I usually have the seller on a written contract. Sometimes this is not possible. Sometimes a customer calls up and says, "What have you got in a forty-two-foot half-cabin cruiser." I"ll say, "I just got a listing over the phone." He"ll say, "Let"s go out and look at it." We"ll go out to the yacht and the owner has a key hidden somewhere. I"ve never met the man. So maybe by the end of the day I"ll have a deposit check and no contract to sell. I"ve been burned here, too. Buyer and seller get together . . .
There"s a wide variety of people who buy yachts. He could be a carpenter, could be a doctor, any average man on the street. I"ve sold yachts to every cla.s.s of workman. I"d say ninety-nine percent of our yachts are financed. The banks handle boat paper over a five-year period. But they want at least twenty-five percent down. It"s just like automobiles. Practically everyone you see has got a loan on it.
When I started in this business, right up through World War II, bankers were scared of anyone that was improvident enough to own a yacht and also need money. They felt like J. P. Morgan-if you had to question the cost of the yacht, you shouldn"t buy it. They thought a workingman had no right to buy it unless he could write a check for the full amount. But afterwards the banks solicited business. They have quite a bit of yacht paper now. There"s every price cla.s.s, there"s a yacht. Some yachts go up to a million dollars, and you can buy a small sailboat for a couple hundred.
These big ones are rare. There"s not too many people willing to splurge that kind of money on a yacht. When I first started out, the average wealthy man would buy a yacht, oh, seventy-five to one hundred, two hundred feet. There was a whole fleet of these yachts right on the Great Lakes. Some of them employed as high as sixteen men in a crew. After World War II and the tax situation, the 165-foot yachtsman owned a 52-foot yacht that could be run with one man instead of sixteen. Then they started putting yachts under corporations and charging them off. That kind of phased out when they were hounded by Internal Revenue.
The 1970 recession was so bad that it cost me over four thousand dollars. I had to go into my own savings to carry me through the year. The first thing they can do without is a yacht. People stopped buying yachts six months before the "70 crash. I guess they had inside information. I could tell it from the resistance to sales. You get along with a three-year-old automobile, you get along with a five-year-old yacht.
Oh, the yacht is a serious status symbol. A lot of the wealthier cla.s.s people live right smack against Lake Sh.o.r.e Drive in those high rises overlooking Belmont Harbor. It"s almost impossible to get a yacht in that harbor. They have a long waiting list. I"m sure those people sit in their apartments and say, "Oh yes, that"s my yacht over there." Some of the yachts aren"t even used, just kept as status symbols, pure and simple. They want to say, "I got a yacht."
They jump about five feet at a time, for status. First they"ll start with an outboard, which I know nothing about. They"ll come to me usually at thirty feet. They"ll sell the thirty-footers, and want a thirty-five. They"ll jump up five feet at a time until they get up to sixty or seventy feet. And that"s it. There wasn"t much jumping in "70, I"ll tell you that.
There"s two cla.s.ses of buyers. One who"s never had a yacht before, who you have to shepherd along. You baby-sit with him until you"re confident he"s well versed in the handling of the yacht. You can"t give him the key and walk away and have him get in trouble on the lake. I"m emotionally involved with the man, I"m responsible for him. There"s just purely selfish motives, too. Any bad publicity on the lake is bad publicity for yachting and bad publicity for the broker. I"ve got to see that he"s safe.
You get involved with people that are overnight experts in boat construction. At first I used to argue with "em. But now I just sit there and smile. You"re a dummy, you just don"t know anything. You just let them tell you. Doesn"t matter any more. I regret this work. If I had to do it over again, I wouldnt" do it. I"d be an engineer, a construction designer.
There"s some fine men in this field. I don"t think there have ever been used car dealers in the yacht business. The yachting fraternity is quite a gossipy clique. It doesn"t take too long to get around if a fella throws a lot of curves. If you establish a good reputation, which I hope I have, that gets around too.
Sometimes you feel like you"re appreciated and needed. Other times they make you feel like you"re a parasite. What burns me up is after you"ve worked real hard on selling the man"s yacht and showed it to a great number of people and you get ready to close the deal, he says, "I don"t think I owe you seven percent." "Why not?" "You made only one phone call and this fella bought it." They don"t know how many hours, how many months, how many days and years you sit there hoping something will happen. And the overhead goes on.
The frustration, the humiliation-but that"s in any business, isn"t it? Some of the people you trust the most want to chisel you the most. Your biggest danger is when you get to like a person. You become less businesslike than you should be. You don"t get him signed up. You think, Well, I just can"t ask the man. I"ve been a guest at his house, I"ve wined him and dined him and we"re on a first name social basis. But when you sit down at the table, you"re got a different man entirely. Two different people. You find this out too late. You"ve got a law suit on your hands.
I had one man I thought so highly of, it was remarkable. He"s an ex-Air Force pilot, had been a bombing pilot. And G.o.d, he"s good looking, tall, slender, most gracious smile. He"s a WASP, if you know what I mean. He looked like he could be an elder in any church in the country. And he had a very sociable wife. If you wanted somebody to represent the upper crust yachtsman, he would be the one. My G.o.d, how he disappointed me.
