© Jason Alden/Bloomberg via Getty ImagesJamie Dimon
If you make a big show of punishing someone, and when you're done they still don't think they have a behavior problem, you probably picked the wrong punishment. Every parent on earth knows this implicitly - but does the Obama White House finally get it, too, now, after Jamie Dimon's raise?
When the board of JP Morgan Chase gave its blowdried, tirelessly self-regarding CEO
a whopping 74 percent raise - after a year in which the Justice Department blasted the bank with $20 billion in sanctions - it was one of those rare instances where Main Street and Wall Street were mostly in agreement.
Everyone from the
Financial Times to
Forbes.com to the
Huffington Post decried the move. The Wall Street pundits mostly thought it was a dumb play by the Chase board from a self-interest perspective, one guaranteed to inspire further investigations by the government. Meanwhile, the non-financial press generally denounced the raise as a moral obscenity, yet another example of the serial coddling of Wall Street's habitually overcompensated executive class.
Both groups were right. But to me the biggest news was how brutal an indictment Jamie's raise was of the Obama/Holder Justice Department, which continues to profoundly misunderstand the mindset of the finance villains they claim to be regulating.
Chase's responses to Holder's record penalties have been hilarious. Their first move was to make sure people outside the penthouse boardroom took on all the pain, laying off 7,500 employees and freezing salaries for the non-CEO class of line employees.
Next, Chase's board members sat down, put their misshapen heads together, considered the impact of this disastrous year of settlements, and decided to respond by more than doubling the take-home pay of the executive in charge, giving Dimon about $20 million in salary and equity.
Comment: From Coup in western Ukraine: The Arab Spring unleashed in Europe
Ukraine has long been the focus of Western meddling as part of a larger geo-strategic game aimed at countering Russia. Zbigniew Brzezinski wrote in 1994 that "it cannot be stressed strongly enough that without Ukraine, Russia ceases to be an empire, but with Ukraine suborned and then subordinated, Russia automatically becomes an empire." A little over a year ago, the US implicitly released a statement via then-Secretary of State Hillary Clinton that it would do whatever is within its means to roll back Russia's economic integrationist efforts. After describing Russia's Eurasian Union plans as "a move to re-Sovietize the region", she proceeded to threaten that "we know what the goal is and we are trying to figure out effective ways to slow down or prevent it."
Undoubtedly, the world is now witnessing what the US had in mind when it threatened to "slow down" and "prevent" economic cooperation between Ukraine and Russia. With Ukrainian stability cracking under the pressure of continued chaos and the economy on the brink of near-total collapse, the lie of EuroMaidan's 'pro-EU integrationist' goals have been revealed. Either the EU will in no way accept a future failed-state Ukraine, licking its wounds from prolonged civil strife, to enter into the organization, or it, in coordination with its NATO overseers, had it planned all along to collapse the country and profitably rebuild it under the aegis of the West. Either way, the fabled 'path to Europe' has been exposed as the sham that it is, and absolutely nothing of positive value can come to the average citizen from what the militant participants have done to their country in the name of 'Euro-integration'.
And Ukraine's fascist Neo-Nazi color revolution backed by U.S.