I remain astonished–perhaps I shouldn’t be–about the extent to which the people who destroyed the financial system still have jobs. It is truly a comment on the emptiness of the rhetoric of the "free market" ideologues and the business world, who demand accountability, efficiency and profitability–except when it comes to their own actions. After all, if you are responsible for the obliteration of trillions of dollars of wealth (not to mention the robbing of workers over decades), why should you still have a job.

   I was reminded of this bizarreness this morning in the wake of the newest installment of on the Wall Street soap opera called, "we are so greedy that we are clueless". The bonuses are cascading again:

Thousands of top traders and bankers on Wall Street were awarded huge bonuses and pay packages last year, even as their employers were battered by the financial crisis

Nine of the financial firms that were among the largest recipients of federal bailout money paid about 5,000 of their traders and bankers bonuses of more than $1 million apiece for 2008, according to a report released Thursday by Andrew M. Cuomo, the New York attorney general.

At Goldman Sachs, for example, bonuses of more than $1 million went to 953 traders and bankers, and Morgan Stanley awarded seven-figure bonuses to 428 employees. Even at weaker banks like Citigroup and Bank of America, million-dollar awards were distributed to hundreds of workers.

   Well, this didn’t surprise me really. But, what really is astonishing in this column by Floyd Norris, in which he says that bonuses really were not the problem:

It is galling to see executives making tens of millions of dollars for running companies that have to be bailed out by taxpayers, but there is little evidence that big pay — or the incentives connected to it — caused the financial train wreck that sent the world into recession.

To the contrary, there is plenty of evidence that no one who counted — traders, chief executives or regulators — understood the risks that were being taken. [emphasis added]

   This strikes me as the equivalent of an economic Nuremberg argument–we didn’t know.

   Which brings me back to my original question: how is it possible for any of these people to still have jobs and, worse, how do increasing numbers of people from companies like Goldman Sachs find themselves with jobs in the Administration?