Bob Herbert:Outside the Casino

[cal04]

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/07/13/opinion/13herbert.html?ref=bobherbert

The hustlers and high rollers at Wall Street’s gaming tables are starting to feel lucky again.

Hiring is beginning to pick up in the very sector that led the country to the edge of a depression. An article on the front page of The Times on Sunday noted that this turnaround “underscores the remarkable recovery of the biggest banks and brokerage firms since Washington rescued them in the fall of 2008, and follows the huge rebound in profits for members of the New York Stock Exchange, which totaled $61.4 billion in 2009, the most ever.”

The hustlers and high rollers are always there to skim the cream, no matter what’s happening in the real world of ordinary American families.

(snip)
What’s needed is the same sense of urgency about helping struggling families and putting people back to work as the Bush and Obama crowds showed when the banks were about to go bust. That sense of urgency is always missing when it’s ordinary people who are in trouble.

[Turbineguy]

1. Sucking wealth

out of what's left of the real economy.

[Demeter]

2. Turbineguy--love your signature line!

Did it ever bother you how Lynn Cheney, a woman with neither extraordinary business acumen nor visible charitable impulses, became head of the Red Cross?

It took me far too long to realize that this was Dick's way of suborning the largest non-governmental non-profit, to prevent them from undoing PNAC's little projects world-wide.

It wasn't an act of political currying, but of kowtowing to the BFEE, or being blackmailed. Fortunately, she made such a mess of it, I doubt that it will ever happen again, but this is a stealth type of operation that must be guarded against.