"The Wall Street guys you're disparaging are actual businessmen - people who legitimately make money."

HAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA! This is a joke, right? You're being sarcastic? The finance industry is built on a few fundamental premises, none of which have anything to do with "legitimately" earning money. Among the basic tenets:

(1) Federal laws discourage "defined-benefit" pensions and strongly encourage "defined-contribution" pension plans, which leads to

(2) A percentgage of all working-class people's income being siphoned off and given to "the Wall Street guys," who

(3) Give that money to really, really rich people and corporations to gamble with, after taking a certain percentage off the top for themselves -- and maybe another percentgage from the rich people to help them gamble with your money.

The bulk of the money that comes from working people and goes to rich people is not, contrary to the Wall Street myth, being used to make the economy; it's being turned into casino-style "financial instruments" which are nothing but an extremely complicated Ponzi scheme at which the rich people and "the Wall Street guys" simply CAN NOT LOSE, because (a) they're already rich, (b) the money they're pissing away is not theirs, and (c) the day after your 401(k) turns to shit, you make another contribution straight out of your paycheck because you have no other choice. Oh, and (d), if and when the whole house of cards collapses, they point out that -- due to their successful efforts at evading all meaningful regulation -- they are "too big to fail," and therefore taxpayers had better bail them out or else they'll destroy what's left of the economy.

In return you get, for example, IPOs that only rich people can subscribe to on the first day, which are then sold to your mutual fund a day later at a prodigious markup; you get one set of investment advice for "the little people" and another set (often diametrically opposed) given to the very wealthy in advance so they can profit off of the advice given to the little people; you get an interlocking system of boards and "compensation committees" that ensure insane compensation packages for top executives regardless of whether it's in accordance with the desires or best interests of the shareholders; you get unregulated futures and commodities markets that drive the power of oil and energy through the roof just long enough to bankrupt entire states; you get "credit default swaps" that are nothing but naked bets on financial transactions the parties have no direct interest in, leaing to the creditors of bankrupt auto makers refusing to accept a discount on bonds because they, and a bunch of other people who never had anything to do with the bonds themselves, can make it all back through the bets they placed with international financial bookie AIG -- and thus the US govenment pays them twice, once when it bails out GM and once more when it pours endless rivers of cash into AIG to keep it afloat (because if AIG went under, rich people who gambled someone else's money on bond defaults wouldn't be able to collect).

And of course while all of the "investments"-slash-wagers are made with the money of working people, the profits all stay with the gamblers. It's a sweet system if you're one of "the Wall Street guys" because there is essentially no way to lose. You can only win.

And the government better not seek to fix any of that even after the fact! Meddling socialists. It's sort of like being raped, wherein the rapists persuades the government to legalize rape, and then gets the government to bring him a steady supply of victims, and then expects a thank-you card from the people he raped -- and anyone who suggests resisting is threatened with death.

I appreciate your black humor but frankly, it's getting harder and harder to laugh about "the Wall Street guys" these days.