Our Hand in the Next Guy's Pocket

The economic recovery could not be going better. The government reports that real wage and salary income during the first quarter of 2010 shot up by a massive 20 percent. It’s simply a great time to be a worker—if, that is, you’re a financial “worker” in Manhattan.

Most financial institutions pay their bonuses in the first quarter of the year, and those numbers recently became available. The average financial industry employee in Manhattan made $100,000 in the first
three months of 2010. Not only was that astronomical figure the average figure, but it includes the lowly bank tellers and trading clerks whose salaries drag down the ridiculous sums taken home by the senior investment bankers.

In essence, if the average financial worker can, in just a few months, earn double the national median
income, the money going to the big dogs must simply be unfathomable.

Don’t worry, however, these guys earned it: they may have dragged down the entire global economy with an incomprehensible series of financial schemes, but they were smart enough to get the state to prop up their endeavors with absolute impunity and then tough enough to trump the reform impulse that went into electing Obama. Their ambition is such that their idea of bringing home the bacon is monopolizing the entire pork industry. Earning their pay, indeed.

The whole thing is beginning to smell like a pig farm, too. While France burns in a national strike over pushing the retirement age from 60 to a mere 62, over on our side of things the Tea Partiers, their wealthy contributors, and the Republican Party are poised to make a comeback by saving the nation from “socialism.” It’s really hard to understand it all sometimes. As Thomas Frank once quipped, contemporary American populism is like the sans-culottes of the French Revolution demanding more power to the aristocracy.

The Wire character Frank Sobota, a longshoreman neck deep in corruption in order to try to buy off enough politicians to create some jobs on the Baltimore waterfront, summarized the last 35 years of history best. “We used to make shit in this country. Build shit. Now we just put our hand in the next guy's pocket."