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Wall Street to #OWS: Obnoxious Is Good

 An ad for the trading company Forex flatters the 1 percent that they’re worth it. 

Leslie Savan

October 17, 2011

If you were going to make a commercial to demonstrate that Wall Street players are arrogant greedsters who totally don’t get the concerns of #OWS protesters and are indifferent to the working class, you couldn’t do much better than this, a spot for the trading company Forex that ran during Sunday’s talk shows. In fact, just as the Martin Luther King Jr., memorial was being dedicated, the ad’s currency trader was jabbering about “a place where a man’s success is determined not by the color of his credit card but by the position he took on the Aussie dollar in the face of rising commodity prices.”

Sure, the ad is jokey, but it indicates how much these people need to be told they’re wonderful, even when they’re being obnoxious; after all, they operate on a higher plane that the little people just can’t understand. (E.g., see Jamie Dimon’s and others’ comments here.)

As Forex’s Bonfire of the Vanities campaign slogan assures them, “It’s your world. Trade it.”

 

Leslie SavanLeslie Savan, author of Slam Dunks and No-Brainers and The Sponsored Life, writes for The Nation about media and politics.


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