CON GAMES: MLB, Wall Street On Steroids
June 18th, 2009 at 05:44pm Michael Conniff 2
Nothing beats the idea of “the level playing field” when it comes to boneheaded American mythology. The analogy no doubt emanates from the national past-time yet is meant to resonate in every America cranny, including any and all branches of government. The idea that the same rules—and the same opportunities—apply to everyone could be stamped on the Statue of Liberty’s crown.
Pity the fool.
The news that Sammy Sosa—late of the Chicago Cubs and lesser Major League Baseball (MLB) nines—applied performance-enhancing drugs during his career was about as shocking as the word echoing across the canyons of finance that implied Wall Streeters are greedy to the point of gluttony, with the law little more than a nuisance.
Ain’t that America? In baseball and high finance, our citizens are more than welcome to game the system as long as nobody finds out
How can that be? Greed is no shocker, but the gross level of unjust compensation—and the willful overleveraging by financial lifeforms—is so far over the top not even Jim Cramer can believe it really happened. Given a chance, most of us expect the voracious denizens of Wall Street will cheat in the darkness of light and the brightness of day—until they get caught with their digits in the till.
Nobody says: “Say it ain’t so, Jimmy Cayne” when they get a look-see into what happened on his watch at Bear Stearns. Read “House of Cards” by William Cohan if you don’t believe me.
Baseball is another story that sings the body egregious. Cheating was and is a way of life in the grand old game—won’t you come home, Gaylord Perry—and everybody knew it, and nobody did a damn thing about it until it was way late in the game, say the bottom of the ninth with the winning run on third. Thanks to steroids and human growth hormone, the Hall of Fame induction ceremonies for the next ten years are going to be as pure as the driven slush.
Nobody well ever ask A-Rod to say it ain’t so.
You can blame money for both situations—the stakes simply too high for humans to resist temptation—but there’s something more basic at work on the level playing field. The cheating in baseball and Wall Street is who we really are as a nation and leaves us many miles from the Elysian Field of equality.
1 Comment Add your own
1. Edward Troy | June 19th, 2009 at 8:29 am
I think you and I of that generation and a half grew up at a time when cheating was considered ethically and morally despicable. Spitballs and test copying were from what I remember, very rare. I never cheated on a test or in life. I truly think that when the "We Generation's" values we changed into the "Me Generation's" values, greed, lying and cheating became the expected norm. There were so many "Pillars of Society" indulging in greed, lying, and cheating, those behaviors were ignored.
As someone who is not wealthy, I do wonder where I would be financially, if I had done what those types did. Smart, honest work has not paid off. Don't get me wrong, we have a great life. I endure too many morons that got away with finding some angle that was not prosecuted, and yet they blabber on and on about work, while sucking down paychecks that have siphoned the vitality of this country.
Too much money rewarding substandard intelligence and ability. 20 home runs in a month; Roberto Clemente would not have been ashamed getting that in a year.
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