The REAL Race to the Top

While Bill Gates and Eli Broad fire up corporate editorial boards and reporters to hammer politicians toward changing state laws in order to beg for some chump change from Arne Duncan's little pot of federal bribe money, the REAL Race to the Top proceeds, entirely unsullied by the tens of millions of unemployed Americans or the shrinking public coffers that reflect the dwindling tax revenues from the Great Recession--brought to you by the makers of Wall Street.

The entire $4.3 billion set aside by Duncan's Office to fuel the unlimited growth of segregated charter chain gangs and pay-per-score teacher bonus plans is less than 15 percent of the real bonuses that will be paid out this happy holiday season to the crooks of just three Wall Street corporations. The total for the three companies? $29.7 billion. From Bloomberg News:

Nov. 9 (Bloomberg) -- Goldman Sachs Group Inc., Morgan Stanley and JPMorgan Chase & Co.’s investment bank, survivors of the worst financial crisis since the Great Depression, are set to pay record bonuses this year.

The firms -- the three biggest banks to exit the Troubled Asset Relief Program -- will hand out $29.7 billion in bonuses, according to analysts’ estimates. That’s up 60 percent from last year and more than the previous high of $26.8 billion in 2007. The money, split among 119,000 employees, equals $250,400 each, almost five times the $50,303 median household income in the U.S. last year, data compiled by Bloomberg show.. . . .

. . . .“Wall Street is beginning to resemble Clark Gable as Rhett Butler in the film ‘Gone With the Wind’: ‘Quite frankly, my dear, I don’t give a damn,’” Paul Hodgson, a senior research associate on compensation at the Portland, Maine-based Corporate Library, said in an e-mail. “It doesn’t seem as if even political threat, disastrous PR, envy, rising unemployment rates and home repossessions is enough to get any of these people to refuse the bonuses they have ‘earned.’”. . . .