As Bloomberg Lays Off Teachers, Wall Street Hires Tens Of Thousands With Perks

Herein lies the problem with modern America:

While the economy limps forward, high-powered, lucrative jobs are returning to Wall Street, causing critical shortages of skilled financial services workers, labor experts tell The Post.

Firms are tripping over each other for talent, bringing combined financial employment in the industry for New York City to some 432,200 in September, a jump of 10,000 since February, according to the Labor Department.

The hot new sectors, coming with six-figure salaries, bonuses and flashy perks, include capital markets, investment banking, compliance, fixed income, back-office operations and wealth management. Meanwhile, demand for MBAs has grown as firms ratchet up offers to graduates straight out of business school.

A shortage of suitable candidates is not surprising. Wall Street is recovering from the worst of the credit crisis disaster that toppled Lehman Brothers in 2008, and younger, promising candidates looked elsewhere, including Washington, DC, for high-paying positions, while Wall Street licked its wounds the last two years.

"Firms are starting to recognize some opportunities for growth and are carefully maneuvering their positions after the bloodletting in 2008 and 2009," said Jim Ross, a Wall Street veteran who's searching for employment himself after a stint as a senior executive at the New York Stock Exchange.

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Perks are rising as well. Unlimited expense accounts and no-interest loans are being held out to entice candidates into adviser and broker positions.

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Bonus expectations are heating up too. The 2011 Glocap Hedge Fund Compensation Report notes that year-end bonuses among hedge fund pros are expected to climb five percent on average this year, the second consecutive year that bonuses have increased.

An eFinancialCareer.com survey this month found pros in the financial tech sector hold a 4.8 percent unemployment rate compared with the nation's 9.6 percent rate, and are expecting bigger bonuses this year compared to last.

So while cities and states all across the country lay government workers off, cut programs and slash pay and benefits, Wall Street big shots - many working for the same firms that nearly brought economic collapse to the country in 2008 and are now bringing fraudclosure to the country in 2010 - are taking jobs with unlimited expense accounts, no-interest loans, expectations of high bonuses and other perks.

No wonder 85% of the wealth in this country is owned by 20% of the people.

And the crazy thing is, it's STILL not enough for them.

The top 20% are STILL trying to drive down wages, grab more of the wealth, screw more and more of the working and middle classes, and bust all of the unions.

Until we DO something about this, middle and working class Americans - the vast majority of the country - will continue to fight for a smaller and smaller piece of the economy.

Right now, the Obamas and the Bloombergs and the Cuomos blame this wealth disparity on education levels and claim the problem lies with the American education system, not corporations.

But that's garbage.

We're in the tail end of class war that the financial class declared 30 years ago.

With the help of politicians in both parties and a corporate-owned media spreading the message of free market ideology, things do look bleak.

When politicians from Rahm Emanuel to Little Andy Cuomo claim the best way to solve problems is to make everything into a Darwinian competition a la Race to the Top, you know we're in trouble.

And they're the Democrats, the party that is supposed to represent the interests of working and middle class Americans.

But even with the game rigged so badly against working and middle class Americans, there are a couple of things we can do.

The first is to STOP voting for Dems because they're the lesser of two corporate evils.

Rahm Emanuel may have nicer social policies than Tom Delay, but when it comes to issues relevant to union members and working and middle class people, he and Delay are the same - on the side of the banksters and the corporations.

Next, we CAN support politicians who are champions of the working and middle classes and unions - even if they're going to lose the election.

Backing a winner does NOT make me a winner.

Backing a politician who supports policies that benefit me makes me a winner.

Remember what Eugene Debs said: "I'd rather vote for what I want and not get it than vote for what I don't want and get it."

For too long, we've done it the other way around.

Finally, we can continue to try and educate others to blame the right people who created this mess we're in.

Union members didn't create this mess.

Teachers didn't create this mess.

The crooks on Wall Street, the hedge fund criminals and the real estate developers created this mess with the aid of politicians of BOTH parties and the Federal Reserve.