I sold the man his first yacht. I knew him for years and admired him. He traded in this yacht on a great big expensive diesel. His son, who was a teen-ager, was throwing wild parties on the boat. His wife was afraid something was bound to happen. She said, "We"re going to sell it and get out of yachting entirely." They put the pressure on me constantly to sell the boat. Finally I got him a buyer. I had done a good job and got him a h.e.l.l of a good price for it. (Sighs.) After all these years, I didn"t-like a d.a.m.n fool -if my attorney told me once he told me a thousand times, "Never trust anyone when it comes to business."
(Takes a deep breath.) The buyer got a forty-thousand-dollar loan at the bank, which I arranged. And the bank hands my old friend a cashier"s check for forty thousand dollars. I said, "Charlie, what about my commission?" It came to over twenty-eight hundred dollars. He looked at me real blank. He glances at his coat pocket where he"d keep his wallent and said, "Oh, I forgot my checkbook." He didn"t have to finish the sentence. I knew I was in trouble with this man, "cause I had nothing in writing.
He brought in eight hundred dollars in cash and said, "This is unreported. You don"t have to show it on your books. Internal Revenue will never know anything about it. I"m doing you a favor." I said, "You"re trying to beat me out of two thousand bucks and put me in a penitentiary. Boy, you"re the biggest surprise to me that I"ve ever had. I thought you were the ne plus ultra of everything a yachtsman would represent. You are the biggest phony I have ever met." He"s president of a big coal and oil company. Top flight. It makes you wonder if you"re too bright. G.o.d, to get hurt by a man like this.
You think a yacht broker is all smiles, and everything is milk and honey. You have your select circle of friends. And you just wonder how bright you are when you establish that circle. You just can"t trust people. Regardless whether they"re street cleaners or bank presidents, you can never tell when they"re gonna throw that curve at you.
(A long pause.) The sooner I retire, the better. I"m getting to sixty-five and I"m just fed up. I can"t roll with the punches like I used to. They bother me more than they used to. So I feet-what for? I should have quit years ago. Oh, I don"t know what I"m gonna do. You know these people your whole life. You have no social life other than yacht broking. I don"t know if I have anything to sell. Maybe you"d find some retired man that"s looking for occupational therapy, that would keep him busy and would bring in about a thousand a month? (A dry chuckle.) DAVID REED GLOVER.
We"re in the offices of Reed Glover and Company, a brokerage firm on La Salle Street, along Chicago"s financial district. "My father was a founding partner. There are twelve partners. We have about twenty salesmen, who also handle the customers" accounts. These salesmen are otherwise known as customers" men.
"Our firm was founded in 1931 by my father, Reed Glover. He had been a banker in a downstate town. He felt an investment firm was needed to serve the small community banks. Now there are fifteen thousand bankers, mostly in the middle states, who receive our letters. After having been on the list for forty years, many of them get around to calling us. I"d say we"re medium sized."
I"m forty years old. I started in the securities business in 1954, the only job outside the army I"ve had. I believed we were in a new era. I thought the founding partners of my firm were hampered by a Depression-era psychology, that they didn"t understand there could no longer be a severe collapse in stock prices. The senior brokers were considered old fogies and stodgy for their unwillingness to go along with some of this new thinking. There has been a great chastening among younger men.
What happened in 1968 and 1969 is that a great many large firms overexpanded. Worse than that, they recommended stocks which were unsound. I"m talking now about the conglomerates. You"ve heard about the Four Seasons nursing homes, about electronic stocks. This became the rage. When the downturn occurred in "69 and "70, many of these firms went out of business. They forgot that there really isn"t a new era. The business cycle is not going to vanish. You must be prepared for adversity as well as prosperity. I realize now there are certain principles that must be adhered to.
There have been many times of personal questioning about my occupation. The worst time came when I approached the magic mark of forty. (Laughs.) During that time we were in the heart of the bear market (laughs), and this is a highly emotional business. When the market is on its way up, you have a feeling of well-being and fulfillment, of contributing to the welfare of others. When the market is going down, this is a rather unfortunate line to be in. When you"re dealing with an individual"s money it"s a terrific responsibility.
The individual of means is exposed to so many people in the brokerage business that it"s quite a compliment to have him turn to you for investment service. The rule I"ve always gone by is that I expect to have my brother-in-law"s account and my roommate in college. But it seems everybody has a roommate in college or a brother-in-law who"s in this business. So I don"t really use my social acquaintances for purposes of business. My closest friends are with many of the brokerage firms. At social gatherings we don"t discuss the market, other than in an amusing rather than a serious way.
I"m amazed how rarely the individual customer will find fault with the broker. Along with that, there"s no written contract in our business. If the stock goes down, the customer"s word is his only pledge. They all pay. This is an honorable business.
When you"re dealing with a person"s money and investments, you deal with his hopes and ambitions and dreams. More people are becoming sophisticated in understanding that they can actually own part of a corporation like General Motors simply by placing an order for an intangible item like a stock certificate.
