Are Plutocrats Driving Americans Towards Our Own Bastille Day?

July 14 has always been a special day for me-- not just because it's the day my parents decided to get married (Happy Anniversary Mom and Dad!)-- but because it is also the day French working people struck the blow against plutocracy that was heard round the world-- and still reverberates today... however faintly. Yes, today is Bastille Day, La Fête Nationale. Happy 223rd Anniversary, France! I'm sure the parade-- since 1880, Europe's biggest annual military parade-- along the Avenue des Champs-Élysées today will be even more wonderful today than usual, now that the President of the Republic is a representative of the working class again. Here in America the dregs of society (whether self-entitled sociopaths and parasites in the Hamptons or toothless rednecks in Mississippi) are determined to elect someone who would have been guillotined in France soon after Bastille Day.

I hope you read the post Thursday, Stinking Rich-- An Existential Danger For American Democracy, which looked at the reasons for the erosion of trust between the American people and our political and business elites. It's mostly about the benjamins. But this was something I meant to include that I overlooked, a short but crucial article in Fortune that helps define why so many people distrust Romney and other financial wheeler-dealers so much-- Financial Executives Confess: Sure, We Lie and Cheat.

You might not expect executives of top financial businesses to admit outright that they’re crooks, but that’s pretty much what they did in responding to a new survey released today by the whistleblower law firm Labaton Sucharow. The firm did online interviews with 500 “senior individuals within the financial sector,” including fund managers, bankers, and asset managers, half of them in the U.S. and half in the U.K. No fewer than 24% of them admitted that they “believed that the rules may have to be broken in order to be successful,” that is, that they “have to engage in unethical or illegal activity.” Only 41% “reported that staff within their own organization had ‘definitely not’ engaged in unethical or illegal conduct.” Some 39% found it likely that their competitors had engaged in illegal or unethical activity.

Another eye-opening finding:

16% of total respondents were at least fairly likely to engage in insider trading if they could get away with it. Perhaps more troubling, only 55% of all respondents could say definitively that they would not engage in insider trading if they could make $10 million with no risk of getting arrested.

So more than half of all these financial executives can admit to being tempted by insider trading. Isn’t there any deterrence? Not according to these same executives. Only 30% feel that the Securities and Exchange Commission, or in England the Serious Fraud Office, “effectively deters, investigates and prosecutes securities violations.” Likewise only 29% believe that FINRA and the FSA, two more American regulators, do so.

Furthermore, they are encouraged to cheat: 30% of these executives say they feel pressured by their compensation or bonus plans to compromise ethical standards and break the law.

The survey goes on to find that 94% of executives would like to be whistleblowers under the terms of the SEC’s whistleblower program, but only 44% of them know about the program. That finding, of course, serves the interest of the law firm behind the survey, which is all about representing SEC whistleblowers.

If 24% of financial executives not only think rules must be broken but have the compunction to admit it, how many more feel that way but don’t care to admit as much in a survey? Mightn’t that be a lot more? It all suggests to me that Greg Smith, in his withering attack on Goldman Sachs last March, wasn’t exactly making it up. And that no one should be too surprised by the recent chargesof manipulation of the LIBOR rate by executives at Barclays bank. Wall Street is not altogether a pretty place these days.

Is that the kind of ruthless garbage you want in the White House, despite the patina of dancing horses, fancy jet skis and lovely car elevators? And because this ad is only running in Colorado, Florida, Iowa, North Carolina, New Hampshire, Nevada, Ohio, Pennsylvania and Virginia, I thought you might want to see it too. The man has such a lovely singing voice




UPDATE: Today Would Also Have Been Woody Guthrie's 100th Birthday

Happy Birthday Woody-- and thanks for all you've given our country. Neil Young just covered his most iconic anti-fascist song This Land Is Our Land. And today the Grammy Museum and Brooklyn College announced that they'll be hosting a Woody Guthrie Centennial Celebration on September 22 with a tribute concert featuring Arlo Guthrie, Steve Earle, Billy Bragg, Judy Collins, Tony Trischka, The Klezmatics and others at the college’s Whitman Theater. More information on the concert and conference right here. Think for a second about what Woody Guthrie gave to this country... and what Mitt Romney gave took. What a contrast! Poor Oklahoma...