Let us KEEP repeating this message until it sinks in and people begin to organize against the real criminals.

The anger is palpable and to quote Joe Strummer, "Anger can be used."

Let's use it against the crooks who stole our country.

Kinda like this Irish parliamentary member:

Pretty Please With TARP Funds On Top

Larry Summers, the director of the White House’s National Economic Council and President Obama's top economic adviser, appeared on ABC's This Week to explain how the administration plans to get banks lending money again.

They're going to beg them by saying "Please lend money, please, please, please!!!!"

Mr. Summers, Secretary of the Treasury at the end of the Clinton administration, said that “it doesn’t cost anything to encourage banks, as the president will be doing, to meet their responsibilities and expand the flow of credit to small business.” He said the president will remind the bankers of what the federal government did to bail out banks when they were in trouble, “that no major bank would be intact, would be in a position to pay bonuses, if that extraordinary support had not been provided.”

The president, he said, “will be talking with them about what they can do to support enhanced lending to customers across the country.”

”We were there for them and the banks need to do everything they can to be sure they’re there for customers across this country,” he said.

Seriously - that's the plan. We were there for you banksters, now you better be there for us by opening up the coffers and lending to consumers and small businesses again.

Gee, that should work.

Never mind that this administration has done everything in it's power to make sure that the banksters (those politically connected ones, at any rate) got 100 cents to the dollar "owed" to them by AIG, that they have bent over backwards to keep Ben Bernanke printing the money presses at the Federal Reserve night and day to provide liquidity for the big banks, that they have kept "Too Big To Fail" institutions like Citigroup and Bank of America and AIG on life support after they speculated on high risk investments, the best they can do to get banks lending again is to beg them.

No wonder the financial institution people treat Obama with contempt and scorn. If that's the best he can do to them after near financial collapse and trillion dollar bailouts last year, then he deserves to be treated with contempt and scorn.

Now compare how Obama and his merry men treat incompetent banksters and failed financial institutions with how they treat schools they declare "failing" and teachers they say are "bad."

What we hear from President Accountability and Secretary of Education Arne Duncan is that failing schools need to be closed, never mind that the causes behind these supposed "failures" may have nothing to do with how good the teachers and administrators in those schools are but stem from larger socio-economic problems like entrenched generational poverty and family dysfunctions like alcoholism and addiction or more mundane problems like large class sizes and few resources.

We also hear from Obama and Duncan how bad teachers need to be fired, never mind that these teachers may have been doing just fine a few years ago before their schools were handed hundreds of "at risk" students with low test scores and troubling graduation rates from other schools that have been closed.

I guess Obama and company suffer from the same fetish so many in America suffer from - that is, the businessman fetish. No matter what happens, the businessman must always be listened to, the businessman always knows best, because he's a, you know, businessman.

Years ago, I used to listen to WFAN, the all-talk radio station, and at least a dozen times a day some know-nothing loud mouth from Jersey or Queens would call to say this is what the Yankees or Mets need to do with the line-up or the pitching staff or whatever. And when the host would say, "What you're saying is stupid and idiotic and makes no practical sense," the callers would say "Hey, I know what I'm talking about. I'm a businessman who runs a __________ business and what works in my place will work for the Yankees. What do you know, you're just a radio DJ!!! I'm a businessman!!!!"

So now some of these same idiots who call sports radio to offer their "business expertise" to their favorite teams are now telling professional educators with actual experience with actual students (usually about 340 a year) in an actual classroom how to educate children. And the rest of us, rather than pointing out the dismal record of business and businessmen in general the past 15 years (think Tech Bubble, think Enron, think Housing Bubble, think 2008 financial collapse, think Bernie Madoff) and noting how they ought to clean up their own messes before creating more of them in other areas of the public sphere, allow these know-nothing loud mouths and their allies in government and the press to call public education "failed."

And of course so much of it starts at the top, where President Accountability lectures teachers about what a bad job they're doing while he rewards the failed financial institutions and the incompetent and/or corrupt banksters who run them by handing them trillions and then begging them to lend some of it out.