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Wall Street's bailout hustle
"What is the state of our moral being when [Goldman Sachs CEO] Lloyd Blankfein taking a $9 million bonus is viewed as this great act of contrition, when every penny of it was a direct transfer from the taxpayer?" asks Eliot Spitzer, who tried to hold Wall Street accountable during his own ill-fated stint as governor of New York.
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 shit . . . .
The only reason such apathy exists, however, is because 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 . . . is this: In an economy as horrible as our . . . where in the hell did Wall Street's eye-popping profits come from, exactly?
The answer to that question is basically twofold: They raped the taxpayer, and they raped their clients.