It"s quite easy to look around and say this is a parasitical business. All you"re doing is raking off your cut from the productivity of others. That is, I think, an erroneous view. Frankly, I"ve wrestled with that. It comes down to this: the basis of this country"s strength and prosperity is the finest economic system that"s ever been devised, with all its inequities and imperfections. Our system depends on a free exchange of publicly owned a.s.sets, and we"re part of the picture.
If there were no stock market, I think the economy would be stifled. It would prevent the growth of our companies in marketing the securities they need for their expansion. Look at Commonwealth Edison. It came out just the other day with a million shares. Without the stock market, the companies wouldn"t be able to invest their capital and grow. This is my life and I count myself very fortunate to be in this work. It"s fulfilling.
RAY WAX.
He has been a stockbroker on Wall Street for several years. He lives in an upper-middle-cla.s.s suburb on the outskirts of New York City. He is married, has two grown children.
"I really believed when I was growing up that somehow I would score. As a kid-I was no more than twelve-I"d get up at five " in the morning and go to an open market where they sold cakes in an open stall. It was so G.o.dd.a.m.ned cold you had to cut the G.o.dd.a.m.ned cakes with mittens. I made four, five dollars a day. That was a lot of money in those days. I worked. I fell good about it.
"I was a golf caddy at fourteen. I used to carry two sets of golf bags for eighteen holes for $2.50. I guess it"s a ten-dollar bill today. You really earned your pay when you went through eighteen holes. If the caddy master liked you, maybe you did thirty-six holes.
"I felt even though there was money in the house, I was supposed to work. I was supposed to earn something. It was one of the things you had to do. If you did, it was supposed to make you feel good. I was a good caddy and I felt good about it. I felt that somewhere along the line someone would recognize that I had that special gleam. Horatio Alger-which is a crock of s.h.i.t."
For twenty years he engaged in all sorts of enterprises and "I was generally successful. Then I lost interest or I thought the promise had gone out of it and I went on to something else. ln the late fifties I had exported cars to South America. I was doing a million dollars a year and sort of ran out of steam. My one virtue was I didn"t rip anybody off. For a while I thought I could live in South America. And I found out that the whole world was rigged. They didn"t want me to do anything legit."
What kept you from becoming a millionaire?
"I just wasn"t . . . I wasn"t facile enough. I was bright enough to do the things I had to do to make a good living, but I really didn"t come up with the big score. And . . . (Pause.) Well, there was a limit to what I was prepared to do to make money in a crazy way. But that"s no good. You"re supposed to do everything you have to do to make money. I guess at some point there"s a limit. You either demean yourself or change yourself or something happens where you become something else. Later, when I owned a hotel, the only way I could survive is if I let a pimp put four broads in the bar. I pa.s.sed. I couldn"t do it. I eventually lost the hotel.
He became a land speculator. "I kinda ran out of money, because land takes a lot of money. I became a real estate broker in self-defense. I began to peddle land. I sold land to builders. I realized they were just one cut above running a candy store. Within a couple of years I was building houses and building them better than anybody"s ever built them before. I really had some kind of responsibility to build a house that was a good house. Until I began to run out of land . . ."
I loved building houses. It"s really a marvelous thing. You work with people that work with their hands. When the carpenters come in to work, G.o.dd.a.m.n it, they"re good. When the bricklayers came in, they gotta know their job. I had a roofer, a Norwegian or whatever the h.e.l.l he was-when he went up on that f.u.c.kin" roof and he bucked that stuff there, man, you knew you were gonna have the best roof you ever had on a house. I didn"t cheat on the house. I sold my own houses, wouldn"t turn them over to an agent. I enjoyed doing that more than anything I ever enjoyed in my life. I don"t know why I didn"t continue it.
I was kind of driven. I had to go on doing something else. I couldn"t see myself building a development of fifty, a hundred houses, little boxes. I couldn"t get the kind of plots where I could put five, six houses on one or two acres, to build a house with enough nuances. The challenge went out of it after a while.
I invested in a hotel. It had 101 keys. I got fascinated with hotels, the operation of it, how it was put together, who came, who went. I came out with a quarter of a million and I built my own hotel-alongside the World"s Fair grounds. We did the biggest job of any motel at the fair. In two years the fair was a shambles. The area was a desert, death. I walked away with a whole skin, but gave the hotel back to the bank.
While I was fiddlin" around with the hotel I began to play the market. I got lucky at some point and made about a hundred thousand dollars. That convinced me I could make this my way of life. I thought it would be a nice way to live. I began to study to be a stockbroker. I pa.s.sed the exam. You learn the ethical side of the business, what you can and can"t do. It"s all mumbo jumbo.
The New York Stock Exchange has 1,066 members. I always think of it as the Norman Invasion. These are William the Conquerors. The 1066 is one of the greatest clubs in the world. A seat on the exchange costs anywhere from a hundred thousand dollars in bad times to a half a million in good times. These guys didn"t pay that price of admission without deciding that they"re gonna take care of each other, protect their own. They"re the guardians of all the stock. They"re the specialists. They dole out these stocks to each other and they have the edge. They become the bookies on all the stocks. This is the only wheel in town.
