accountability for the beneficiaries of criminal actions, such actions continue to be heavily promoted and ethical behavior punished. If individual employees directly involved in crime are punished, it's at most a trivial and temporary setback to the financiers, because there is always another corporate executive waiting for a chance to break the law and prey on the weak for a fatter bottom line.
Wall Street is basically Anonymous for rich people and fascists: A medium of collective action and individual imperviousness to legal consequences. The people whose fortunes depend on it are generally not industrialists or even really businessmen: To paraphrase Gordon Gekko, they add nothing, invent nothing, create nothing - their sole pursuit is the shuffling of money to create more money, and how that occurs is a matter of indifference to them even when proven to be heinously immoral. Even outright illegality is only a factor taken into consideration based on how likely indictment would be. Nothing is inherently off-limits. It wasn't off-limits for the financial sector of Switzerland to profit from the Holocaust, and Wall Street has certainly not proven itself the moral superior of its Central European counterparts.
The major difference between such historical examples and modern-day ones is that in the past, banking and finance merely enabled criminal government policy - now they are its principal authors, using ill-gotten gains to corrupt regulatory bodies, rig elections, buy media companies and spew propaganda, subvert the judicial system, and privatize public assets while nationalizing private losses on the part of the wealthy despite preventing government from doing the same for people who actually need help. Occupy was and to some extent still is a profound movement for having originally recognized that the problems our nation faces basically center on Wall Street.
It was a real epiphany, given that liberals, progressives, and leftists have often had trouble zeroing in on the root causes of problems rather than just opposing a menagerie of subordinate villains - the military-industrial complex, oil companies, the religious right, and so on. However, once you identify Wall Street as the root of the problem, then it's a lot easier to identify why - because it's the membrane boundary that prevents the holders of capital from the consequences of how that capital was made. It is literally, fundamentally a gargantuan money laundering apparatus backed by the US taxpayers and taxpayers of dozens of other countries as well. It is the gateway through which the public Treasury is privatized, and it is a one-way street: All the resources it contains are leveraged to riddle the tax code with loopholes so that as little money as possible ever moves in the opposite direction, and any politician who dares to suggest raising taxes on capital gains finds themselves targeted by an avalanche of money to their opponents.
But somehow it manages to be even worse than crowdsourced crime, because literally every corrosive social and political influence in this country and in the world seems to have its enabling financial nexus centered directly on Wall Street: From the rise of China's power to the worldwide evisceration of once-venerable social safety nets and the empowerment of religious fanatics as foot soldiers of plutocracy, every anti-democracy, anti-liberty, pro-authoritarian set of events that unfolds today seems to trace back to the same institution. It has its tentacles in every pie there is - including the pensions of working people who are caught in a Catch-22 between losing what they have slowly through the constant predations of their own employers or losing it quickly if they refuse to play the game.
Somehow we have managed to create an institution that acts like a magnet for every bad, destructive, corrupting impulse human beings are capable of and concentrates it into the most insidious economic toxin of all time. The people of this country and all others are basically farm animals to Wall Street - we are supported only to the extent needed to keep us obedient and productive, and whatever incentives they're not willing to supply with pay and benefits are augmented with the terroristic threat of losing health insurance they actively prevent us from having as a public right. Most people today have few or no opportunities to make a living without being employed by corporations, so they've come to see the parasitic system that feeds on them like dairy cows as necessary and unavoidable. The only two challenges to this status - labor unions and public-sector employment - are under perpetual, massive attack by Wall Street to reinforce this view and eliminate all possibility of escape from their control.
While there are individual businessmen who are outspokenly brazen in their contempt for humanity and love of what financialized corporatism does to it - e.g., the Koch brothers - it is simply impossible to identify any specific person or group of people whose prosecution or social discredit would be enough to drain the swamp that empowers Wall Street. That's part of what makes it such a robust and difficult enemy - it is a fluid abstraction consisting of the aggregate actions and interests of hundreds of millions of people worldwide, and it easily flows around obstacles placed in the way of individuals within it. In fact, now as a globalized phenomenon, it flows around even regulations and laws put in place by national governments. It is like H.P. Lovecraft's description of Nyarlathotep, the primordial "Crawling Chaos" of countless heads and limbs; the Hydra of Greek mythology; or the Leviathan of Judeo-Christian Scripture (and perhaps of television, as well).
Without issuing any specific regulatory or political prescription to deal with such a monster, we can say that the right strategic approach must be to counteract the immediate effect that causes all the subsequent destructive issues: The fact that money only flows one way. This should involve higher and more effective taxation of capital gains ultimately, but that doesn't have to be the whole story - we can come up with ideas for how to bleed Wall Street on a sustainable, private-sector basis that doesn't require pitched political battles the way that restoring tax decency would. The rise of credit unions is an encouraging step since they take money away from large banks, although as far as I'm aware nothing in law or regulation stops a credit union from being traded on a stock market.
Perhaps there should also be a greater social emphasis on personal ownership of a business rather than cashing out in an IPO. We once had such a value in this country, and reinvigorating it would put at least some degree of check on the power of Wall Street. Individual businessmen can be good or evil, but they are far more accountable as owner-operators of their closely-held companies than are executives and owners of corporatized, publicly-traded firms. But these are just a few notions off the top of my head - I'm sure more creative, more engaged people than I can come up with better ideas for how to turn the system into a two-way street and keep it so. That wouldn't stop it from being crowdsourced crime, but it would at least ensure that the money eventually gets back to the victims. We really need to reeingineer Wall Street from the outside so that it stops being a giant economic Slip 'n Slide into Hell.