Reality TV Hits Rock Bottom

As millions of Americans struggle to hold on to their homes, Wall Street has found a way to make money from the mortgage mess. Investment funds are buying billions of dollars? worth of home loans, discounted from the loans? original value.

The corporate media is now making the connection that millions of us have already made, namely, that a criminal gang of rich white guys in New York did some extremely reckless things with the nation's collective wealth and the workers got clobbered.

The financial sector employs about 6% of all workers but ‘produced’ 40% of all companies' profits. Making money without actually making something turned out to be the largest growth sector of economy from the early 1980s until the current crisis.

Congress should change the wall-street environment. There needs to be more competition. The impulse last year to have bigger banks take over failing big banks now looks exactly wrong. Congress also needs to force banks to hold a lot more capital.

Obama's package to stabilize the financial system — reducing interest rates to near zero, bolstering big banks with taxpayer money, guaranteeing billions of dollars of financial institutions’ debts — helped set the stage for a new Wall Street boom.

The most-quoted sentence in financial journalism this year, by Matt Taibbi , describes Goldman Sachs as a “great vampire squid wrapped around the face of humanity, relentlessly jamming its blood funnel into anything that smells like money.”

Why should reducing social inequality be ruled out as a government goal? The spectacle of wall street speculators raking in incomes greater than those of a 1,000 or even 10,000 workers is a symptom of a deeply diseased and reactionary social order.

The Obama regime doesn't have the balls to go after the most outrageous salaries and bonuses that are about to flow. The bond traders at Goldman Sachs, JP Morgan Chase and Morgan Stanley will get fat bonuses that derive from taxpayer welfare.

Payback Time: Obama flew into New York City Tuesday to raise millions of dollars in campaign donations from America’s financial elite. He will probably clear at least $3 million, largely from a Manhattan bash with an entry fee of $30,400 per couple.

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.

Politicians and media were eager to protect the banks from going under. While tens of millions of people losing their jobs homes was an inevitable consequence of neoliberalism, the collapse of a bank would have undermined the belief in capitalism.

After the mortgage business imploded, Wall Street investment banks began searching for a new scam to make money. They think they've found one. The bankers plan to buy “life settlements,” life insurance policies that ill and old people sell for cash.

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?