I really thought of the market as a sort of river. Money running to the sea. I figured all I had to do is just stand on that bank and lower a bucket every once in a while and take a little bit of that out. I didn"t care how much these gentle gentiles, with those little briefcases under their arms, took back to Larchmont or how much went up to Westport. I figured they"re gonna let me lower my bucket. But they don"t let anybody lower a bucket.
I"m afraid the work of a stockbroker is superfluous. He did have a function at one time, when little people were allowed in the market and given a chance to share in part of the goodies. The market really is a game played by very skilled people, who acc.u.mulate stocks at low levels so they can be distributed at high. The market is rigged. Knowledgeable people buy certain stocks, whether they have intrinsic value or not, and at some later hour the public is told these stocks represent good values and should be purchased. By the time Joe Blow goes in, the people who"ve created this atmosphere go out. For every dollar made in the market, a dollar has been lost. The pros make it, the 1066 boys.
The brokerage firms need some people to make this whole machine work. Somewhere in this pattern of things is the stockbroker. Here"s where I come in. We"re all hooked in. I"m watching every transaction. Everything that happens in the market I see instantaneously. I have a machine in front of me that records and memorizes every transaction that takes place in the entire day. It"s called a Bunker-Ramo. It"s really a television screen that reproduces the information from a master computer that sits in New Jersey. Within a fraction of a second, when I press for the symbol I want, it goes to the central computer and it automatically comes back. When I take my hand from the machine, the screen in front of me is already reproducing the information.
I watch eighteen million, twenty million shares pa.s.s the tape. I look at every symbol, every transaction. I would go out of my mind, but my eye has been conditioned to screen maybe two hundred stocks and ignore the others. I pick up with my eyes Goodrich, but I don"t see ITT. I don"t follow International Tel, I"m not interested in that. I don"t see ITT, but I do see IBM. There are over thirty-two hundred symbols. I drop the other three thousand. Otherwise I"d go mad. I really put in an enormously exhausting day.
It"s up at six thirty, I read the New York Times and the Walt Street Journal before eight. I read the Dow Jones ticker tape between eight and ten. At three thirty, when the market closes, I work until four thirty or five. I put in a great deal of technical work. I listen to news reports avidly. I try to determine what"s happening. I"m totally immersed in what I"m doing. For the amount of work and intelligence I bring to this job, I"m not being properly compensated. I make a routine living now. The only compensation is like me against the machine. I"m trying to use my intelligence against the wheel. I"m a f.u.c.kin" John Henry fightin" this G.o.dd.a.m.ned steel drill, and I"ll probably die with my hammer in my hand. (Laughs.) Because I don"t want to buy the package. Maybe I"m wrong, but I want to get there my own way. It"s very difficult, that"s G.o.d"s truth.
The market moves to destroy you. It says, Play it your way, sucker, buy the package. Believe in the American Dream, buy the hundred time multiple, believe in IBM, and if you doubt it, G.o.d help you. Don"t ever question what you"re doing.
"People go to the race track. When there"s fifty thousand people at the track, 49,990 are there to lose money. It"s kind of a self-flagellation. There"s maybe ten people in that park who are pros, who"ve been there at six in the morning and clocked the horses, who"ve felt the turf and talked to the jockey or stable boy. They"re the professional gamblers. They"re there for just one reason-to make money. The 49,990 other slobs, they"re there to lose. I don"t have to tell you about horses."
People who go into the market are committed to losing money. They don"t blame the broker. They don"t blame the machine, which is rigged against them. The moment you buy a stock, you"re hooked. You"re gonna pay a commission on the way in or on the way out. Normally that"s a sizable percentage. The stock has to move up at least a point and a quarter for you to get even. If you bought a stock at $50, it has to move to $51.35 before you"d get even. You"re being humped before you even get around the corner. The moment you buy that stock, you"re a loser.
What I try to do to justify my existence is to understand how it works. I took courses. I took in every lecture. I subscribed to services. I do charting. I"m almost like that gambler who clocks the horse at six in the morning on the workout when they blow that horse out. But I"m really on the outside lookin" in. Somebody else has rigged the race and knows who"s gonna win it. And somebody else knows what stock"s gonna go. I"m sure every stock has a group that decides when they"re gonna go and when they"re gonna get off. All you can hope to do when you see that train moving-there"s the theory of the moving train . . .
When the train begins to move, all you can do is see it move and hope to get on. You don"t know when the train slows down until after the big boys have jumped off. You"re gonna get on ten points after they did and get off ten points after they did. If you can discern the direction of the train . . .
