"Secret Society" for Wall Street Types? What One Reporter Claims- Daily Kos

I have no idea if any of this is true or not

Real life is often stranger than fiction so who knows

Tue Feb 18, 2014 at 12:37 AM PST

NY Magazine reporter crashes a secret Wall Street society exposing country top financer's 1% jokes

by HoundDogFollow

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What a wild story we have here in 1% Jokes and Plutocrats In Drag: What I Saw When I Crashed a Wall Street Secret Society, by Kevin Roose in the New York Magazine. This expose of the secret fraternity, Kappa Beta Phi, involves an incredible list of some of the richest and powerful people in the country acting out drag skits, mocking poor people, liberals, and making fun of the global financial crash that has devastated the savings of billions of people around the world. By comparison Mitt Romney's 47% comment may seem like an episode of Mr. Roger's neighborhood.

I’d heard whisperings about the existence of Kappa Beta Phi, whose members included both incredibly successful financiers (New York City's Mayor Michael Bloomberg, former Goldman Sachs chairman John Whitehead, hedge-fund billionaire Paul Tudor Jones) and incredibly unsuccessful ones (Lehman Brothers CEO Dick Fuld, Bear Stearns CEO Jimmy Cayne, former New Jersey governor and MF Global flameout Jon Corzine). It was a secret fraternity, founded at the beginning of the Great Depression, that functioned as a sort of one-percenter’s Friars Club. Each year, the group’s dinner features comedy skits, musical acts in drag, and off-color jokes, and its group’s privacy mantra is “What happens at the St. Regis stays at the St. Regis.” For eight decades, it worked. No outsider in living memory had witnessed the entire proceedings firsthand. ...
I wasn’t going to be bribed off my story, but I understood their panic.  Here, after all, was a group that included many of the executives whose firms had collectively wrecked the global economy in 2008 and 2009. And they were laughing off the entire disaster in private, as if it were a long-forgotten lark. (Or worse, sing about it — one of the last skits of the night was a self-congratulatory parody of ABBA’s “Dancing Queen,” called “Bailout King.”) These were activities that amounted to a gigantic middle finger to Main Street and that, if made public, could end careers and damage very public reputations. ...
The first and most obvious conclusion was that the upper ranks of finance are composed of people who have completely divorced themselves from reality. No self-aware and socially conscious Wall Street executive would have agreed to be part of a group whose tacit mission is to make light of the financial sector’s foibles. Not when those foibles had resulted in real harm to millions of people in the form of foreclosures, wrecked 401(k)s, and a devastating unemployment crisis.

Roose predicts this expose is going to destroy some careers, and damage reputations and he may be right. Not because they dressed up in drag, which is just part of the diversity spectrum, in my opinion, but because of the crassness of the jokes about poverty, and a financial crash that has ruined so many peoples life savings, and destroyed so many businesses. But, it is also worth noting that he adapted this article from his book, Young Money, published today by Grand Central Publishing.

7:18 AM PT: Updated to change NYT to NY Magazine.  He was as NYT reporter when he did the undercover work, but published the story in NY Magazine.
7:26 AM PT: I just woke up and am amazed this is at the top of the rec list and just two spots above the Christie report I did last night. It was so slow a four in the morning when I published that I thought it would be lost. I still have to read the comments. Here is a link to the complete membership list of Kappa Beta Phi.
Revealed: The Full Membership List of Wall Street’s Secret Society