Financial Tables are turned

Financial executives had it made: Whether their fancy trading brought profits or not, they got their fat bonuses. Even after they busted the entire economy and killed off millions of jobs and were then bailed out by taxpayers, they still grabbed billions in bonuses. These greedy geniuses are now being stopped by the Obama Administration.
In these terrible economic times, the word "chutzpah" is being bandied about by everybody - and for good reason. How is it possible for a billionnaire-rich financial guy to have the nerve - "chutzpah" - to take a gift from a homeless taxpayer and waste it on baubles for himself? Although the country is deep in debt, we gave these masters of the economy money in order to prevent their companies from failing; the idea was that they would make loans to get the economy moving. So what do these greedy fools do? They take the money for themselves!
To the word "chutzpah" we must add "gonif" (thief).
After much screaming and yelling by all of us, the Obama Administration is finally acting to reduce the compensation of greedy executives in the financial industry:
The Obama administration plans to announce -- as early as today -- new 90% pay cuts for 175 Wall Street executives at the seven firms bailed out by the government amid the economy's collapse earlier this year.
Some of the executive compensation may be in stock, but the executives may need to wait 2 or more years before they may redeem the stock.
This is good. This is great. This is long overdue. Why should people who spend their time gambling - this is how Goldman Sachs and the other "too-big-to-fail" financial outfits get most of their money - be rewarded more than anyone else? If they would offer loans to businesses, they would do something useful. If they would offer loans for people to buy homes, they would be doing something useful. But NOBODY benefits from the incomprehensible "paper" they deal in. Nobody but Wall Street gamblers themselves. And only because taxpayers guarantee these gamblers can't fail.
Up to now we have been suckers, kowtowing to the so-called financial wizards, kowtowing to the tune of hundred-million-dollar packages. No more. These are wizards no more. They brought ruin to the country. They are now fools. They will now begin the path down to lower compensation.
Not just lower compensation but lesser importance. Les Leopold expresses it well:
In the movie, "The Incredible Shrinking Man" (1957), the protagonist (played by Grant Williams) sails through a sparkly, radioactive mist which slowly shrinks him down until he's about an inch tall, having to fend off spiders with a straight pin as sword. Obama wants to supply similar pixy dust to the financial sector. As he put it, "Wall Street will remain a big, important part of our economy, just as it was in the '70s and the '80s. It just won't be half of our economy....We don't want every single college grad with mathematical aptitude to become a derivatives trader."
Indeed, we need mathematical experts to work on important projects that build our economy - developing a thriving "green" industry, for instance. Let's compensate people according to their contributions to the economy. Let's rebuild the American meritocracy.
Obama has turned the tables on greedy financial executives. It's up to the rest of us now to follow through and reward people according to the value of their contributions to society.