May 31, 2011
Elizabeth Murphy
100 F Street, NE
Washington, DC 20549
Dear Murphy,
America paid & will pay a terrible economic & emotional price because of sociopathic risk-taking by Wall Street executives, who took those risks because they knew they could walk away with $billions in bonuses & stock options while remaining legally, & emotionally, unaffected by short, mid-, & long-term consequences of their actions. We need rules, & actual enforcement of them, so that Wall Street pay packages don't encourage short-term risk-taking by sociopathic personalities, such as Leonard Blankfein doing God's work, & Tony Hayward anxious to get his life back, representative financiers in having the cognition & ethics of crack addicts.
The rules should require a 5 year deferral period for executive bonuses at big banks, ban executive hedging of pay packages, & require specific, & accurate, details from banks on precisely how they ensure that executives will share in long-run risks created by their decisions. This should apply to the full range of financial institutions, & draw in all the key executives at those companies.
"Our future depends on understanding by individuals of features of our present & past, & responding responsively. It relies on individual & corporate human understanding. . .Further advance has to be toward management of the whole ecosystem, which now rests in mankind's hands, for purposes to be decided by mankind, desirably as a consequence of developing a well-advised population, which is not the same as decisions made by popular vote for the creation of wealth.
Wealth creation by itself is dangerous," R. Williams & J. da Silva, /The Chemistry of Evolution: The Development of Our Ecosystem/
(NY: Elsevier, 2006).
"What of the future? The human population explosion with its accompanying technological explosion is disrupting the orderly development of the world's biosphere in a variety of ways. Although anthropocentrism is usually unscientific, it does seem safe to say that now is a special time, a transition period; and that we are a special species, the unwitting cause of the transition. One thing seems
certain: the world will eventually resume its orderly development after our species goes extinct. Questions about what will happen before that, before (as one might say) natural order is restored, are unanswerable," EC Peliou, /After the Ice Age/ (Univ. of Chicago Press, 1991),
Referencing Docket No.'s:
OTS: RIN 155-AC49
OCC: RIN 1557-AD39
Fed: RIN 7100-AD69
SEC: RIN 3235-AL06
FHFA: RIN 2590-AA42
FDIC: RIN 3064-AD56
Sincerely,
Dr. Gerrit Crouse