Free Republic

Why does Wall Street make the big bucks? A nation with 10 percent unemployment is understandably puzzled and outraged when the very people at the center of the financial crisis seem to be the first to recover and are pulling down fabulous pay packages. At Goldman Sachs, the average pay for 2009 has been estimated at nearly $600,000; at J.P. Morgan Chase's investment bank, it's been reckoned at slightly below $400,000. These averages conceal multimillion-dollar bonuses for top traders and investment bankers; underlings get smaller sums. Are Wall Street's leaders that much smarter and more industrious than everyone else?

The bank bonus season, that annual rite of big money and bigger egos, begins in earnest this week, and it looks as if it will be one of the largest and most controversial blowouts the industry has ever seen. Bank executives are grappling with a question that exasperates, even infuriates, many recession-weary Americans: Just how big should their paydays be? Despite calls for restraint from Washington and a chafed public, resurgent banks are preparing to pay out bonuses that rival those of the boom years. The haul, in cash and stock, will run into many billions of dollars. .

Why attack the productive classes who want to be rich? There is class warfare going on in this country — but it’s not against the established rich. It’s against those who are trying to become wealthy. President Obama has declared that those who make over $200,000 will pay higher income taxes. Caps on payroll taxes are supposed to come off as well for the upper class. Envisioned estate taxes will take 45 percent of individual inheritances valued over $3.5 million. Many states have also hiked their income taxes on the upper brackets. Again, most of those targeted are not...

The Sunday after 9-11-2001 I attended Mass at Our Lady of Guadelupe Church in Cool Valley. During the sermon, instead of words to encourage, mourn or unite I heard the priest rail about "the corrupt men who control Alan Greenspan" at which point I got up, turned on my heel and walked out the center aisle of the church, accompanied by the gasps of the elderly parishoners. Fast-forward to today, when I go to Mass at St. Ferdinand's in Florissant. I think there's something familiar about the priest, and then he blames the desire for wealth for all the evils...

Stimulus, stimulus and not a drop…A “stimulus” of nearly a trillion dollars was proposed, without which we were told, unemployment would skyrocket and credit would tighten further. Six months later — unemployment having risen even higher than the administration’s forecast of what would have been the case had their stimulus package not been implemented — now the same proponents of massive borrowing demand a second stimulus to accomplish what the first ’successful’ borrowing apparently did not. If you fail, then try the same thing to fail even bigger the second time — while calling for more success to follow the...

Barack Obama's rich supporters fear his tax plans show he's a class warrior Some of Barack Obama's richest supporters fear they have elected a "class warrior" to the White House, who will turn America's freewheeling capitalism into a more regulated European system. By Leonard Doyle in Washington 09 May 2009 Barack Obama: some of his rich supporters fear he is becoming a class warrior Wealthy Wall Street financiers and other business figures provided crucial support for Mr Obama during the election, backing him over the Republican candidate John McCain as the right leader to rescue the collapsing US economy. But...

President Barack Obama's tax proposal – which promises to increase taxes for those families with incomes of $250,000 or more -- has some Americans brainstorming ways to decrease their pay, even if it's just by a dollar. A 63-year-old attorney based in Lafayette, La., who asked not to be named, told ABCNews.com that she plans to cut back on her business to get her annual income under the quarter million mark should the Obama tax plan be passed by Congress and become law. So far, Obama's tax plan is being looked at skeptically by both Democrats and Republicans and therefore...

How the advocate for the poor became the champion of the middle class. Step back in time to April, 1990. Obama is the first “black” President of the Harvard Law Review, and he begins to attack Middle America. This is the Obama thousands of Americans don’t know . . . yet. “I’m not interested in the suburbs,” he authoritatively tells a liberal reporter. “The suburbs bore me. And I’m not interested in isolating myself.”1 You see, in Obama’s worldview, the suburbs are full of middleclass types, who lead bo-ring middleclass existences, apparently. They’re the “isolating” folks, like, say, Joe, the...

The more important issue than Senator Obama’s choice of words, is the world view underneath them. By using voter’s adverse economic circumstances to rationalize his cultural beliefs, Barack Obama has reintroduced what has been a defining question in American politics for more than generation: Why do so many working-class voters cast their ballots on social and values-based issues like gun ownership, abortion and same-sex marriage rather than on economic policy prescriptions?These voters — known as “the silent majority” in the 1970s, “Reagan Democrats” in the ’80s, and as “values voters” during the last two election cycles — have long been...

