"What's intriguing about "Wall Street" - what may cause the most discussion in the weeks to come - is that the movie's real target isn't Wall Street criminals who break the law. Stone's target is the value system that places profits and wealth and the Deal above any other consideration. His film is an attack on an atmosphere of financial competitiveness so ferocious that ethics are simply irrelevant, and the laws are sort of like the referee in pro wrestling - part of the show. "
...Roger Ebert, Review of Wall Street

Gordon Gekko : "The richest one percent of this country owns half our country's wealth, five trillion dollars. One third of that comes from hard work, two thirds comes from inheritance, interest on interest accumulating to widows and idiot sons and what I do, stock and real estate speculation. It's bullshit. You got ninety percent of the American public out there with little or no net worth. I create nothing. I own."

Gordon Gekko : "The point is ladies and gentlemen that greed, for lack of a better word, is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all of it's forms - greed for life, for money, knowledge - has marked the upward surge of mankind and greed - you mark my words - will not only save Teldar Paper but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you. "

1. Food First: Adjusting America
   
   
2. Kevin Phillips,"Graph of Growing Economic Inequality"
   
   
3. "A Rising Economy that Lifts only Yachts
   : Great Graphs of Increasing Income Inquality
   
   
4. "How Unequal are We Anyway?"
   
   
5. U.S. Inquality Gap Widest since 1929 (in-class)
   
   
6. Two Decades of Extraordinary Gains for
   Affluent Americans (in-class)
   
   
7. Most Companies Paid No Taxes during the Boom
   
   
8. The Corporate Scandal Sheet
   
   
9. The Tech Bubble Burst: 2002
   
   
10. U.S. National Debt Clock
    
    
11. U.S. NATIONAL DEBT CLOCK FAQ
    
    
12. U.S. National Debt: 1940-2005 graph (in-class)
    
    
13. Bush's 10 Trillion Borrowing Binge
    
    
14. U.S. Could be Going Bankrupt
    
    
15. Bello, The Third Worldization of America
    
    
16. Forbes: The World's Billionaires
    
    
17. The Forbes 2008 Billionaire List
    
    
18. The Short, Happy Life of the Yuppie
    
    
19. Palmer on the 1980s Yuppie
    
    
20. Palmer on Gekko's Greed Speech
    
    
21. The Yuppie's dilemma: Economic Insecurity
    and the Survival of the Fittest
    
    

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Bello, The 'Third Worldization' of America

The double squeeze by corporate America and Republican Washington, in fact, forced Americans to give back quite a bit. The 1980s ended with the top 20 per cent of the population having the largest share of total income, while the bottom 60 per cent had the lowest share of total income ever recorded. Indeed, within the top 20 per cent, the gains of the Reagan-Bush period were concentrated in the top one percent, whose income grew by 63 per cent between 1980 and 1989, capturing over 53 per cent of the total income growth among all families . Meanwhile, the bottom 60 percent of families actually experienced a decline in income.  (Bello, 95)

The trends revealed a middle class that was losing ground. Median family incomes for 1990 and 1991 dropped to their levels of the late 1970s when adjusted for taxes and inflation.36 ( Bello, 95)

Indeed, structural adjustment Republican-style was beginning to give the U.S. a Third World appearance: rising poverty, widespread homelessness, greater inequality, and social polarization. (Bello, 97)

For the most part, US corporations are meeting the competitive challenge of the 1990s by continuing the strategy of the 1980s: throwing off workers at home and hiring cheap labor abroad. (Bello, 103)

The 1980s, then, saw a process of corporate-driven global adjustment, which encompassed the US economy. Ideologically trumpeting the free market but in practice advancing the interest of corporate monopolies, the Reagan and Bush administrations presided over the dismantling of the New Deal state, the depression of living standards, and the destruction of workers' protections.( Bello, 104)

Structural adjustment, liberalization, privtalization, deregulation--these were the key thrusts of corporate America's effort to create a global playing field whose rules would favor its version of capitalism and hobble
the opposition. (Bello, 104)

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Hertzberg, The Short, Happy Life of the Yuppie

"To all appearances, yuppiedom seems to be still thriving. But the yuptowns of our coastal cities, where one is seldom more than a few blocks from a designer ice-cream outlet or a branch of Banana Republic, have been overbuilt by speculators gripped by the delusion that trend lines never change direction. The gleaming, empty towers of yuppiedom betoken not prosperity but imminent collapse. "

"Political intimations: yuppiedom is essentially a
phenomenon of the Ronald Reagan era, inextricably tied to the values, follies, and peculiar conditions thereof. The word yuppie shot from obscurity to ubiquity during the 1984 presidential campaign and became associated with the two politicians who squeezed Walter Mondale 's head like the tongs in an Excedrin commercial, Gary Hart and Reagan himself."

