Compensation for CEO's of the nation's publicly-held companies went up again. It was up 6% overall. (Did your pay go up 6% last year?) The average Chief Exec made $10 million in 2011. The top-of-the-list number-one guy made $137 million. These are same people who outsource, take money and jobs off-shore, refuse to spend, invest, or hire in this country, and bitch about U.S. taxes and economic "uncertainty", i.e. Black Man in the White House. The whole 1%-99% thing isn't really so hard to understand, is it?
Locally, our central Ohio hospitals and health care systems are sitting on piles of money -- $3 billion in cash reserves, to be precise. And what are they doing with all that cabbage? Improving care, service or efficiency? Lowering the cost of care? Nah. Saving it for big year-end executive bonuses? Probably. Wouldn't it be nice if health care providers used more of their profits on, you know, actual health care?
Recently, JP Morgan Chase revealed that it would soon post a very large trading loss -- something like $2 billion, maybe $3 or $4 billion. No one was really sure, but it was big and likely to get bigger. The loss originated in the bank's office in London or Cairo or the dark side of the moon (again, no one was really sure), and resulted from one of those incomprehensible synthetic, hydroponic, bat-shit derivatives that did us all so much good in 2008. CEO Jaime Dimon, one of the most public critics of post-crash financial reforms, was suddenly all over the place, openly groveling and apologizing for the very things he was once so quick to defend. It was all so delightfully, absurdly rich!
Despite Dimon's acts of contrition, it's clear that JP Morgan Chase is not only "too big to fail", they're too big to know what the fuck is going on! They're so big, they're institutionally unmanageable. We need more than the Volcker Rule -- we need the return of the old Glass-Steagall Act.
Don't hold your breath.
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