Paced by Harvard University's staggering $34 billion stockpile, 76 colleges now boast endowments over $1 billion after robust returns on their investments over the past year, according to an annual study being released today. Harvard's endowment rose by nearly $6 billion over the past year, a nearly 20 percent increase. Yale University's endowment, the nation's second largest, rose to $22.5 billion, a 25 percent increase. Stanford University, Princeton University, and the University of Texas system rounded out the top five. Among colleges with endowments greater than $1 billion, the median one-year return was 21 percent. Nationally, the median return was...

<p>The rapid escalation of the U.S. anti-immigration hysteria fueled by ratings-hungry cable-television hotheads and leading Republican presidential hopefuls is a dangerous trend: It may lead to a Hispanic intifada that may rock this nation in the not-so-distant future.</p>

House Republicans yesterday declared "something fishy" about the major tuna company in House Speaker Nancy Pelosi's San Francisco district being exempted from the minimum-wage increase that Democrats approved this week. "I am shocked," said Rep. Eric Cantor, Virginia Republican and his party's chief deputy whip, noting that Mrs. Pelosi campaigned heavily on promises of honest government. "Now we find out that she is exempting hometown companies from minimum wage. This is exactly the hypocrisy and double talk that we have come to expect from the Democrats."

The Episcopal Church has approximately 2 million members and 7,200 churches in the U.S. and is part of the 77-million member Anglican Communion. Because of its presence in the U.S., the relative wealth of its members, and its connections to Anglicans throughout the world, the Episcopal Church is in a strategic position to influence attitudes toward Israel on both a national and global scale. - Sadly, the Episcopal Church is Not a trustworthy observer of the Arab-Israeli conflict. The church's leaders and constitutive bodies routinely issue one-sided statements about the Arab-Israeli conflict, and its publications portray Israel as exclusively responsible...

It sounds like the University of Washington student Senate is struggling to make some progress. After turning down a memorial to a notorious World War II Congressional Medal of Honor awardee, alum "Pappy" Boyington, they are now considering a more general memorial. At least this time they are getting it all wrong in a different way. The real problem seems to be the students' "carefully taught" inclination to "massification" -- the tendency of liberal institutions, in the nocturnal twilight of Marxist collectivism, to insist on memorials to classes of people, not individuals. The kiddie Senate is now trying to figure...

I don’t believe in coincidences in politics. When I see the Wall Street Journal and New York Times both running big front-page stories within two days of each other on a subject that isn’t remotely time sensitive, I know that something is going on. More than likely, it signals the beginning of an organized campaign by the liberal media to gin up an issue for the Democrats. When a team is on a losing streak, the best thing the coach can do is line up a game with a cream-puff opponent. Even if the victory doesn’t mean much substantively, it...

I say forget introspection. It's time to be honest about our antagonists. My predecessors in this conversation are thoughtful men, and I honor their ideas, but let's try something else. I grew up in Missouri and most of my family voted for Bush, so I am going to be the one to say it: The election results reflect the decision of the right wing to cultivate and exploit ignorance in the citizenry. I suppose the good news is that 55 million Americans have evaded the ignorance-inducing machine. But 58 million have not. (Well, almost 58 million—my relatives are not ignorant,...

It was a late Monday night last month in Husaybah, Iraq, and the usual handful of Marines had settled down in their brick and tin building around an Army green cot for what had become a near nightly diversion - a game of cards, spades, to be specific. --snip-- So far, 46 percent of the 798 Americans killed in the war as of May 26 have come from small towns outside of metropolitan areas, according to an analysis by the Post-Dispatch of military and U.S. Census statistics. For the analysis, "small towns" were defined as those of less than 40,000...

If there’s one slogan that’s come to represent the anti-war movement in its current incarnation, it’s one that appeared on a banner in a March 15 demonstration in San Francisco. It bore the message,“We Support Our Troops, When They Shoot Their Officers.” This banner has been seen around the world and cited in more than 400 publications. You can see the creator of the banner in the photograph; he’s the one on the right wearing the black ski-mask (being assisted by activist Kevin Keating). He recently spoke with me about the mythology that’s grown up around it. As much...

FUN WITH THE DEMOCRATIC UNDERGROUND Many Boortz listeners are now frequent visitors to the Internet's premiere comment board for Democrats. It's called DemocraticUnderground.com. Over the weekend my ever-alert listeners brought two different conversation threads to my attention. The first thread began with a suggestion by one Democrat that the Congress be equally divided between men and women. Why? Because "Congress is Unjust" That's why. This person didn't bother to explain why it would be "just" to deny to a voter the right to vote for a candidate of their choice. Here's your link to that thread. http://www.democraticunderground.com/duforum/DCForumID60/22942.html The second thread...