"Everybody agreed from the start that a yuppie had to be a baby boomer, one of the seventy million Americans born between 1946 and 1964. Beyond that, the category was, and is, played like an accordion. If yuppies are people who make $40,000 or more, live in cities, and work in professional or managerial jobs (the high end of Newsweek's several definitions), then there are only about a million and a half of them. If they are just baby boomers who went to college, live in metropolitan areas, and work in offices (the low end), there are more than twenty million."

"Yuppie promptly went into a moral free fall that continued long after Reagan was re-elected. In a Roper Poll taken in 1985, which found that 60 percent of adult Americans knew roughly what yuppies were (an impressive total, considering, for example, that only 34 percent know who is Secretary of State), six times as many people thought yuppies were "overly concerned with themselves" as thought they were "involved in working for the betterment of poor people." When a half-dozen young go-go Wall Street investment bankers—prototypical yuppie heroes—were indicted for insider trading in the wake of the Ivan Boesky scandal, yuppiedom's descent into moral squalor was complete in all eyes but its own. That was accomplished by the crash, which brought yuppies face to face with something worse (in their eyes) than dishonor: failure."

"Hippies thought property was theft; yuppies think it's an investment. Hippies were interested in karma; yuppies prefer cars. Hippies liked mantras; yuppies like manna. Still, yuppiedom carried over from hippiedom an appreciation for things deemed "natural," an emphasis on personal freedom, and the self­ absorption of that part of the counterculture known as the human­potential movement."

"In the preppy variant of snobbery, material objects —the clothes, the cars—were implicitly viewed as the outward signs of an innate superiority. In the yuppie dispensation, status was conferred by the objects themselves. One no longer had to he part of a class to acquire artifacts of that class. This was a logical result of the commercialization of bohemia and the reduction of "good taste" to a series of tidy, standardized formulas pioneered by New York magazine and eagerly picked up by the whole of the upscale press. Status became a commodity; sensibility became something that could be ordered out of a catalog. In the final nightmare. the Beatles "Revolution" was sold to be used as a jingle in an athletic shoe advertisement, and the Byrds ' version of Pete Seeger ' s ` Turn, Turn, Turn, " was auctioned off for similar humiliation at the hands of a newsmagazine."

"The premise of most of what has been said, written, filmed, and broadcast about yuppies goes like this: The Yuppie is emblematic of his time and generation. He is a synecdoche—the part that stands for the whole. In a time of prosperity, boundless opportunity, soaring hope, et cetera, he is the vanguard, the leading edge. He is like everybody else, only more so. We're all doing well; he's just doing a little bit better. He is simply a sharper, more dramatic instance of a trend that is general throughout the society. Therefore he is a fitting symbol of his age."

"During the decade between 1973 and 1984—the decade that ended by spitting out the word yuppie—the median American family saw its income drop from $28,200 to $26,433 (measured in 1984 dollars, as are all these examples). At the same time, the proportion of Americans classified as poor grew by nearly a third.

But who cares? The poor and the average are species yuppies scorn. What about our heroes? Well, the very rich got very much richer, but even people in yuppie income brackets had their problems. In 1973, families in what economists call the highest "quintile"—that is, the top fifth—were earning a mean average income of $68,278. In 1984 they were making less—$66,607, to be exact. That's nothing to hold a telethon over, of course, especially when the income of the poorest quintile was dropping at the same time from $9,136 to $7,297. But it 's not the bonanza suggested by all the fuss about yuppies, either. It's stagnation."

"But if upwardly mobile means you live better than your parents did and you're sure your children in turn will live better than you—the American Dream is another name for this —then no. The vast majority of those tagged yuppies by the media have been heading down, down, down for more than a decade, and the worst is yet to come. The very word yuppie is a taunt, a lie, a fraud: insult added to injury."

