Not only has the Wall Street bailout restored the banksters who wrecked our economy to full prosperity, it’s also paying off very handsomely for the bank overseers who orchestrated the bailout.
For example, as chairman of the Federal Reserve for six years, Ben Bernanke led the bucket brigade that poured trillions of public dollars into Wall Street’s vaults. So, he’s now on a global “Show Me Some Love” tour, pocketing up to $400,000 for each speech he delivers to the financial giants he rescued with our money.

Then there’s Timmy Geithner, whose chief responsibility as head of the New York Fed had been to regulate Wall Street’s reckless banks so their greed wouldn’t cause a nationwide financial crisis. But – oops! – they did exactly that on Timmy’s see-no-evil watch. Still, having proven himself a banker’s man, Geithner was promoted to be President Obama’s Treasury Secretary. There, he insisted that the government’s priority must be rescuing greedy bankers with taxpayer dollars, rather than saving the millions of American homeowners stuck with bloated mortgages, facing wage cuts and joblessness, and who were sinking into deep debt and poverty.
But, being a banker’s man, Geithner was not punished for his inept and morally-deplorable policies. Rather, he was richly rewarded with a top executive position as – what else? – a Wall Street banker. Now, he has published a book about his years of public screw-ups. Oh... sorry, I meant “public service.” Concluding that he was correct and courageous, Geithner’s book should’ve been titled: Heckuva Job, Timmy!
This is Jim Hightower saying… So Wall Street prospers, Ben and Tim wallow in wealth – and the real economy remains mired in the ditch of joblessness, low wages, household debt… and rising anger at the Wall Street/Washington cabal of self-serving elites who shoved them into that ditch.

“Springtime for Bankers,” http://www.nytimes.com/2014/05/19/opinion/krugman-springtime-for-bankers.html, May 19, 2014.

“Crisis Management, Rethought,” The New York Times, May 18, 2014.

Corporations shift their tax burdens to you

Did you scramble to get your taxes done this year, dashing to the mailbox at the last minute? Yeah, me too.

I really didn’t mind paying what I owe – but I hate having to pay the taxes owed by the likes of JPMorgan Chase, Mitt Romney, Exxon, and Amazon. They’re just a few of the astonishingly-profitable corporations and superrich financial hucksters who walk their tax tabs each year, thus putting the cost of everything from the military to our national parks onto our shoulders.
We constantly hear CEOs and their congressional hirelings wail about the “punishing” tax rate of 35 percent assessed on corporate profits. But they’re grinning as they’re crying, for they know they actually pay nowhere near that. In fact, the latest assessment by the Government Accountability Office found that U.S. corporations pay an average tax rate of only 12.6 percent, forcing workaday taxpayers to cover the multiple billions of dollars that these privileged elites dodge.
How do they do that? Simple. They duck through ridiculous loopholes in our tax laws. How ridiculous? Try the subsidy for corporate criminals. If you get a speeding ticket, do you get to deduct the fine from the income tax you owe? Ha – just try it! But JPMorgan Chase was fined more than $20 billion last year for major frauds and consumer rip offs, and its honchos have now deducted that “punishment” from the corporate tax bill, claiming it as a cost of doing business. Oh, they also get to deduct the many millions of dollars they paid lawyers to defend their blatant wrongdoing.
This is Jim Hightower saying… Well, sniff the elites, we’re merely making rightful use of the deductions allowed by tax laws. But it’s their lawyers who wrote those laws to legalize their thievery! And need I mention that they also get a deduction for the mega-salaries and expenses of those lawyers? So, we pay for their wrongdoings, their fines, and their lawyers.

“Corporate Loopholes To Covet,” The New York Times, April 15, 2014.