I think you mean a Mercantalist.

While a bonus in the face of the penalties incurred this year is in some ways insulting, his total compensation is relatively modest compared to the CEO market and the size of JPM.

This is one of the points that the "47% of "murkins don't pay taxes!" crowd consistently fails to acknowledge: over the past 30 years or so, many major corporations in this country have gamed the system to the point that they no longer pay a single penny of federal tax on profits, because they claim not to have any profits to tax. They do this by either transfering that burden to shareholders via dividends (who themselves either pay greatly reduced Capital Gains tax when they eventually sell their stock, which may not be for literally decades, or none at all, if they continue to maintain their holdings), or onto high-level managers and CEO's via "stock-option bonuses" who do pretty much the same thing.

The problem is that, if a company has $0 profits, not only do they not pay taxes, but they have nothing to invest in new infrastructure, expansion, or increasing workforce, let alone paying rank-and-file employees decent wages and benefits.

It's all basically a Ponzi-scheme of enormous proportions, designed with the express purpose of providing not only the corporation itself, but its shareholders and senior executives with a means of avoiding paying their fare share of federal taxes, and thus shifting the burden of supporting the government solely on the backs of working people.

No wonder average Joes and Janes are so frustrated by the current situation; but they've been brainwashed into focusing their ire on the government itself, and NOT on the corporations & their stakeholders who actively seek to reneg on their social obligation to contribute to the Common Good.

There's an extra apostrophe in the title

@3: These companies are following tax law as written and adjudicated - ire is rightly focused on the government that put that structure in place and sustains it.

This is the exact reason the two major political parties differ not a bit at their core - the particular beneficiaries of the laws, in this case tax laws, vary slightly when one team or the other has control, but not much.

Jamie Dimon is laughing in all of our faces. No matter how much bad press he gets, no matter how much his thievery is exposed, he gets to keep his millions and there's nothing anyone is doing about it. There are things people can do about it, but those in power chose to let him go and continue to be the poster boy for the shitty side of America.

It's angering.

@5 That tax law was not written in a vacuum.

@7 No, it was written by Jamie Dimon and his cronies and then passed into law by politicians who he and his peeps funded - exactly my point. The label pasted on the politicians may be different, the ingredients are the same.