Basically, for those unfamiliar, the show is about a rivalry between two characters, one a hedge fund billionaire named Bobby Axelrod, played by Damien Lewis, and the other a US Attorney named Chuck Rhodes, played by Paul Giamatti, in whose district the hedge fund operates and who is determined to prosecute and convict the owner. Complicating matters is that the USA's wife is a psychotherapist employed as an in-house counselor by the hedge fund. Now the show tries not to take sides. I get the impression the "good" characters we are supposed to be rooting for are a trio of AUSAs working under Rhodes, who is at best, an anti-hero, and honestly the show is structured more like he's the antagonist anyway. It seems to take it a little for granted that the audience is already going to be on the federal prosecutor's side (Hi, show. I'm Cannoli. We clearly have not met), such as assuming we accept its premise that the billionaire is automatically guilty of something and deserves, automatically, prosecution. And sure enough, he does shady crap and whatnot, breaking federal regulations on stock trading.

By the way, I find it even more offensive, in a way, that the concept of insider trading as a crime even exists. Because investing is not a game. It is not gambling and should not be. It is the purchasing of ownership in a business in order to give that business more money with which to operate, enabling it to produce goods and services better or more cheaply. In order to make the best investment possible, it seems only sensible that one should know as much as possible about where your money is going. But if you obtain any real knowledge of the company, it is now illegal to buy a stake in it. It is illegal for an employee of a company to believe in a new product or development so much that he tells his friends and encourages them to buy in. Seriously, WTF? Insider trading is not fraud, it's just smart investing. It's like kicking people out of the casino for counting cards at blackjack. That's not wrong! It's just being REALLY good at blackjack! But in both cases, it seems there is some mentality that getting a lot of money by using your brain instead of blind luck, must somehow be immoral (well, of course, in the case of the casino, they don't want to lose money). The mentality seems to be that insider trading is akin to looking at the other player's hand of cards. But that's in games. In the real world, with real money and real people's livelihoods on the line, transactions are not supposed to be "games". What's the difference between insider trading and legally required product labeling? In each case, the purchaser is finding out exactly and precisely what they are buying. Why is it okay for the owner of a company (ie a stockholder) to keep secrets about what he is selling, but not a soft-drink manufacturer?

One issue that the show tries to gloss over and minimize is that many investors in the hedge fund are regular ordinary people. It is a plot point in several episodes that the NYPD pension fund is invested with Axelrod. Do we NOT want him investing that money wisely? Do we want him putting it blindly into companies based solely on their past performance? Speaking of the cops and their retarded cousins, the firefighters (I have two brothers who were volunteer firefighters. I stand by my statement), it comes out that Axelrod's big break came when he saw trading opportunities in the midst of the crisis of 9/11, and that he kept trading even after he knew it was a terrorist attack. Okaaaaay? Aaaand? There is no indication that the trades he made are illegal. His enemies in the US Attorney's office chortle over the revelation and point to it as a justification for their efforts to dig up dirt on him and find a crime they can prosecute him for, but they don't actually charge him for anything related to it. And the cops and firefighters with whom he had formerly been best friends, many of whom are related to his wife, whose brother was a fireman killed in the WTC, start treating them like they are subhuman and some sort of horrible traitors. Like using their power to vandalize her sister's restaurant, in which Mrs. Axelrod is a silent partner. But he did not do anything to harm them! It's not like he was ignoring his duties or profited off their deaths directly, he just made money because the economy changed thanks to people reacting to the news. And also, his firm was about to fire him, but their HQ was in the WTC, and all the partners but him died in the attack. So, yeah the guy profited by really hideous events, but he did not cause or contribute to it, or even make money off the actual crimes committed. At worst it's in bad taste. Somehow. It's not the most sensitive thing he could have done. But he didn't do it to them, and they've been content to ride the gravy train of all his donations and scholarships and whatnot he's been shoveling at the appropriate charities ever since. If he hadn't made that kind of money in a way that offends New York's ____est, he'd have done it by hurting the feelings of someone else.

