If you ask anyone how the last two years have been, the answer would be “Terrible!” Unemployment rocketed up to nearly 10% officially and probably about 20% unofficially and shows no sign of coming down soon. Homes are being foreclosed left and right, throwing people onto the street. Food banks are reporting difficulties in meeting the increased demand for their services.

But not everyone has been hard hit. As Bloomberg news points out:

The last two years have been the best ever for combined investment-banking and trading revenue at Bank of America Corp., JPMorgan Chase & Co., Citigroup, Goldman Sachs Group Inc. and Morgan Stanley, according to data compiled by Bloomberg. Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, 56, and his top deputies are in line to collect more than $100 million in delayed 2007 bonuses — six months after paying $550 million to settle a fraud lawsuit related to the firm’s behavior that year. Citigroup, the bank that needed more taxpayer support than any other, has a balance sheet 14 percent bigger than it was four years ago.

The very institutions that created so much distress for so many people were able to get the government to not only bail them out but to gut many of the new regulations that would have prevented the kind of reckless actions that might cause a repeat of the crisis.

The U.S. government, promising to make the system safer, buckled under many of the financial industry’s protests. Lawmakers spurned changes that would wall off deposit-taking banks from riskier trading. They declined to limit the size of lenders or ban any form of derivatives. Higher capital and liquidity requirements agreed to by regulators worldwide have been delayed for years to aid economic recovery.

Can anyone doubt that we have an oligarchy?

In fact, corporate America has been amassing huge amounts of cash by firing workers and squeezing the remaining ones to take on the increased workload. This ‘business strategy’ goes under the euphemism of ‘increasing productivity’. As a result, they increased their profits that have been used to pay huge bonuses to their top executives and raise their stock prices. Look at the Dow Jones index over the past two years.

Does the index bear any resemblance to the conditions of actual people?

Ted Rall’s animation succinctly captures what is going on. (Cartoonist Tom Tomorrow taps into a similar vein.)