The Jolly Banksters

From CNN/Money:

Banker's bonuses: 40% bigger this year
Global financial firms are planning to increase bonus payments as strong financial markets propel banks back to profitability.
By Ben Rooney

NEW YORK (CNNMoney.com) -- Bonuses at financial firms worldwide will increase by an average of 40% this year, according to an annual report released Monday.

Options Group, a New York-based executive search and compensation consultancy, said near-record revenues from fixed-income, commodities and foreign exchange trading will help push bankers' bonuses back up after a slump in 2008.

The report, which was based on data from 300,000 industry professionals worldwide, also showed that bonuses are increasingly being offered in the form of multi-year stock options.
...

Of course, what happened last year was not so much a "slump" as it was a hostage situation. A handful of billionaires who had already gotten richer that the dreams of Avarice from bonuses they awarded themselves for looting the economy...put a gun to our collective heads and demanded trillions more in cheap taxpayer money to prop up their global three-card Monte scam.

And they succeeded. We paid their ransom, and as we starve they divvy up the money they stole from us right before our very eyes. "Laughing all the way to the bank" I would say, were it not for the fact that they are the fucking bank.

In a more civilized time, these people's heads would be on pikes and happy children would be making up rope-skipping songs about the day the banksters went away (cashes, cashes, all fall down...) But we live in the lengthening shadows of a barbarous age, and so instead of pikes in the public square, their smiling faces grace the cover of Money Fetish Porn magazines.

And so we cue Wilco covering Woody Guthrie

and hope for the best.