MEANWHILE BACK IN AMERICA
Today’s Wall Street Journals headlines read, “WALL STREET BACK ON TRACK TO AWARD RECORD PAY”. By contrast, the headlines in the L.A. Times business section included, “DEFAULTS LIKELY TO KEEP RISING”.
“Major U.S. Banks and securities firms are on pace to pay about $140 billion this year, a record high that shows compensation is rebounding despite regulatory scrutiny of Wall Street’s pay culture.” was the first paragraph from the Journal. The Times article centered on the fact mortgage rates had hit all time lows, but that made little difference to the housing market. Why? Economists are predicting foreclosures will rise through past next summer as unemployment continues to grow. Delinquencies will continue to climb because of the ongoing loss of income. So you see we are becoming like the Chinese. America’s wealth is held by 0.1% of the population while the other 99.9% are now poor! The ones of us still hanging onto our homes are literally one paycheck away from disaster. In the meantime, like that water closet rodent John Thain, the ousted CEO of Merrill Lynch, who last year spent $850,000 decorating his office bathroom, including a $35,000 gold-plated “dunny”, a $168,000 credenza finished off with a $14,000 waste paper basket, his competitors will working hard at how they can outdo him come bonus payment time. Maybe they may be able to acquire a solid 24 carrot gold bidet that not only washes the bum but also dries it!
Just 0.1% of $140,000 billion is $140,000 million. If those filthy low lives handed out a miserable 0.1% of their bonus checks to good causes, look at the difference they could make. That won’t happen. They probably now have their 30,000 sq ft Hampton’s mansions already on the market so they can upgrade 50,000 sq ft ones with all thirty bathroom dunnies fitted with bum drying gold-plated bidets! If 0.01% ($14 million) was handed to over American Samoa, the islands could be rebuilt!
I am repeating myself here, but I really have become so disheartened with the new Washington administration. Powered by the good will of most Americans, President Obama to me has squandered the opportunity to reform capitalism and those who are employed in it. Most financial institutions were the beneficiaries of the $780 billion TARP program which in less than six months has resulted in today’s Wall Street Journal’s main article. Compare that to unemployment shooting well past 10% of the workforce by Christmas and we have an interesting parallel. He even allows stupid statements to come out of the Fed and Treasury telling us the recession is over. I don’t care if we are moving onto the upside of the “U”, the bottom of the “U” has been dug (all caused by those gangsters on Wall Street with a little help from Bush and Cheney) so deep that for most of us America will never recover and we may very well join the nations of banana republic status (our currency has already headed that way) where we will have to hunt and fish for our food if Obama’s stimulus plans don’t start to take effect. He stimulated the banks enough to hand out $140 billion in bonuses, how about the helping those of us on Main Street now buying our groceries with food stamps!
-
Share
Our Photos
