My new boss invited me to go to lunch. Lunch turned out to be an awards luncheon for the downtown partnership where our group had a table. Comrades I have never seen so many faces of capital in my life. 1,000 suits and pantsuits that see the entire landscape around them as a vast frontier that they can exploit. 1,000 suits and pantsuits chowing down on salmon and applauding each other for finding the most creative and profitable ways for real estate capital to devour every untouched pocket of urban land in my city and be securitized and revitalized and gentrified to oblivion.
I don't know how we are going to resist this absolute monolith going forward but my feeling after today is pretty bleak.
You should see some of the banking conferences I run AV for. The worst is the leadership panels, where three bank CEOs and a sponsor spend an hour talking about how much good their bank does for the community. I kind of enjoy when they bring a regulator up because everyone in the crowd is clearly so annoyed, though.