AssholeBadgeOh, this will play well with the unemployed, homeless, and pretty much anyone with even a trace of a moral center:

A group of Wall Street banksters staged a rally the other day . . . and I don’t mean that stocks ended the day on an up note.

Things had gotten entirely too annoying. First it was White House (and populist) complaints about Wall Street recklessness and greed (humongous bonuses). Now it was White House desire to attach new regulations and taxes to banks. Enough!

And so a rally was organized at lunchtime on the 23rd floor of 14 Wall Street, directly across the street from the New York Stock Exchange, in the cushy offices of John Thomas Financial, a three-year-old investment house. It was much more comfortable than, say, the street.

As Thomas Belesis, the 35-year-old chief executive of John Thomas who hatched the idea, put it, “It’s cold out.”

Goodie, a bankster whine and cheese party! Who’s bringing the hankies?

I don’t know what’s funnier – that the company is named “John Thomas“, or that these pampered little parasites with their Prada loafers and spa manicures couldn’t be bothered to don their cashmere coats, silk scarves from Thomas Pink and Italian leather gloves to stand outside in the cold for a whole 30 minutes.

Or maybe it’s something else. Maybe the prospect of a . . . chilly . . . response from the lumpenproletariat audience was just too great a threat to their over-inflated sense of well-being.

Come on, guys, sack up! Where’s the courage of your convictions, if you honestly believe you’re being unfairly victimized and denigrated by the little people? You certainly thought you were Billy Badasses when you were designing ingenious new ways to rip off the rest of the world, all while you pushed the needle in your BMW M5s to 120 on your way out to the Hamptons.

Before the rally began, Mr. Belesis explained that he had begun thinking about forming this group in the last month or so as he heard “the repeating, relentless attacks on Wall Street.”

“I wanted the people who work on Wall Street to be heard,” he said.

Yes, I can see how Mr. Belesis, poor beknighted soul, would be outraged by the fact that Wall Street has no megaphone of its own in the public square. Why, if only there were some method of ensuring that Wall Street’s interests had adequate representation in our government discourse!

THESE are the legendary Masters of the Universe? More like Slaves to Their Own Narcissistic PR.

P.S. If you haven’t read any of Matt Taibbi‘s or Andrew Ross Sorkin‘s work on the Goldman Sachs-otomy of our economy, I highly recommend this diary over at Daily Kos as a refresher, which reprints an AIG insider’s take of what actually happened in that fateful fall of 2008.