One interesting thing about taking advantage of the markets as a result of 9/11 to make a few hundred million, this fictitious trader is not the first person I have heard of doing it. I was equally unimpressed when it was presented as evidence of George Soros' perfidy. Except what Soros did was sell short and deliberately buck the agreement among other traders to buy in order to help boost the economy. Soros actually sabotaged the efforts to boost the stock market to help recover from 9/11, and did so to add to his billions at the expense of other's efforts to help the country & economy. He wasn't a desperate guy trying to make his mark and suddenly saddled with the sole responsibility for the financial well-being of his company and the livelihoods of his partners' now widowed and orphaned families. The imaginary character at whom the TV writers want us to be indignant was not nearly as bad as the guy who backs all the politicians they voted for.

And during the cinematic face-off between the two leads at the end of the first season, Axelrod tosses off the point, presented in a way that minimizes it, as if it's just something he's saying and not an objective truth, that stock market regulations are all arbitrary. They don't speak to an inherent good or evil, they are just things that some people decided they did not like. At one point, Rhodes and one of his team, the guy who is actually morally challenged in the first season which is why I think he's the one we are supposed to be rooting for, are talking about motivations for going after Axelrod and the thing that they seem to think is wrong with him is that he is making things unfair for the little guy and that by putting him in jail, they are going to tilt the table a little bit closer to level. But that's back to the mentality that everyone in America is playing a game to get rich, and the people in the lead are winning! Axelrod is a hedge fund manager! His business is making money by buying and selling stocks and taking advantage of loopholes arbitrarily placed in the rules concerning those activities. He does not take advantage of "the little guy." This is not to say he, from time to time, does not do things that hurt people, often as collateral in his petty maneuvers to win pissing contests or grab a million or two more he does not remotely need. But that's not what the US Attorney for the Southern District of New York is prosecuting him for. By the way, when the show aired, it had been more than a decade since a WASP held that position. Thanks to Trump, it did go a couple years later to a white guy who might have things in common with Charles Rhodes Jr. But that's a funny thing. This is not the first time I have seen the USASDNY portrayed on screen, in an antagonistic role, scripted by a man named Sorkin and both times it was a whiter than white bread guy and both times, the character was based loosely on Preet Bahara. Whitewashing somehow never makes the news when they do it to a villain, who, BTW, took his dismissal from the post with the same grace Donald Trump took his own. The guy Axelrod is based on, incidentally, now owns the NY Mets, and as far as the blue collar people of the outer boroughs are concerned, untouchable if the stars they've finally been able to acquire with his money start playing like they are supposed to.

See that's the thing about the little guy. Either he's a bitter scheming asshole who probably turned to crime or he cares more about his baseball team than how a billionaire cheating on some rules that will never ever matter to, or protect in any way, The Little Guy, abstractly is making this country somehow worse. What the rules really do is protect the old money establishment types and the upper fractions of the one percent from upstarts who come from blue collar backgrounds and outplay the established players at their game.

One of the things they did with the contrast between Axelrod and Rhodes is that Axelrod IS a blue collar guy who grew up hustling and holding down multiple jobs as a teenager. One of the episodes designed to make him seem sympathetic is when he arranged to buy the naming rights to a culture type building, I think a museum or something like that, by a payout to the descendants of the guy for whom the building is already named. He gets them in the room by dangling a large offer and then proceeds to hand them a check for a fraction of the amount, launching into an anecdote about how when he was a golf caddy, the patriarch of their family stiffed him and got him fired, because he gave good advice the man ignored and his son, one of the heirs now in the room snickered at his subsequent screwup. So now he is penalizing the family for his lost income with interest and making them take his pittance, because they are so deeply in debt they can't turn it down. This is supposed to be an episode of justice being done, but it just makes him look sad, from my perspective at any rate. Meanwhile, Rhodes is an Ivy League legacy and trust fund baby, and not a little of his animus against Axelrod is encouraged by his father, who clearly seems to resent this parvenu barging into his nice neat world. The essence of their conflict is Tom Buchanan versus Jay Gatsby.

