Working Life

Let me give credit, up front, to a splendid idea from the actors Greg Wise and Emma Thompson that clarified my own outrage at a simple reality: the bankers destroyed the economy with their greed and incompetence, the Obama Administration lets each bank CEO off the hook with a negotiated deal for a fine that the institution, not the banker pays, and with no jail time for a single high-ranking Wall Streeter and WE PAY FOR THIS.

That’s right: each one of us, with our taxes, pays for this sleazy deal with the financial elite.

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If you want to know why the Wall Street elite and the bankers who robbed us blind are laughing all the way to their mansions, it’s because the joke is on YOU. On every American. Because after they robbed the country, and destroyed millions of jobs and trillions of dollars in value, YOU get to pick a nice part of the tab.

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The silence is pretty amazing. The man most responsible, or at least, a central player, in the greatest financial crisis in generations–a crisis that cost tens of millions of people around the globe their jobs and their futures–gets a whopping RAISE…and not a single political leader has stood up to challenge the generosity of the “free market”. This is corruption writ large. And, yet, not a word from the White House, not a word from any figures, future presidential candidates or otherwise, to take on what is a big middle finger to the entire American public.

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If you were Jamie Dimon, or a sleazy banker of the same stripe, and you got the following deal, would you take it: make billions of dollars for your bank, which, in turn, rewards you personally making you a very, very wealthy man BUT, in the process, because of combination of incompetence, criminality and greed, you help destroy an entire economy and put millions of people out of work, for which your bank pays billions of dollars in fines BUT you get to keep your job and, despite all the crimes, you don’t spend a single night in jail nor do you take out a single dime from your own pocket because the system will protect you and instead hand the bill to essentially the very people you hurt, and you are dealing with a government with no spine or inclination to punish the responsible people at the top so don’t worry for a second…well, would you take that deal?

Of course you would.

And that, in a nutshell, is the upshot of the $13 billion sham fine Jamie Dimon cut with the Obama Administration.

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A couple of days ago, I mentioned how Jamie Dimon and his band of corporate lawyers were planning to fleece the people — again. They concocted a scheme to make sure that a ton of the fine money Jamie had agreed to shell out from the corporate treasury in the form of fines would, in fact, be tax deductible. But, whoa, wait a second — a couple of Democrats actually grew a set of balls.

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These are the moments when you would really like to be a fly in the room where Jamie Dimon’s corporate lawyers sit around with the boss and ponder: how can we screw the public today? And, baby, every day they come up with a new one.

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Jamie Dimon should be in jail, or at least he should be jobless. But, a different point is worth making about the damage he has caused: why would any child, growing up today, or entering the workforce, listen to any lecture about corporate ethics or “doing right” after being exposed to the farce around Dimon and JPMorgan Chase?

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Jamie Dimon’s behavior has got to be a classic melding of psychosis and smugness. And a healthy dose of “I know the system is rigged and now matter how much I fuck up, I’m not getting the axe.” And, sadly, he’s got a lot of evidence to support his smug act.

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This is running right now, with further details to come, on The Wall Street Journal web site. It’s not entirely unexpected since news on this was leaking out.

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Jamie Dimon lives a charmed life. In a normal world, he would be in jail or at least be out of a job–not earning millions of dollars in pay and benefits. Which is really a parable about the world in which we live in where nothing really changes.

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