Who cares if our major financial institutions are in the tank? Certainly not the executives of the major financial institutions in this country who continue to reward their “top” employees outrageously regardless of the deep pile of bullcrap into which they’ve they’ve driven their companies:

[T]he top five Wall Street banks — three of which racked up record losses — have announced that they are paying their employees a record $39 billion in year end bonuses. Hemorrhaging losses, Morgan Stanley, Merrill Lynch and Bear Sterns had to increase the percentage of revenue they devote to employee pay to ladle out these bonuses. So much for pay for performance.

Bank spokesman were not exactly lining up to justify this but Jeanne Branthover, managing director of a global search firm, helpfully explained: “It’s essential that pay is still there or you’re going to lose really good people.”

Thirty nine billion dollars worth of bonuses (that’s $39,000,000,000.00 for those who prefer numerals)? For the mismanagement these “really good people” have foisted upon their companies and shareholders? I know the dollar has been losing value lately but that’s still a large chunk of change even for mega-billionaires like Bill Gates and Warren Buffet. I bet even a few Saudi princes wouldn’t mind getting in on a racket this good. Ridiculous pay when your company is profitable, and even more ridiculous when you flush its assets down the toilet! Note to Mafia chieftains: you’re in the wrong business guys. The real crooks reside on Wall Street.

(cont.)

The one thing Wall Street knows how to do is raise money. The proof: Even with financial markets threatening to melt down worldwide, four of the Street’s biggest firms have attracted a total of $50 billion of investor cash to help cover losses on subprime- mortgage-related carnage past and on carnage yet to come.

There’s a sucker born every minute, right? But sooner or later even the suckers start to catch on to the swindle. And our financial institutions right now are the biggest con game going. Investors are losing their shirts, ordinary people are losing their homes, inflation, fueled by among other things, the dollar’s devaluation which is a direct result of the bursting financial bubbles these “really good people” created, is pilfering the pocketbooks of ordinary Americans who lack the benefit of working for a company that pays bonuses regardless of profits.

Back in the Gilded Age of the late 19th Century and early 20th century they had a name for “really good people” like these. They called them Robber Barons. It’s long past time to resurrect that nomenclature and that rhetoric, don’t you think?

For out of this modern civilization economic royalists carved new dynasties. New kingdoms were built upon concentration of control over material things. Through new uses of corporations, banks and securities, new machinery of industry and agriculture, of labor and capital—all undreamed of by the fathers—the whole structure of modern life was impressed into this royal service.

There was no place among this royalty for our many thousands of small business men and merchants who sought to make a worthy use of the American system of initiative and profit. They were no more free than the worker or the farmer. Even honest and progressive-minded men of wealth, aware of their obligation to their generation, could never know just where they fitted into this dynastic scheme of things.

It was natural and perhaps human that the privileged princes of these new economic dynasties, thirsting for power, reached out for control over Government itself. They created a new despotism and wrapped it in the robes of legal sanction. In its service new mercenaries sought to regiment the people, their labor, and their property. […]

For too many of us the political equality we once had won was meaningless in the face of economic inequality. A small group had concentrated into their own hands an almost complete control over other people’s property, other people’s money, other people’s labor—other people’s lives. For too many of us life was no longer free; liberty no longer real; men could no longer follow the pursuit of happiness. […]

These economic royalists complain that we seek to overthrow the institutions of America. What they really complain of is that we seek to take away their power. Our allegiance to American institutions requires the overthrow of this kind of power. In vain they seek to hide behind the Flag and the Constitution. In their blindness they forget what the Flag and the Constitution stand for. Now, as always, they stand for democracy, not tyranny; for freedom, not subjection; and against a dictatorship by mob rule and the over-privileged alike.

Sounds familiar, doesn’t it? Maybe we could use a few politicians willing to use these very same words again, willing to fight against an even more entrenched economic royalism than even FDR faced. Otherwise we will continue to suffer under the reign of those who steal our wealth, our prosperity and our future, all while promoting a sham of of a democracy.