Anyway, in the third season, there is a new Attorney General, played as a stereotypical Texan, by Clancy Brown, an actor who specializes in shady bosses or patriarchs, and genial villains. His orders to Rhodes as US Attorney, who serves at the pleasure of the President, and for all practical purposes, the AG, are to move away from financial crimes and on to other things, though he is allowing the efforts related to Axelrod to go on. In one episode, a low level actor in one of Axelrod's criminal conspiracies is flipped by the prosecutors, but Axelrod manages to get her deported through a clerical error. When they want to bring her back to the US to testify, the AG denies it, pointing out that she came into the country illegally, committing a crime in the process, and then took part in another crime, that defrauded an American company, cost workers their jobs and cost investors heavily, which was the point of the scam Axelrod had her commit. And for doing all these things, breaking all these federal laws, they want to bring her back, free from prosecution, rewarding her criminal history. Later on, when the AG is demanding the prosecution of a federal inmate who killed a guard, Rhodes arranges for the guard's misconduct to be leaked. While they congratulate themselves on the public outrage now making it impossible to prosecute the killer, the AG calls to point out that he and Rhodes read different newspapers and while the NY Times and their readership are horrified on behalf of the photogenic Hispanic killer, Breitbart and THEIR readers are incensed that a drug dealer killed a prison guard. So the case goes through, but meanwhile the (female, minority) official Rhodes forced to leak the story to enable his plot has been fired.

And this is what it comes to on the show. Who gets in trouble depends on the agenda on the people calling the shots. What one side sees as crimes that threaten society, and must be eradicated, are, to the other, merely arbitrary lines being crossed that a case can be made for not drawing in the first place. One side sees a witness who can testify her boss asked her to make a store look bad, so they can hopefully force him to testify against the vengeful billionaire who wanted it done, and the other side sees a multiple times criminal, whose actions in the country prove why they want crackdowns on her sort in the first place. One side sees an entertaining rich guy who embodies their idle fantasies, and does a lot of good, and the side sees cheater against sacrosanct laws that protect against wealth imbalance who embodies their worst nightmares. One side sees authority being abused and the people who are supposed to safeguard society acting out their own issues on people who comes within their power, and the other side thinks that person who came into their power was a bad guy and while it might be "wrong" what happened to him, they are not going to weep any tears, and certainly not swing an axe at the very system that protects us all. The first side would retort that it does NOT protect "us", just an entrenched institution that is not focused on the real threat. And that very discussion applies to two different cases on the show. To one side, the dead prison guard is the abuser, and the prison system his flawed institution, and to the other side, Chuck Rhodes is the abuser and the federal prosecutor's office is the institution exceeding its remit. Honestly, it reminds of the bit in "Crossroads of Twilight" where Egwene is thinking that if Rand has somehow transgressed against Aes Sedai, he will have to be punished, especially because of who he is, because as the Dragon Reborn, he is too dangerous to be allowed to violate peoples' rights. And he ESPECIALLY has to be punished for transgressing against Aes Sedai, because if he can harm Aes Sedai, he can harm anyone. You can flip that thinking for either party in "Billions". Chuck Rhodes cannot be allowed to carry out his vendetta against Bobby Axelrod, because if he can break the rules and crush this billionaire, who is on a first name basis with Steve Tisch and Lars Ulrich and the Secretary of the Treasury, no one is safe from Rhodes' abuse of his prosecutorial powers. On the other hand, no criminal can possibly do the harm Bobby Axelrod can do with a seven figure cash bribe that is a smaller portion of his net worth than a dime does to normal people, so how can you say any extreme is too far in shutting him down for good?

The divide is too great. You wonder how people can vote for a clown like Donald Trump or a senile fossil like Joe Biden? Because the alternative is the other side getting into power and then your side is in the crosshairs. Yesterday's hero is now a criminal. Today's victor was on the ropes yesterday. And neither side is wrong in their fears. No one wanted Donald Trump for president, they did not want Hillary Clinton, and they did not want the empowerment of people who seek to destroy their way of life and everything that's important to them. No one wanted Joe Biden, they wanted to stop Donald Trump from enabling people who would do the same to them.