Maybe if I was twenty, twenty-five years and I just came out of Harvard Business School and I believed this bulls.h.i.t, which is packaged and wrapped . . . Wall Street, Madison Avenue. The people even look the same. They really believe in their invulnerability. They believe their own success story. I don"t believe it. (A rueful chuckle.) That"s a h.e.l.l of an argument to be a broker. In a crazy way I do a service. I try to give such customers as I have a rational explanation for an investment. I try . . . (Sighs wearily.) "Look, we"ve got eighty billions of dollars worth of money floating around in Europe. It"s nonconvertible. We"ve f.u.c.ked every country in the world. We"ve got every central bank in the world with dollars up to their a.s.s. They can"t do anything with it. We said to "em, "We"re the Texans." The world belongs to Connally. He told "em in effect, "Live with that money. We"ve bought your companies, we"ve taken over your economies, we"ve given you dollars that are spurious. Don"t blow the whistle on us, because the whole f.u.c.kin" sky is gonna come down, Chicken Little. Maybe two, three years from now, if the spirit moves us, we may talk about the convertibility of the dollars into gold. In the meantime, f.u.c.k ya. Put those dollars in our treasury notes, buy our stocks, do somethin" with "em. But don"t come back to me to redeem "em, because they"re worthless." We f.u.c.ked the world.
"I"ve seen "em do this. I buy gold, I buy silver. It"s the only thing that"s real. You can"t buy gold in this country. We don"t dare. If we let Americans buy gold, everybody"d be diggin" up his f.u.c.kin" back yard and buryin" gold bullion in it. "Cause he knows the f.u.c.kin" thing"s real."
(A long pause.) I try to perform a function that has some meaning. I try to take somebody"s money and not make s.h.i.t out of it. If a banker"s taking your money and giving you five percent and he"s earning twelve percent on it, there should be a better way for the little man to partic.i.p.ate. He should do a h.e.l.l of a sight better than giving it to an insurance company or a bank. It shouldnt" be that rigged. He should have a chance to get a fair return on that money. He"s worked for it. Somebody else shouldn"t be able to use that money and get a twelve percent return while paying the little guy five in front.
The real money made in the market is being made by people with real wealth. I"ll say, "If you give me five thousand dollars, I can make you a ten percent return. If we"re pretty good, maybe I can get you twenty percent. If it"s a smash, maybe we"ll double it." But the only way you"re gonna make a million dollars is to start with a million dollars.
"People who have made money in the market have consistently had money. The great wealth in this country has bought Johnson & Johnson, has bought IBM. They never sold a share. To this day, sixty-six percent of the stock is owned by people that never sold a share. They bought General Motors in 1930, they never sold it. They didn"t put it in the banks at four percent return. They live on the return. They never sell the principle."
I"m trying to use my intelligence, which I"ve exercised in other businesses. But it"s like wrestling with an octopus. Too many things that I can"t control are happening. I can tell you what happened after the fact, but it"s very difficult to tell you before the fact. The market never really repeats itself exactly in the same way day after day. There is similarity over the years. Jesse Livermore, a legend, went broke three times. But he was so valuable to the Street, he created so much excitement that the fraternity, the 1066 club, gave him the money to put him back in business. His manipulation in the market, his activity, created additional sales every day. Other people became excited and involved. Yet this man, with all his experience, continually got wiped out. He was bucking something bigger than he was. Ultimately he was destroyed and killed himself. He lost touch with even the reality he knew.49 It"s really an illusion. It"s only real because enough people believe it"s real. The whole market is based on a premise-potential growth. You can put any kind of multiple on a stock. If a stock earns a dollar a year, it sells for a hundred. It"s selling at a hundred times its earning capacity. If you believe the stock is a reflection of some future experience, that you can invest in a hundred times its earning capacity and that you will subsequently benefit, you qualify as a true believer. But the moment you question that premise, the whole thing collapses like a house of cards. You have to buy this whole crazy fiction or there would be no market.
"IBM, Eastman Kodak, Xerox, these are called growth stocks. And they"re held by every major inst.i.tution, every pension funds, every university. This is the backbone. n.o.body questions the basic premise that these stocks will continually get better. Polaroid over the past four years has had an earning growth of minus eleven. But because they"ve got a camera that is unique, they pretend they will expand at an infinite rate. As long as you believe that, you can pay 130 for Polaroid, as it was today. You"ll pay anything as long as you believe this American Dream that growth is forever. But the people who make this market, at some bad hour they"re gonna sell Polaroid at 130 to shnooks like you and me. And they"re gonna pick it up again at 65 and start the whole process all over. They"ve done it continually."
Some people know me over a period of years and have allowed me to handle their business. I"ve created new business on solicitation, depending on how good my track record is. The function of a broker is to try to get his account to trade. The real money is never made by selling stock. A broker"s lifeblood, the only money he makes, is by generating commissions. Most money is made by getting people to turn their portfolios, their stocks, over three, four, five times a year. If you"re really unethical--cynical, the milder word-you may get "em to turn their stocks over ten times a year or fifteen times. There"s a name for it.
Brokers merely are ribbon clerks. They"re order takers. They do very little if it"s a big house. It"s a profession that"s in its decline. Everything is being committed to computer, to systemized tapes. These are houses now on the Street that say, "Don"t you ever make a decision. We have a computer that tells you what to do to your customer, to buy and to sell." At some point the function of a broker may be relegated to some girl who sits at a phone and repeats what the computer has told the customer to buy and to sell. I see Wall Street being reduced to kind of a supermarket. The biggest houses will be swallowing the others. You"ll wind up with four or five houses and not many more than half a dozen.
