For Many At The Top The Economic Crisis Isn't Cramping Any Style

Isn't Bubbles precious? And only $5.6 million, not even the whole annual bonus for some

We know how the Bush Economic Miracle is hitting most people: consumer spending is off the cliff, basic industries are threatened with potentially devastating bankruptcies, foreclosures are through the roof and unemployment rates are in the basement. Millions of Americans are having problems with health care, with financing their children's educational plans, with their own retirement. And, as we saw yesterday, with Sotheby's contemporary art auction only netting $125.1 million a few nights ago, billionaires were able to fatten their collections of garbage art from, among others, Jeff Koons, for bargain basement prices.

But the Wall Street executives who helped the incompetent, bumbling and thoroughly dishonest and corrupt Bush Regime steer the economy into this disaster? Happy days are here through thick and thin. Their six and seven figure bonuses-- at magical tax rates-- are doing just grand, thank you. The same way that there is a vague implication that if the Democratic caucus takes away Holy Joe Lieberman's Homeland Security Committee chairmanship he will do something drastic, like cutting off his nose, there is a vague implication that Wall Street executives might get angry and so something to spite their faces if they're bonuses become part of a plan to bailout the economic mess their unabashed greed and stupidity caused.

According to a report from financial news agency Bloomberg, Goldman Sachs, for example, has set aside $6.8 billion for bonuses, and Morgan Stanley, $6.4 billion.

And the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, Massachusetts Democrat Barney Frank, isn't happy. "These are people who lost enormous amounts of money," Frank observes. "How do you give a bonus to someone for having failed so badly as many of these people did?"

What's got many on Main Street and Capitol Hill angry, David says, is the possibility that some of the $700 billion government bailout package could go into the pockets of Wall Streeters to pay their bonuses.

"All of the money is to go into new loans," Frank points out. "None of it is to go into compensation of any kind for the employees."

No wonder Barney Frank is the new bete noir of the far right. How dare he stand up for working families and against the robber barons worshipped by the neo-fascists running the GOP? There are ways out of the economic crisis the Republican financial agenda and their ideological orthodoxy, corruption and incompetence have brought on-- and it sure isn't more of the same. We'll soon see if Barack Obama and the Democrats are up to it.