Goldman wasn't alone. The nation's six largest banks -- all committed to this strategy of flagrantly gorging themselves as America goes hungry -- set aside a whopping $140 billion (every penny of it a direct transfer from the taxpayer) for executive compensation last year, a sum only slightly less than the $164 billion they paid themselves in the pre-crash year of 2007.
Beyond a few such bleats of outrage, however, the huge payout was met, by and large, with a collective sigh of resignation. Because beneath America's populist veneer, on a more subtle strata of the national psyche, there remains a strong temptation to not really give a sh*t. The rich, after all, have always made way too much money; what's the difference if some fat cat in New York pockets $20 million instead of $10 million?
The only reason such apathy exists, however, is that there's still a widespread misunderstanding of how exactly Wall Street "earns" its money, with emphasis on the quotation marks around "earns." The question everyone should be asking, as one bailout recipient after another posts massive profits is this: In an economy as horrible as ours, with every factory town between New York and Los Angeles looking like the hundreds of hollowed-out ghost ships at the bottom 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 employee "performance" was just that awesome? A year and a half after they were minutes away from bankruptcy, how can it be that these a**holes are 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.
In fact, they're back conniving and playing speculative long shots in force -- only this time with the full financial support of the U.S. government. In the process, they're rapidly re-creating the conditions for another crash, with the same actors once again playing the same crazy games of financial chicken with the same toxic assets as before.
That's why this bonus business isn't merely a matter of getting upset about whether or not Lloyd Blankfein buys himself one tropical island or two on his next birthday. The reality is that the post-bailout era in which Goldman thrived has turned out to be a chaotic frenzy of high-stakes con-artistry, with taxpayers and clients bilked out of billions using a dizzying array of hustles and cons that, but for their ponderous complexity, would have fit well in slick grifter movies like The Sting and Matchstick Men. There's even a term in con-man lingo for what some of the banks are doing right now, with all their cosmetic gestures of scaling back bonuses and giving to charities. In the grifter world, calming down a "mark" so he doesn't call the cops is known as the "Cool Off."
To appreciate how all of these (sometimes brilliant) schemes work is to understand the difference between earning money and "making scores," and to realize that the profits these banks are posting don't so much represent national growth and recovery, but rather something much closer to the losses one would report after a theft or a car crash.
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