There are houses that guarantee if you utilize the machine, you"ll get five or ten trades a year out of your customers. They"ll put him in a stock and they"ll take him out. Beautiful. But in actual practice, when the market goes sour, the machine breaks down. It can"t take care of the vagaries. The machine can"t account for an economic crisis or a world depression. The machine can"t account for an unemployment rate that exceeds six percent. The machine can"t account for a military adventure in Vietnam. It"s a robot. It can do what the programmed tape tells it to. But it can"t account for the extraordinary world we live in.
People like me start out with a feeling that there"s a place for them in society, that they really have a useful function. They see it destroyed by the cynicism of the market. A piece of worthless stock can be given glamour and many people may be induced to buy it. Excitement, public relations. The people can be wiped out with the absolute cynicism that brings those who conceived it to the top.
Can you imagine? I really felt I could buck this machine. When I began, I was sure I could win. I no longer have that confidence. What"s happening is so extraordinary. It"s so much bigger than I am.
I"m just trying to go along for the ride. I have little to do with it. They believe the game because they know how the cards are gonna be dealt. I don"t believe the game because I know the cards are stacked. After being told about fiscal responsibility, they know the treasury"s gonna spew out all kinds of dollars, and all kinds of money"s gonna be made available to the corporations for them to put in the market. This is a contradiction. This is where the thing breaks down.
I can"t say what I"m doing has any value. This doesn"t make me too happy. If I could learn in some way to live with the wheel-but I can"t. If I make an error and it costs the customer money, it"s as though it were my money. This is extraordinary. The average broker lives to generate commissions and he goes home as though he were selling shoelaces or ties. He doesn"t carry the G.o.dd.a.m.n market with him. I carry it like it was a monkey on my back. Man, I wake up in the middle of the night remembering what I did right or wrong. Thats" no good. But I really can"t make it happen.
When I built the houses, I hired a bricklayer, I hired the roofer, I determined who put the G.o.dd.a.m.ned thing together. And when I handed somebody a key, the house was whole. I made it happen. I can"t do it in the market. I"m just being manipulated and moved around and I keep pretending I can understand it, that I can somehow cope with it. The truth is I can"t.
The broker as a human being is being demeaned by the financial community. His commissions are being cut. I joined the a.s.sociation of Investment Brokers-we number about a thousand members as against forty thousand brokers-which tries to think of itself as though it were the Pilots Union. The terrible thing is we don"t fly planes. We handle the f.u.c.kin" phone and punch out digits on something that translates from a computer. We pretend we have status in the community, but we"re expendable.
The brokerage firms just cut our commission again, while they increased their own rate by forty-two percent. The SEC approved a new set of commission rates. The SEC is just an arm of the stock exchange. They put their people in it. Like every regulatory agency, it serves the exchange and p.i.s.ses on the public. The commissions for the houses are larger, but I make no more than I made before. This happened in every firm on the Street. It"s as though they went out and played golf together and agreed on it.
In this rip-off, we"re treated with contempt by the members of the stock exchange. You"re being told you"re not a useful member of society. They"re really saying, "If you make too big a noise, we"re gonna have a girl take the orders and the machine"ll do the rest. You"re better off to let us make your decisions. Don"t attempt to use your intelligence. Don"t attempt to figure out what"s happening, if you know what"s good for you."
Oh, I"ll continue to cope. (Laughs.) I"ll continue to struggle against the machine. I"ll continue with my personal disillusionment. (Laughs.) Oh, I"d like one morning to wake up and go to some work that gave me joy. If I could build houses all over again, I would do it. Because when it"s finished, somebody"s gonna live in it, and the house is gonna be built and it"s gonna be there after I"m gone. (Pause.) Ahhh, f.u.c.k it!
BUREAUCRACY.
STEVE CARMICHAEL.
"I"m a coordinator. I"m project management." He works for the Neighborhood Youth Corps. Though it is federally funded through the OEO, he is employed by the city. "Two of our agencies were joined together about six months ago. A further step toward inst.i.tutionalizing the poverty program." He heads a department of nine people. "We take young people of poverty income families and a.s.sist them through work experiences, those who"ve dropped out of school, and thereby better their potential of obtaining a job."
He is twenty-five, has a wife and one child.
When I was with VISTA my greatest frustration was dealing with administrators. I was working in a school and I saw the board of education as a big bureaucracy, which could not move. I was disdainful of bureaucrats in Washington, who set down rules without ever having been to places where those rules take effect. Red tape. I said I could replace a bureaucrat and conduct a program in relationship to people, not figures. I doubt seriously if three years from now I"ll be involved in public administration. One reason is each day I find myself more and more like unto the people I wanted to replace.
