Working Life

Have we heard this one before? Uh, huh. Will it mean any of the top bankers lose their jobs or, perish the thought, end up in jail? Well, I’d give a better chance the Waltons of Wal-Mart give away their entire fortune to their workers to pay for health care and higher wages.

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For the price of a measly $20 billion, the government left JP Morgan Chase walk away from the responsibility of helping fuel the wreckage that became the global financial crisis–and, to boot, it paved the way, incomprehensibly, for Jamie Dimon to get a big fat pay raise(long live the American free market!!!). Now, an important suit by Better Markets has been filed to potentially undo the deal, or, at least, force a more honest, open discussion about what the government’s cheap stay-out-of-jail, sock-it-to-the-customers actually says.

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Par for the course. Though you would be right to say “you have got to be kidding,” the truth is that the signal has been sent from the White House and from most of Congress that the bankers will not go to jail and they will not bear any personal cost of causing the greatest financial crisis in generations, a crisis that cost millions of people their jobs, thei retirement, their dignity and their futures. And the crystal clear example, from the outset, has been Jamie Dimon. He’s getting a big fat raise.

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Punishment should bring about change — that’s what every parent wants. More important, that’s what societal punishment I suppose tries to accomplishment. Which is why billions of dollars in fines doesn’t really matter. Nothing will change.

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It just hit me how we can make money off of Jamie Dimon — it’s a *weekly* crime show, or even a reality show. Because every day you wake up you’d have new material for the show. Seriously. Like today.

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I make it a habit of regularly bagging the transcribers of press releases (formerly known as “journalists”) for utterly failing to do their jobs, particularly when it comes to challenging the rhetoric of the so-called “free market.” So, today, is a day of rest ranting about the sad state of affairs among the denizens of the Fourth Estate. Because, hells bells, Michael Hiltzik at the Los Angeles Times has penned a devastatingly good piece about the most recent example of JP Morgan Chase getting slapped on the wrist for a pretty big piece of scamming the people.

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