Pitchforks & Torches

How else could a committed redistributionist like me react to news like this:

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.

[...]

[Stephen] Gandel, who's a Money magazine senior writer and contributor to Time.com says, "Compensation should be down 70 percent but, because all this new money is coming from the government, the firms are now saying they can pay more, and so they're only going to cut bonuses by 40 percent.

Even without bonuses, the mean annual salary for a securities industry employee was just under $400,000, David notes, ten times more than the average U.S. worker.

When the howling jackals of the political right screech about "Marxism" or "communism" or some other such hoary authoritarian bullshit extracted from deep inside their partisan id, remember that for them it is only bad to redistribute when it goes downhill. Increasing the wealth of the wealthy, to them, is far preferable to spreading the wealth so those who don't got a lot, get a little more.

That's bad.

Somehow, one is stealing and the other is... um... not stealing.

What is most appalling to me is that these people see nothing wrong with what they are doing. Somehow, because they've read Ayn Rand and imagine themselves some kind of mighty John Galt-type, astride the world and held back from even further greatness and glory by hangers-on, bloodsuckers and sycophants, they see this as their due.

They think we owe them this kind of treatment because we wouldn't exist without them. Sez them. Clearly, it is the other way around. Try doing my job for a day. I'm sure I could fake my way through theirs for a day, or even longer, much more successfully.

Something more akin to the French Revolution should be in order for these people.

If someone doesn't go to jail over this, that may very well be what happens.