I"ll run into one administrator and try to inst.i.tute a change and then I"ll go to someone else and connive to get the change. Gradually your effectiveness wears down. Pretty soon you no longer identify as the bright guy with the ideas. You become the fly in the ointment. You"re criticized by your superiors and your subordinates. Not in a direct manner. Indirectly, by being ignored. They say I"m unrealistic. One of the fellas that works with me said, "It"s a dream to believe this program will take sixteen-, seventeen-year-old dropouts and make something of their lives." This may well be true, but if I"m going to belive that I can"t believe my job has any worth.
I may be rocking the boat, though I"m not accomplishing anything. As the criticism of me steps up, the security aspect of my job comes into play. I begin to say, "Okay, I got a recent promotion. I earned it." They couldn"t deny anybody who made significant inputs. Now I"m at a plateau. As criticism continues, I find myself tempering my remarks, becoming more and more concerned about security.
I"m regarded as an upstart. I"m white and younger than they are. (Laughs.) They"re between thirty and forty. They might rate me fair to middlin" as a person. They might give me a sixty percent range on a scale of a hundred percent. As a supervisor, I"d be down to about twenty percent. (Laughs.) I think I"m a better supervisor than they give me credit for. They criticize me for what criticism they may have of the entire program-which is about the way I criticized my supervisor when I was in their position. He became an ogre, the source of blame for the failings of the program. The difference is I don"t patronize my staff the way he did. They make a recommendation to me and I try to carry it out, if I feel it"s sound. I think it"s built up some of their confidence in me.
My suggestions go through administrative channels. Ninety percent of it is filtered out by my immediate superior. I have been less than successful in terms of getting things I believe need to be done. It took me six months to convince my boss to make one obvious administrative change. It took her two days to deny that she had ever opposed the change.
We"ve got five or six young people who are burning to get into an automotive training program. Everybody says, "It takes signatures, it takes time." I follow up on these things because everybody else seems to forget there are people waiting. So I"ll get that phone call, do some digging, find out nothing"s happened, report that to my boss, and call back and make my apologies. And then deal with a couple of minor matters-Johnny ripped off a saw today . . . certain enrollees are protesting because they"re getting gypped on their paychecks.
So we"re about a quarter to five and I suddenly look at my desk and it"s filled with papers-reports and memos. I have to sort them out before a secretary can file "em. Everybody"ll leave at five o"clock, except for me. Usually I"m there until six ". If I did all the paper work I should, my sanity would go. Paper work I almost totally ignore. I make a lot of decisions over the phone. It hits you about two months later when somebody says, "Where"s the report on such and such? Where"s the doc.u.mentation?"
"I had a lot more hope once. When I came out of VISTA I wanted to work in education. I wanted a decent paying job, too. I started out here at ten thousand dollars a year. That"s good when you consider I had no experience in the field and was only twenty-three. I didn"t realize how much it meant when you said you were a VISTA. I didn"t think it was that phenomenal.
"I had four years of college in business administration. I worked for Illinois Bell, a fairly decent job. But this was not for me. I had too much energy. I got into business because it was easy. After working awhile, all my beliefs in the corruption of private industry were substantiated. (Laughs.) That turned me off. What"s left? Social service. I quit, hightailed to Washington, and I was accepted in VISTA four days after I got my induction notice. (Laughs.) They got me a 2-A deferment, and miraculously I was not tripping rice paddies.
The most frustrating thing for me is to know that what I"m doing does not have a positive impact on others. I don"t see this work as meaning anything. I now treat my job disdainfully. The status of my job is totally internal: Who"s your friend? Can you walk into this person"s office and call him by his first name? It carries very little status to strangers who don"t understand the job. People within the agency don"t understand it. (Laughs.) Success is to be in a position where I can make a decision. Now I have to wait around and see that what I say or do has any impact. I wonder how I"d function where people would say, "There"s a hotshot. He knows what he"s talking about." And what I say became golden. I don"t know if it would be satisfying for me. (Laughs.) That might be more frustrating than fighting for everything you want. Right now I feel very unimportant.
POSTSCRIPT: "While I was waiting for this job I was advised to see my ward committeeman. I was debating. My wife was pregnant. I had virtually no savings. I was gonna get a ten-thousand-dollar job. What was I gonna do? I was all set to work as a taxicab driver. Then I said, "I"m going to be a bricklayer. Just come home at night, take a bath, relax." I was prepared to call my uncle, who"s a mason. I knew he could connect me, that"s the irony. I was decrying a system that forced me to go to my ward committeeman to get a city job, but I was going to call my uncle to get me at the head of the line to get in the masons union. (Laughs.) One system was just as immoral as the other. By a stroke of luck, my application cleared city hall without my having to go through politics. To this day I"m politically unaffiliated. I don"t know how long that will last. I may have to go to an alderman to get my promotion cleared.
"My goal for the last two years is to be a university professor. He works only nine months a year. (Laughs.) He can supplement his income. What"s a comfortable income? We started out at fifteen thousand dollars-my wife and I-as our goal. We"re up to about twenty-five thousand now. If I have another kid, the goal"ll go to thirty thousand. The way I look at the university professor-aside from his capacity to influence other people-is that the business world often uses him as a consultant. Not bad.
