Free Enterprise for Us but Klepto Markets for Them

Those of us who used to believe in free enterprise and free markets are having second thru seventh thoughts about now.  Matt Taibbi (one of the best actual reporters going, one of his blogs is here.) posted over at Big Picture says: “The Best 18 Months of Grifting This Country Has Ever Seen.”

“The nation’s six largest banks set aside a whopping $140 billion for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007.”

The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits — Goldman reported $13.4 billion in profits last year, after paying out that $16.2 billion in bonuses and compensation — is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like those hollowed-out ghost ships we see on History Channel documentaries like Shipwrecks of the Great Lakes, where in the hell did Wall Street’s eye-popping profits come from, exactly? Did Goldman go from bailout city to $13.4 billion in the black because, as Blankfein suggests, its “performance” was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how are these assholes not only back on their feet again, but hauling in bonuses at the same rate they were during the bubble?

The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.”

 You may become a commie or a sex slave after reading him. I've been saying for a couple of years that we have an ethical problem, not a political or financial one.