Wall Street is doing to America what private equity firms did to Simmons Bedding and many other productive companies. Taking control with borrowed money, stripping assets, slashing jobs and cashing out. - Taxpayer bailouts saved Wall Street from choking on its own greed. Now, as the Wall Street Journal reports, "Major U.S. banks and securities firms are on pace to pay their employees about $140 billion this year -- a record high." - $140 billion is more than the combined budgets of the U.S. Departments of Commerce, Education, Energy, Housing and Urban Development, the National Science Foundation and the Environmental Protection Agency. --- --- Typical workers, meanwhile, make less today adjusting for inflation than they did in the 1970s. Wall Street rewarded CEOs who cut employee wages and benefits and offshored manufacturing, services, and research and development; feasted on Bush's tax cuts; turned mortgages into loan sharking; and vacuumed up home equity, college funds, retirement funds and other private and public investments into their rigged casino. - Goldman Sachs, for example, "peddled billions of dollars in shaky securities tied to subprime mortgages on unsuspecting pension funds, insurance companies and other investors when it concluded that the housing bubble would burst," McClatchy reports in a new investigative series. -- The Great Depression gave way to the New Deal. -- The Great Recession has become the Great Ripoff.