Wall Street Bankers’ Bonus Abuse Issue!

The notion that Wall Street keeps its gravy train rolling by lining the pockets of our top-tier politicians with money and other influence-peddling gifts in order to condone the financiers’ actions is quite disturbing. In fact, the financiers’ claims per the paramount importance of their work as an excuse to enable them to get away with whatever they deem appropriate for themselves (e.g., awarding of excessive tax-payer financed bonuses, etc.) is very disturbing as it smacks of greed and self-centered conceit.  But the biggest rub is that these absurd bonuses were largely financed via the billions of dollars in taxpayer-financed funds from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP) and trillions in loans from both the Federal Reserve and the FDIC.  These sources of aid money were designed to help the Wall Street financial institutions deemed too big to fail to survive their own terrible misdeeds, not to excessively reward their executives for jobs NOT well-done.  This has got to be perhaps the biggest misappropriation of our hard-earned tax money that has ever transpired in the history of this country. 

Finally, as long as big money talks and remains the primary influence driver in the current socio-political (or cultural) climates across the globe, then people in power will apparently continue to walk in the direction deemed appropriate  by the big money purveyors (e.g., Goldman Sachs, George Soros, et al.).  The condoning by governments of  their large scale market manulation shenanigans for their personal gain at the expense of the taxpayers of the world speaks for itself.  And their latest ploy of shorting the Euro while playing credit default swaps (CDOs) shows that there’s no shame on their part.  Finally, even President Obama is softening up his tone towards the big banking entities and their actions. And speaking of being “too big to fail’, perhaps the US socio-economic system and federal government is falling under this same exact definition.  This splitting up (i.e., per the splitting up of  giant oil corporation Standard Oil over 100 years ago) is becoming a more realistic option over time in terms of gaining more value and growth opportunities from the resulting smaller entities that would result.