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OpEdNews Op Eds    H3'ed 10/12/10

Wrong-Way Barry

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So, how you doin'? I only ask because I am checking to see how the whole "trickle-down" thing is working for you. Because, if the news in today's Wall St. Journal is true, those of us down here must be just about due for a real soaker. Because the folks at the top are really raking it in -- again:

Wall Street Pay to Hit Record $144 Billion This Year
10/11/10 -- Daily Finance: Pay on Wall Street is on pace to break a record high for a second consecutive year, according to a study conducted byThe Wall Street Journal, growing 4% in 2010 at nearly three dozen of the top financial institutions...The 35 top publicly held securities and investment-services firms are set to pay $144 billion in compensation and benefits, up from $139 billion in 2009, according to theJournalsurvey. Compensation was expected to rise at 26 of the firms.

The study also found that revenue was expected to rise at 29 of the 35 firms surveyed, but at a slower pace than pay. Wall Street revenue is expected to rise 3%, to $448 billion from $433 billion, despite a slowdown in some high-profile activities like stock and bond trading. Overall, Wall Street is expected to pay nearly a third -- 32.1% -- of its revenue to employees." (DailyFinance: http://srph.it/cwQRR9 )

And Democrats wonder why progressives are so depressed (emotionally and financially) this election cycle. Duh. It's because this is exactly the opposite of what we voted for two years ago -- the EXACT OPPOSITE !

It's why we feel like we got suckered into a political version of Three Card Monte. It's why the old adage, "Fool me once shame on you. Fool me twice, shame on me," rattles our frontal lobes. It's why we feel our stomachs turn every time we're told we need to elect Dems instead of the other guys -- because the "Dems are different."

Excuse us, but can someone point us to the "different" part. All we're seeing is same old, same old -- with the same old folks getting the same old goodies while all we get is the same old crap. Not sorta the same old crap. Not a kinder/gentler same old crap. But EXACTLY the same old crap.
fox

Barry, you were supposed to be a bright fellow. How did you get it so goddamn wrong? Instead of saving the legion of ordinary folk that elected you, you saved Wall Street. They scared you into saving their thieving butts. Like the old Red Fox character in Sanford & Son, they slumped in their leather desk chairs, grabbed at their chests and declared, "This is the big one, this is it!" And you fell for it. Sucker.

Their way of thanking you for it, is by using a lot of that dough they raked in this year -- thanks entirely to you -- to fund the campaigns of the very people we elected you to get rid of in the first place.

Brilliant!

And the banks you saved, what are they doing to show their gratitude? They're out there stealing millions of homes (they call it "foreclosing") from the same folks they made money off five years ago suckering them into taking out shady loans. You remember those shady loans, don'tchya Barry? You should. Because you used taxpayer money to buy them from those banks you saved in the hopes those grateful bankers would make new loans to fund a recovery. Instead they are sitting on all that money and pushing it around Wall Street and the bond markets. And, with the federal reserve charging the banks zero interest, both Wall St and the banksters have made another freakin' fortune by doing nothing useful.

Brilliant!

That's what we got for our $750 billion "stimulus," It was like giving Viagra to serial rapists.

And so, Barry, now that your partys' back is up against a wall of disappointment, you propose $50 billion to create infrastructure jobs -- a bone to your base. Of course this won't happen, because Republicans will make damn sure it doesn't. We know it won't happen because Dems are the perennial sissies of the Congressional Fight Club.

But, even if that $50 billion gets passed, you still got things completely backwards, Barry. You should have put $700 billion of the original stimulus into infrastructure and jobs programs -- ala NRA. Then you should have handed Wall St and the banks the remaining $50 billion with a note attached:
bankers
"Do what you can with this and don't come around whining for more or I'll give DOJ the green light to arrest a few of you thieving bastards. B.O.)

But that's not what you did. Instead you bought into the fiscal version of "trickle-down" economics and saved the wrong constituency.

Now your party is going to lose control of Congress. You know it and now you're trying to get us to vote for the same bunch again. You're final strategy, the last refuge of those who fail, is fear. You keep warning us what will happen if we don't get "energized" and vote for Dems next month.


The only trouble with that threat it fails, as you pols like to put it -- to "resonate.". After all, you've had control for two years, and look what we got for it; Wall Street is again rolling in clover and banks are stealing homes like pinstriped hordes of Genghis Khan. The rest of us are still out here, just scraping by -- barely.

Brilliant!
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Stephen Pizzo has been published everywhere from The New York Times to Mother Jones magazine. His book, Inside Job: The Looting of America's Savings and Loans, was nominated for a Pulitzer.

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