It's 3:30am, the party isn't over yet. They know they can get their huge bonuses today for precisely the same reason they've always deserved disgustingly huge bonuses.
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Ever since manufacturing left our shores for China with its smokey factories, almost two-thirds of our national GDP has come from the service sector. While Wall Street does not comprise the majority of the service sector, they do provide the lifeblood for the majority of its activities: credit for consumption. Our retail industry is the envy of the world not because of how many Fortune 500 retail companies we have, but because Americans on the whole can seemingly buy anything they want whenever they want without worrying about saving a penny. If you find yourself stranded overseas but want the latest toy from Apple, or the latest and greatest from Nintendo? Just import it from the indomitable USA; we'll always have it before anyone else.
Only the magic loom of Wall Street could have made this post-industrial feat possible. Whether it's in the form of 12 month 0% APR credit cards, hedging to give us the world's greatest wealth concentrated in the form of the NYSE casino, or leveraging sub-prime mortgages to give us straw in the form of gold, it's always been Wall Street that enriched all of us. Not to mention our big retail outlets probably couldn't have made payroll consistently without Wall Street's magic either.
Their good bonuses are our good fortunes in turn, as it were.
Although we are now in economic free fall, this long-held tenet in the American political economy has not changed. Not yet. But before it does change (and it will), Wall Street is going to hoard every last bit of bonus money they can because they can. It makes no difference to them whether their bonuses are comprised of tax money from their fellow citizens or deposits from far off Asian savers, and why should it? They deserve their bonuses because they gave us our lifestyle, albeit one that eventually drove us into the ground. But what's that got to do with them? Nothing. After all, they're just mere bankers merely doing their job.
Of course Wall Street knew they would be bailed out. Banks like Wells Fargo or Bank of America probably acquired absolutely toxic waste dumps like Wachovia or Merrill Lynch just so they can strengthen their case as a TARP recipient. Congress knew that; they're not stupid, and that's why they're smart enough to know they have to bail out the banks to protect the American Dream. Or what's left of it, anyway, and if only for a little longer.
The party isn't over yet but it's about 3:45am and ticking, and all poor Obama can do is play the angry father role to appease the common man. While Wall Street won't have the biggest bonuses this year, it's good enough for sixth place overall. Not bad for last call. But for me, in spite of all the doom and gloom of 4am, kicking out a bunch of disgustingly rich bankers onto the merciless streets of unemployment would hardly be the worse thing imaginable today.