Reality TV Hits Rock Bottom

There is an element of provocation in the pay awards being doled out by the banks. Far from curbing their avarice, they are flaunting their wealth and power in the midst of soaring unemployment and deepening social misery for millions of Americans.

The moral is: Cheap money creates bubbles. And bubbles move wealth from workers to rich motherfuckers. The same old story. That's why the wealth gap is wider now than anytime since the Gilded Age. The rich own everything. The poor get screwed again.

Germany's finance minister, known for his fierce criticism of banking excesses that caused the global financial crisis, is warning that the plague of "casino capitalism" is returning to some banking centers. He also takes a stab at German executives.

The banks are now aggressively pressing people who are delinquent on loans and mortgages in order to extract what they can, charge usurious interest and fees to capitalize on your crisis. That is the business model Obama invested in for all of us.

With millions of American’s out of work, construction projects stagnated, the auto industry stripped to its hubcaps by corporate raiders, Goldman Sachs reported in their quarterly earnings that they had made a net profit of $3.44 billion.

The financial industry lobbying in Washington, at $104.7 million for the first three months of 2009, is 8% down on last year. But that is to be expected – why should Wall Street continue paying top dollar for a wholly owned subsidiary?

Barack Obama has quarantined single-payer healthcare advocates, crushed dissent against the war in Congress, and transferred more money to the finance capital class than at any time in planetary history. Not bad for just five months in office.

This isn't socialism, but an extension of longstanding corporate welfarism. The rich and powerful turn to the government to help them whenever they can, while needy individuals get little social protection. We need to break up the too-big-to-fail ban