"Shout out: Who killed the Yuppie? The answer is, It was you and I. We turned him into an effigy, and then we hanged him. He became the collective projection of a moral anxiety. We loaded onto him everything we hated about the times we had been living through—everything we hated about what we suspected we ourselves might have become. We made the Yuppie the effigy of selfishness and self-absorption, of the breakdown of social solidarity, of rampant careerism and obsessive ambition, of the unwholesome love of money, of the delusion that social problems have individual solutions, of callousness and contempt toward "losers," of the empty ideology of winnerism and the uncritical worship of "success." Then we strung the little bastard up."

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Palmer on the 1980s Yuppie

.... [T]he text of urban yuppie materialism also exhibited a neo-conservative style fostered by Reaganomics. The yuppie drives to make large amounts of money quickly, to succeed in a ruthless competitive world, to acquire the most expensive material goods, to spend rather than save, to party extremely hard as a reward for working extremely hard, to sacrifice (especially human relationships) for one's job, mirrored the Reagan administration's deficit spending policies and hi-tech defense system acquisitions. Eighties yuppies saw their ruthless competitive work ethic and their consumptive materialism as hedges and buffers against an increasingly unstable terrorist- and nuclear- and deficit-threatened world. Yuppie­ ness became a form of protective coloration against the economic and status threats from ethnic minorities and the poor, from a questionable national economy, from an increasingly competitive world. Yuppies saw themselves as a uniformed cavalry circling the wagons around what was left of the American dream, that dream's material icons, the job with a chance for betterment, the house....,the car, the status goods, perhaps even a controlled and economically justified family. The films of the eighties were acutely aware not only of the stereotypes and accoutrements of the yuppie lifestyle but also of the insecurity of the dying American dream."

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Palmer on Gekko's Greed Speech

Wall Street (1987) is the ultimate film text of the workplace battlefield. It inventories the ammunition that loads up the yuppie dream, tracks the quick and easy money that fires that dream off. In Wall Street, Gordon Gekko (Michael Douglas), microphone in hand and working the room like a rock star, addresses a corporate stockholders' meeting and delivers the Gettysburg Address of the yuppie philosophy:

Well, ladies and gentlemen, we're not here to indulge in fantasy, but in political and economic reality. America. America has become a second rate power. Its trade deficit and its fiscal deficit are at nightmare proportions. . . . Today, management has no stake in the company. . . . You own the company and you are being royally screwed over. . . . Well in my hook you either do it right or you get eliminated. In the last seven deals that I have been involved with, there were 2.5 million stockholders who have made a pre-tax profit of 12 billion dollars. [applause] Thank you. I am not a destroyer of companies; I am a liberator of them. The point is, ladies and gentlemen, that greed, for lack of a better word, greed is good. Greed is right. Greed works. Greed clarifies, cuts through and captures the essence of the evolutionary spirit. Greed, in all its forms, greed for life, for money, for love, for knowledge, has marked the upward surge of mankind and, greed, you mark my words, will not only save Teldar Paper, but that other malfunctioning corporation called the USA. Thank you very much.

Gekko's speech, his preposterous paean to greed, rings with a kind of evangelistic fervor. It is delivered in a setting similar to the UBS stockholders' meeting in Network presided over by the snakelike Frank Hackett (Robert Duvall) and the charismatic corporate evangelist Diana Christiansen (Faye Dunaway). In his address, Gekko offers an absolution to all the yuppies in the audience who are suffering guilt over their materialism. Though addressing the shareholders of Teldar Paper, a corporation he is raiding, Gekko begins his Sermon on the Mount by defining how the American dream has turned into a nightmare due to bad management. For Gordon Gekko, America is no longer an idea, it is merely another large corporation being mismanaged by bureaucrats and suffering from cash flow problems. Gekko uses the nation as a macrocosmic metaphor for Teldar and offers his panacea for the problems of both troubled corporations, greed. Greed, one of the Seven Deadly Sins, takes on moral stature (it is "good" and "right"), pragmatic efficiency (it "works"), rhetorical power (it "clarifies" and "cuts through and captures the essence"), and progressive force ("it marks the upward surge of mankind"). Greed, literally, becomes a savior for both Teldar Paper and for the USA, and Gekko's speech becomes a fervent absolution of the yuppie angst that clouds the hardhearted decision making of corporate raiding. "