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There are a lot of really pissed off people in this country right now, folks just completely wired over the audacious greed, arrogance and outrageous stupidity of the heads of the Wall Street financial firms and the nation’s leading banks. The daily news we’re receiving of lavish retreats, million dollar office make overs, unbelievably over-priced office area rugs, $19 BILLION dollars-plus in year end Wall Street bonuses, Bernard Madoff’s penthouse house arrest and his millions in gifts to friends as his empire got sucked into a black hole of financial despair - all of that has just led to a level of contempt for these men and women that can hardly be described.
Both President Obama and Vice-President Biden expressed some of the feeling, though neither mentioned the public executions and floggings a lot of Americans would like to see. I’m one of them. When you can accept hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayer money to save your sorry asses, and then turn around and pay yourselves billions of dollars for work bonuses after a period in which your work essentially destroyed the world’s financial system - you are either stupid or arrogant, or both, to an unfathomable degree. Sure the average Wall Street worker puts in 80 hours or more a week, and sure the job sucks, but their typical bonus is five times their base salary, and this past year averaged $112,000, down from about $150,000 over the past few years. Sorry buddy, I don’t work 80 hours a week, but my year end bonus was a turkey at Thanksgiving. This year not even a Christmas party or a ham. In fact, where I work, we haven’t had a Christmas bonus in years, and damn few raises. The American auto industry also needs a real kick in the ass. After a decade of ignoring the world’s need for fuel efficient, clean running, safe, smaller automobiles and trucks, and going into financial ruin because of it, American auto manufacturers still have the gall to spend millions in court to fight new mandatory clean air legislation for new cars!! They built gas guzzling behemoths that they can’t give away now, they asked for billions from us taxpayers to keep them alive, then they turn around and spend the money to fight us and the laws that would have saved them if they’d followed them 10 years ago. And what exactly are the banks doing with the hundreds of billions that was loaned to them to kick the economy back into action? Sitting on it, it seems. I just heard that there are banks offering down to 4% interest rates for re-financing mortgages. I also heard that, in orcder to get those rates, you may need an exceptional credit rating. Let me see if I get this right - the banks, whose credit has turned to sh*t, got bailed out with taxpayer money, and they are now demanding that anyone who wants access to that money had better have done a hell of a lot better job than the bank’s have done with how they’ve handled credit. Un-be-leave-able! The high and the mighty needed a kick in their goddamn, whitened teeth, and I do believe that is what they are getting. Vermont’s junior Senator Bernie Sanders is asking for a full investigation of how this financial disaster happened, and he wants names named and feet held to the fire. He wants to find out who’s responsible and hold them accountable. I hope he gets what he wants. But I also, while in full rant here, have to spread the blame to a government that failed on its watch. It is the government’s responsibility to protect its citizens from predatory businesses and to regulate businesses for their own and for the populace’s good. When credit card companies legally can charge 15, 20, 25 percent rates of interest and higher, organized crime rates that should be outlawed, and large banks are allowed to create sub-prime loans, and chop up and sell mortgages in a way that is so complex it defies understanding, then our government has failed to protect either its citizens or its businesses.
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