MR. PRESIDENT, MEET THE MANSON CLAN

President Obama had a meeting with bankers on Monday. Several bankers didn’t make it. Classy. Their absence and the tone of the meeting made it clear who’s in charge. It isn’t President Obama.

At the meeting President Obama pressed bankers to lend more money and reminded them that, given what occurred last year, they need to understand that we’re all in this together.

That should teach them. Maybe next time he’ll really get tough and force a group hug on them.

Predictably, in what can only be termed a lame PR moment, the bankers (who were present) smiled on cue and agreed that we should all work together. It was quite the Kumbaya Moment.

I know I feel better.

BACK IN THE REAL WORLD …
Meanwhile, in the real world, the banker’s lobbyists have been marching on Washington. While President Obama is asking the industry for favors, and looking to hand out good citizenship medals, the industry's lobbyists are busy fighting tooth and nail so the industry can avoid paying their fair share. They're also working to dilute proposed regulations which would help prevent what happened last year from occurring again.

Effectively what happened on Monday is that the bankers smiled, and publicly agreed to be good neighbors. At the same time their operatives were working so that the industry could tell President Obama and the American taxpayers to f@#k off.

It's really that simple.

And why not? They kept their jobs. They got their money. They got their $38 billion tax breaks. They got their trillion dollar Federal Reserve guarantees. So it’s business as usual. Consider the following.

* The derivatives market that got us into this mess is now bigger than it was before last year’s meltdown (around $140 trillion).

* Bonuses and salaries for Wall Street’s biggest players, most of it a product of business and accounting fraud, are still going through the roof.

* Many of these guys are now arrogantly telling the world that they’re largely independent of last year’s economic meltdown, or that the government is to blame for the collapse and the now laggard recovery.

* Some of them feel it’s OK not to plan ahead for a meeting with the President of the United States.

If chutzpah is killing your parents and asking the court for leniency because you’re now an orphan, bankers are now on an entirely different family tree. In fact, in many ways they're looking more and more like the lost siblings of the Manson Family.

What a bunch of pricks.

- Mark