Oh dear, here we go again: “Wall Street is a meritocracy, for the most part,” an irate but of course unnamed onetime Citigroup executive confides to junior father confessor Gabriel Sherman in this week’s hallucinatory New York magazine cover story, “The Emasculation of Wall Street.” “If someone has a bonus, it’s because they’ve created value for their institution.” READ MORE

So Mike Bloomberg's eviction of Occupy Wall Street has actually resulted in a large protest this morning that is actually occupying Wall Street. You just know there's a team of mayoral advisors, familiar with the First Amendment, who are sitting in an office right now with their arms crossed, being all "la la la, told you so." More good pics here. Arrests are already taking place.

Photo by CBC superfox David Common.

Zuccotti Park is a well-manicured, block-long park in the heart of New York City’s financial district that, for the past two days, has been home to a few hundred squatters, anarchists, activists, students, a few drug addicts, several undercover cops and one lone man in a suit. Alternately calling themselves Occupy Wall Street or Take Wall Street or the 99%, they have set up camp, spending the night on rolls of cardboard, yoga mats and bare concrete, as a protest against the abuses carried out by various financial institutions and banks against the people of this country. READ MORE

It's worth taking a long, slow read of this morning's Times story on lack of prosecution in general and particularly the lack of Justice Department civil or criminal cases regarding the "financial crisis." For one thing, there are at least two instances of someone directly lying to the reporters in the story (although it is unknown to us which of the parties giving conflicting accounts is lying). Elsewhere, people put the blame on regulatory inaction: "In 1995, bank regulators referred 1,837 cases to the Justice Department. In 2006, that number had fallen to 75. In the four subsequent years, a period encompassing the worst of the crisis, an average of only 72 a year have been referred for criminal prosecution." And here's a nice way to look at a flaw in the system, from a UC Irvine criminology professor: “When regulators don’t believe in regulation and don’t get what is going on at the companies they oversee, there can be no major white-collar crime prosecutions. If they don’t understand what we call collective embezzlement, where people are literally looting their own firms, then it’s impossible to bring cases.”

That pill-popping, boy-crazy nincompoop Ayn Rand has got a lot to answer for. Indeed, it's not too much of a stretch to say that we owe at least part of the recent economic crisis to her and her philosophy of Objectivism, since former Fed chief Alan Greenspan was a lifelong disciple of both. READ MORE

I can summarize the well-informed tripartite New York magazine cover story on Wall Street, while eliding all the details: pretty much no one learned anything, rich people really enjoying spending money, it's not unlikely there'll be a round two mortgage debacle, Wall Street is more consolidated than ever and poses a "greater systemic risk," we're off to enjoy/exploit the BRICs (and CIVETs and EAGLEs, et al), even though Goldman Sachs, among others, took a bath on them over the last few years, slightly fewer Harvard MBA graduates are going straight into Big Finance (they're all becoming consultants, which, same diff!), and lots of people on Wall Street are irritated at the negative attention and don't understand why they can't just keep on rollin'. Also you probably shouldn't trust them with your retirement money, still. Surprise!

Lil Wayne was released from Rikers Island this morning. He'll now head to Las Vegas, where he'll apparently join his protege Drake on stage Saturday night, and then to Miami, for the traditional welcome home party at a strip club Sunday night. According to Mack Maine, another rapper on Wayne's Young Money label, the crew plans to "just treat him like a king, like the royalty that he is and make him feel like we really missed him and welcome him back to the family, basically." READ MORE