that article is also a good reminder (to me at least) of the futility of thinking of "shame" as something that could possibly hold republicans back or make them pause. it is truly irrelevant to them. i like the description of the rich Greenwich republicans pride in building tall walls around their homes that runs through these paragraphs:
n the early years of this century, the economic divisions that would come to define America in the age of Trump became evident on the lush back roads of Greenwich, in a sign so subtle that it was easy to miss. Many of the new estates going up were no longer surrounded by the simple stone walls, stacked to the height of a farmer’s hip, that crossed the New England landscape. Instead, the builders introduced a more imposing barrier: tall, stately walls of chiselled stone, mortared in place.The fashion for higher walls had little to do with safety; Greenwich has one of the lowest crime rates in America. To Frank Farricker, who served on the town’s planning-and-zoning commission, they symbolized power and seclusion. “Instead of building two or three feet high, people got into six-footers—the ‘Fuck you’ walls,” he said. When nearby municipalities noticed the trend, they treated it like an invasive species; they rewrote zoning rules to prevent the spread of what stonemasons took to calling “Greenwich walls.”
The walls were products of one of the most extraordinary accumulations of wealth in American history. In much of the country, the corporate convulsions of the seventies had entailed layoffs, offshoring, and declining union power, but on Wall Street they inspired a surge of creativity. Since the seventeen-hundreds, Wall Street had focussed mostly on funnelling American savings into new businesses and mortgages. But, in the last two decades of the twentieth century, financiers and economists opened vast new realms of speculation and financial engineering—aggressive methods to bet on securities, merge businesses, and cut expenses using bankruptcy laws. U.S. stock markets grew twelvefold, and most of the gains accrued to the wealthiest Americans. By 2017, Wall Streeters were taking home twenty-three per cent of the country’s corporate profits—and home, for many of them, was Connecticut.
The Internet allowed financiers to work from anywhere, so some escaped New York’s higher taxes by relocating their offices closer to where they lived. Newspapers took to calling Greenwich the “Hedge Fund Capital of the World.” The dealmakers earned vastly more than the industrial executives they had replaced. In 2004, Institutional Investor reported that the top twenty-five hedge-fund managers earned an average of two hundred and seven million dollars a year.
Nine of those top managers lived or worked in Greenwich, led by Edward Lampert, who in 2004 earned an estimated $1.02 billion after orchestrating the merger of Kmart and Sears. Lampert was not one to dress like a gardener; just offshore, he docked his yacht, a two-hundred-and-eighty-eight-foot vessel that he had named Fountainhead, for Ayn Rand’s individualist fable. (Trump has said that he identifies with the book’s hero, Howard Roark, a designer of skyscrapers who declares, “I do not recognize anyone’s right to one minute of my life. . . . No matter who makes the claim, how large their number, or how great their need.”) So much individual wealth accumulated in southern Connecticut that tax officials took to monitoring the quarterly payments of a half-dozen of the richest taxpayers, because their personal earnings would affect how much the entire state was able to spend on public services.
Around town, Morgan Stanley executives no longer competed to wear the cheapest wristwatch. (The current chairman and C.E.O., James Gorman, is celebrated on watch-enthusiast blogs for a rare Rolex that can sell for seventeen thousand dollars.) Jack Welch, who succeeded Reginald Jones at G.E., retired in 2001 with a record severance package of more than four hundred million dollars. One of Jones’s friends, the investor Vincent Mai, was dismayed that many business leaders put short-term interests ahead of long-term vision. “The culture changed into grabbing as much as you can, as quickly as you can,” Mai, the founder and chairman of the Cranemere Group, told me. “Restraint just seems to have gone out the window.”
The money physically redrew Greenwich, as financiers built estates on a scale once favored by Gilded Age railroad barons. The hedge-fund manager Steven A. Cohen paid $14.8 million in cash for a house, then added an ice rink, an indoor basketball court, putting greens, a fairway, and a massage room, ultimately swelling the building to thirty-six thousand square feet—larger than the Taj Mahal. In a final flourish, Cohen obtained special permission to surround his estate with a wall that exceeded the town’s limits on height. It was nine feet tall.