Why I Don’t Care Why Greg Smith Quit

Greg Smith was in his 12th year with Goldman Sachs when he quit yesterday and posted his manifesto in the New York Times to explain “Why I Am Leaving Goldman Sachs”.

Do I care?

No.

Greg Smith is a recognizable small-time opportunist. He wants it both ways. He is 33-years-old, has been with GS for 12 years, was making $500,000 a year, which isn’t all that much dough, but he hadn’t made it to the level of Managing Director. He was described by a man he attended Stanford University with as being a person who had “a really high moral fiber”.

Spare me. The same has been said of religious zealots who willingly murder transgressors…it’s a meaningless encomium.

But Mr. Smith’s fiber being highly moral or not is not the point.

Now that things have not worked out well at GS for Mr. Smith, and now that GS rep has been seriously tarnished, Mr. Smith wants us to know he never liked the way GS operated and he stayed on just to change things from the inside out, because the way GS was operating, was, he said, “making me ill.”

There’s a lot of that sick-making moral lassitude going around. Rick Santorum told us the separation of church and state views of John F. Kennedy made him “want to throw up”. And yet, both Smith and Santorum stuck around for years doing whatever they had to do to advance their careers before discovering they had a visceral response to the company they kept.

The organization Smith now reviles couldn’t see its way to making him a Managing Director. Do you think this has anything to do with Smith having belatedly grown a spine?

I do not care why Greg Smith quit Goldman Sachs any more than I care why a woman who has had three abortions decides aborting is repellent and wants no woman to have an abortion. I do not care why Greg Smith quit Goldman Sachs any more than I care why a jewel thief turns state’s evidence and wants his thieving compadres put in jail. I do not care why Greg Smith quit Goldman Sachs because I also do not care why a rejected lover wants the former object of his/her affection to rot in hell. The reasons are all too transparent and vengeful…no explanation is necessary.

I do not care about Greg Smith’s reasons because they are suspect and he looks like a slimey little putz trying to spin his years of turning a blind eye to corruption into a magnificent act of sacrifice.