Greg Smith, Goldman Sachs, Occupy Wall Street, Civil Disobedience

A Lesson in Defection From Goldman Sachs - the climax of just about every story of effective civil resistance is the moment of defection
 The defection of Greg Smith from Goldman Sachs has become one more public relations nightmare for the venerable firm.  This article is interesting because it points out how Smith's concern did not match the Occupy Wall Street movement's primary concerns but he put a chink in the armour of the firm and opened some practices to scrutiny which furthers the cause of change.

"If you want to get an institution to eat itself alive, don’t just denounce it altogether. Instead, find ways to make its most committed and loyal members consider whether the institution really lives up to its own cherished values, and let them do their thing. They’re the ones who can stir up far more trouble with far less effort than anyone on the outside ever could."

Getting people within the organization to question the business values and ethics they have routinely and blindly applied in their dealings with clients is a very effective way to push for change in an institution like Goldman.


Was Greg Smith influenced by the OWS movement or by personal motivations?  Occupy would like to claim a small victory but the mindset of the average Wall Street executive is not akin to Mahatma Gandhi or any other seeker of justice for the masses.  In other words, Smith was doing his whining for his own 'spoiled brat' reasons and he paid no heed to justice for all or to tearing down a corrupt institution...

Source:
 http://www.nationofchange.org/lesson-defection-goldman-sachs-1334409931

A Lesson in Defection From Goldman Sachs | NationofChange

Goldman Sachs executive Greg Smith quit his job and, to massive fanfare, penned a New York Times op-ed denouncing what his company has become. 

With those 1,300 words, Goldman’s stock price dropped 3.4 percent, vanishing more than $2 billion from its worth and necessitating a commiserative house call from the mayor of New York.
(The damage was not permanent and the stock bounced back the next day.  But Smith sold lots of newspapers and got tongues wagging and fingers pointing and people speculating about the state of his sanity.)

Smith didn’t really echo any of the Occupy movement’s concerns about

- Goldman’s habit of self-serving market manipulation, contributing to downturns from the Great Depression to the Great Recession, 

- or its present hijacking of the very political system tasked with regulating it. 

(The most egregious part of this scandal is the power given to former Goldman executives over the fate of the financial system and the way they used this power to bail out bankers, keep the prosecutors at bay and ignore the collapsing housing market that was sinking the middle class of America, etc.)

- or the massive “bailout” to "save the financial system from collapse.

Smith objected to the way that Goldman was putting its own interests before those of its clients. 

(Was he hoping to exonerate himself from these practices so he could take his clients with him on his next business incarnation?)
 

Historically, the climax of just about every story of effective civil resistance is the moment of defection — when some crucial segment of the old guard goes turncoat and throws down with the voice of the people: Soldiers refuse to fire, prisoners go free, politicians ditch the party line.

Greg Smith, whose utter devotion to Goldman Sachs’ supposed core values is the premise of his denouncement, is as true a believer as they come.

REPEAT:  Greg Smith is as true a believer as they come. 

And it is precisely these kinds of people  who can end up being the most likely and effective whistle blowers and the most crippling defectors, 
 the instant they’re forced to realize that their institution fails to live up to its own cherished values.

 Think about it for a moment, and this actually stands to reason. Of course we would be more likely to make sacrifices on behalf of values to which we’ve already committed our lives or careers, the values that our clients and subsidiaries and loved ones have heard us espouse for years.


Saul Alinsky noted this phenomenon. He wrote, in his Rules for Radicals:

Since the Haves publicly pose as the custodians of responsibility, morality, law, and justice (which are frequently strangers to each other), they can be constantly pushed to live up to their own book of morality and regulations. 
(Can't be done)

No organization, including organized religion, can live up to the letter of its own book. 

You can club them to death with their “book” of rules and regulations.

Zoom back, then, to Occupy. The movement’s usual mode of attack against corporations or police departments it doesn’t like is to shout slogans about how bad they are. One could argue that:

Greg Smith reminds us that there’s a better — and perhaps more nonviolent — way: 

If you want to get an institution to eat itself alive, don’t just denounce it altogether. Instead, find ways to make its most committed and loyal members consider whether the institution really lives up to its own cherished values, and let them do their thing. They’re the ones who can stir up far more trouble with far less effort than anyone on the outside ever could.

 The Other Argument:

When a company’s cherished values really are intolerable perhaps there’s no substitute for simply going into the streets and shutting it down.

OWS claims such an intolerable situation is:

(Goldman, protecting the wealth of the1%)