LILITH REYNOLDS.
It"s hard for me to describe what I"m doing right now. It may sound like gobbledygook. It"s hard to understand all the initials. It"s like alphabet soup. We just went through a reorganization, which is typical of government. Reorganization comes at a rapid rate these days. My job has changed not only in name but in status.
She has worked for the federal government for nine years. "I work for the OEO. I was a.s.sistant to the regional director. I was what"s called the regional council liaison person. There"s something called the Inter-Agency Regional Council, which is made up of five agencies: OEO, HEW, Welfare, Labor, Transportation, and Housing. This group meets once a month.
"Agencies don"t really want to coordinate their efforts. They want to operate their programs their way and the h.e.l.l with the others. OEO has been unique in that we"ve funded directly to communities without going through other government structures.50 "The regional councils are really directed from Washington. They"re told what to do by the Office of Management and Budget. They are just a little political thing. One of the big pushes was to make better contact with the six governors of the region and the mayors-from appointments secretary to planning staffs to budget departments. Getting the money you need for the programs you want, getting it down to the people. We spent most of our time doing that.
It"s amazing how little information there really is around. How systematically it"s kept from getting around. Some of the Spanish-speaking community groups got fairly good at hara.s.sing the regional director. They wanted answers to questions. How many Spanish-speaking people are employed in our office? That wasn"t hard-two. How many are employed by agencies to which we were giving grants? How many people are being served by the programs we"re funding? These were legitimate questions. The way we went about getting the answers was ridiculous. We just couldn"t come up with the statistics. We made an educated guess. It"s hard to change the rules. People take the course of least resistance.
There"s a theory I have. An employee"s advancement depends on what his supervisor thinks of him, not on what the people working for him think. The regional director"s job depends on his friendship in Washington. So the best thing for him to do is not challenge the system, not make waves. His future depends on being nice to the people who are making the decisions to make the cuts that are hurting his employees. So he"s silent. But the people down here, the field representatives, who know what"s going on, make waves. So the director tries to get rid of the most troublesome.
At our office there"s less and less talk about poor people. It"s mainly about how we should do things. I don"t know if this was always so. It"s just more obvious now. Local politicians have more and more say in the programs. In Chicago, Mayor Daley runs it. In other cities, it depends on the power structure. We talk more of local inst.i.tutions these days, not of poor people.
I have been very active in the union.51 We"ve frequently confronted management with problems we insisted they solve. We tried to get them to upgrade the secretaries. They"re being underpaid for the jobs they"re doing. Management fought us. We"ve tried to have a say in policy making. We"ve urged them to fund poor groups directly. Management fought us.
For instance, the union has backed the Midwest Poor People"s Coalition. We tried to get funds directly to the Chicago Indian Village and a poor group in Indiana. Almost always, the agency has balked. We"ve attacked management because they"re just not carrying out the Economic Opportunity Act.
The employees should help make policy, since they"re closest to what"s going on. It"s probably the same as in auto plants. A lot of times workers can make better decisions about production than managers. The managers aren"t down there often enough to know what"s going on.
Your education prepares you to go into a job and accept what you"re told as being correct. I worked several years for the Social Security Administration. It has a fantastic number of rules and regulations. For a long time I believed they were correct and it was my job to carry out these rules. After I got to OEO it became more and more obvious to me that a lot of these rules were wrong, that rules were not sacrosanct. I think this is happening to workers all over. They"re challenging the rules. That"s what we"re in the process of doing.
Through the union people have been bringing up ideas and management is forced more and more to listen. They hadn"t taken us very seriously up to now. But we just got a national contract which calls for union-management committees. I think our union has challenged management a lot more than most government unions. That"s largely because of the kind of people OEO has attracted. They believe in being advocates of the poor. They believe in organizing people to challenge the system. It"s a natural carry-over to organize a union which also challenges the system.
I"m among the top fifteen people in the decision making process in the office. As the union became more aggressive-it was on the issue of the Indians, the director tried to fire our president-I got into a big ha.s.sle. We developed thirty-three charges against the director and made a ma.s.s mailing to all community agencies, to all the grantees, to all the senators and congressmen in the region. After that, I was no longer a.s.sistant to the regional director. (Laughs.) That"s another typical thing in government. When management wants to get rid of you, they don"t fire you. What they do is take your work away. That"s what happened to me. He didn"t even tell me what my new job would be. They sent somebody down to go through my personnel file "My G.o.d, what can we do with her?" They had a problem because I"m a high-grade employee. I"m grade 14. The regional director"s a 17. One of the deputy directors told me, "You"re going to be economic development specialist." (Laughs.) I"m very discouraged about my job right now. I have nothing to do. For the last four or five weeks I haven"t been doing any official work, because they really don"t expect anything. They just want me to be quiet. What they"ve said is it"s a sixty-day detail. I"m to come up with some kind of paper on economic development. It won"t be very hard because there"s little that can be done. At the end of sixty days I"ll present the paper. But because of the reorganization that"s come up I"ll probably never be asked about the paper.