Awhile back I wrote a post called “Capitalist Terrorism” at the time when Wall Street was holding a gun to our head insisting the whole financial system would resemble the twin towers if we didn’t pay their rans… uh, bailout of $700B dollars. We did of course and the banks went about their business of huge bonuses, corporate jets and other Caligula-like behavior. They just didn’t lend out much of our money to um, us. Well, that changed today as banks erected a huge wad of $22.5B to help Viagra maker Pfizer get up $68 billion to take over rival Wyeth.

Oh, and 19,000 human beings currently employed by the two firms will lose their jobs to “cost cutting.” Gotta serve those shareholders, ya know. Just today, some 40,000 job cuts were announced by our friendly, neighborhood corporations including:

  • Sprint Nextel Corp – 8,000 jobs
  • Home Depot Inc – 7,000 jobs
  • General Motors – 2,000 jobs
  • Caterpillar Inc. – 20,000 jobs
  • Texas Instruments Inc. – 3,400 jobs

In an effort to “shore up” balance sheets and income statements, these companies are killing what they need for recovery and survival: consumers. You can’t sell a blue pill to a guy after you’ve taken his mojo.

Update: Looks like the new administration is going after these um, “business leaders:” “ABC News has learned that Monday officials of the Obama administration called Citigroup about the company’s new $50 million corporate jet and told execs to “fix it.””

And…from Reuters: “New York’s attorney general issued a subpoena to former Merrill Lynch Chief Executive John Thain on Tuesday in a probe into bonuses paid to the firm’s employees just days before its takeover by Bank of America Corp.

“The fact that Merrill Lynch appears to have moved up the timetable to pay bonuses before its merger with Bank of America is troubling to say the least and warrants further investigation,” Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said in a statement.”