Hi everyone. I’m on Random Buzzers all week. Come on over and ask me some questions!

According to this New York Times article, young wannabe bankers are the first to go in the most recent round of financial sector lay-offs.

I know. Boo hoo, right?

I won’t ask anyone to shed a tear for these youngsters who still have plenty of time to rethink the trajectory of their professional lives. Besides, looked at one way, the recession is the best thing to happen to this generation of young, ambitious college grads. Without easy access to the lucrative field of magical fairy dust mortgage derivatives, they might actually do something meaningful with their lives.

But the article also forces me to poke a hole in what has become a bizarre misconception about bankers. According to the article, “Being young on Wall Street once meant having it all: style, smarts and too much money to spend wisely.”

I won’t dispute whether young bankers ever spent money unwisely. I’ve seen them plunk down hundred dollar bills for the privilege of having some surly waitress/struggling artist bring them a bottle of vodka and some juice then tell them to make their own drinks–a neat little nightlife mutation called “cracking a bottle” that was meant to allow bankers to feel elite while non-bankers deftly took their money.

But the idea that bankers are widely renowned for their “style” or “smarts,” is, at best, laughable. I lived in New York for twenty years. I knew lots of professionals, both in banking and out of it. Without question, the bankers were not the smartest knives in the drawer. Even most of the bankers I’ve known would confess to a widespread intellectual mediocrity among their peers. The smartest ones, hands down, were the scientists, artists, and teachers.

As for style? Please. Find one person, other than a banker, who emulates the way bankers dress. Oversized grey or navy blue suits? Come on. Find a tailor, gentlemen. And, as for the ladies? Meh. It’s impossible to look stylish when you’re enslaved to a dress code intended to evoke uniform dullness.

In terms of the cultural life of New York City, bankers contribute exactly one thing: money. That’s no small thing, mind you, and I’m sure quite a few bartenders, waiters, and restaurant owners (not to mention strippers, hookers, and drug dealers) can credit the financial industry with a large portion of their profits. But I can promise you that no New Yorker ever lined up to get into a restaurant because it was popular with bankers. No one ever sought out the latest, hippest bar that bankers frequented. If anything, the arrival of hordes of bankers meant it was time to move on to a new bar. I used to play this cat and mouse game with my friends in New York City at a revolving Happy Hour wherein bankers basically chased us from Tribeca to Alphabet City and beyond.

So, to the young college graduates now being evicted from the financial services sector, I have this to say: thank your lucky stars. As a banker, people would have gladly relieved you of your money in a variety of ways. They would have even allowed you to feel elite as they did so. But they would not have admired you in the process. They would not have emulated you or sought out your company. They would not have found you cool. So if you want to be more than a leaking wallet in the cultural life of New York, or any city, find a job that has some kind of intrinsic value.

And to the former Goldman Sachs analyst who claims that, in the wake of Occupy Wall Street, the banking industry has “lost its luster,” I say this:

It never had any to begin with.

According to Dylan Byers of Politico, who has run the numbers on Nexis, the phrase “income inequality” has appeared in news organizations 500% more often since the beginning of the Occupy Wall Street movement. That, more than anything, is a victory for the protesters. OWS has been, from the beginning, a kind of cultural cohesion around a collection of ideas that the mainstream media has traditionally ignored, or even disparaged. Before OWS, the phrase “income inequality” would routinely be dismissed as an artifact of “class warfare.” Now, it’s on the tips of everyone’s tongues.

Early complaints about the movement’s lack of specific demands is also falling away as an increasingly focused platform centering on economic justice comes into focus. Poll the former residents of Zuccotti Park or any of the other occupation sites and you’ll hear a variety of ideas, but the most common seem to be the following:

- Regulate banks in a way that disincentivizes the reckless gambling that puts all of us at risk.

- Tax investment returns at the same rate as income.

- Reform campaign finance laws so that we’re no longer being governed by Goldman Sachs.

Of course, there are other ideas, like making banks finance their own future bailouts through a financial transaction tax, but I think it’s fairly easy to see the big idea at the heart of the movement: American capitalism and democracy are broken. The big difference between Occupy Wall Street and The Tea Party is that the latter sees the government as the big evil, whereas the former fingers a reckless and under-regulated banking industry that has captured our government and bent it to its will.

So here’s the question: do we still need a physical occupation? I think not. In the beginning, the physical presence of so many people submitting to harsh living conditions out of an idealistic commitment to a fairer, more just world was inspirational, so inspirational that it created imitators across the country and beyond. But the message is out now. And Zuccotti Park had begun attracting people who were not helping the cause–the homeless, the inarticulate, the multiply-buttoned radicals. It’s important to prevent these physical sites from becoming convenient flashpoints for ideological opponents eager to paint the movement itself as a kind of lifestyle choice for weirdoes. The best thing OWS can do now is to avoid making that easier for them. Absent the physical presence, the ideas themselves can disperse and thrive without the distractions of bad press.

As many of the occupiers have said, “we are the ones we’ve been waiting for.” The occupation was the rallying cry. It worked. And the commitment of those early occupiers should not be underestimated. But now it’s time to get to work on actually creating that fairer and more just world.

For those of you who don’t know it, Books of Wonder is a brilliant young people’s book store on 18th Street in Manhattan. And this Sunday, it gets even better. I’ll be reading and answering questions along with a very impressive list of authors:

TAMORA PIERCE – Mastiff
JOHN CONNOLLY – The Infernals
RAE CARSON – The Girl of Fire and Thorns
MATTHEW CODY – The Dead Gentleman
DELIA SHERMAN – The Freedom Maze
LEANNA RENEE HIEBER – Darker Still: A Novel Of Magic Most Foul

I know Delia personally, and she’s wonderful. I also read recently with Leanna Renee Hieber and she’s a laugh riot.

Time: 1PM
Location: 18 West 18th Street (between 5th Avenue and 6th Avenue)

Come for the readings. Stay for the cupcakes!

NOTE: I previously listed this reading as being at 3PM because I am very dim at times. It’s at 1PM.

Ok, this freaks even me out.

As many of you already know, the NYPD has been constructing a major surveillance initiative aimed primarily at the financial district but now spreading to mid-town. Footage from surveillance cameras all over the Wall Street area is being processed in a centralized unit using state of the art face and gait recognition software. With this technology, New York City Police offers can track a suspect (or an OWS protester, for example) from one camera’s range to another, compare his or her face with an already existing database of potentially dangerous individuals (or peaceful protesters), and link it up with whatever other information it has already gathered on the suspect/innocent civilian.

Ok. Let’s just say we want to make an argument in favor of this type of spying for the sake of security. As Mayor Bloomberg recently said: “As the world gets more dangerous, people are willing to have infringements on their personal freedoms that they would not before.”

I’m not going to argue with this opinion right now, because I’m more concerned with another detail of this program, namely the fact that the NYPD has reserved space in this central processing station for high level employees of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.

Yes you read that right. Goldman Sachs and Citigroup are watching you, with the courteous help of the NYPD.

Let me state for the record as a US citizen and occasional pedestrian in the Wall Street area, I do not give Goldman Sachs or Citigroup permission to spy on me. Ever. Whatever bargain Americans are willing to make for the sake of security, I’m pretty sure the vast majority are not willing to hand over their privacy to the likes of Goldman Sachs and Citigroup.