Last year, airline fees totaled nearly $8 billion a consumer subsidy siphoned right out of our pockets into the corporate coffers. Take the ticket change fee. If something comes up, forcing you to change a flight from the one youd booked, youre hit with a service fee of $150.

Not merely dirty in terms of the gross pollution, mountain destruction and mine worker deaths that the Appalachian coal giants are causing, but also in terms of the massive loads of campaign cash that theyre shoveling into Americas elections in a crass effort to get lawmakers wholl do their bidding in Congress.

The key to this scam is the fee that bankers assess when your account is overdrawn. Bank of America, Citigroup, Wells Fargo and others are raking in billions from these fees, and lately they’ve been dealing a joker called “high-to-low” check clearing that takes even more from unsuspecting customers.

Recently, the biggest casino player of them all, Goldman Sachs, made a bizarre effort to strike a sober public pose by imposing a new ethical standard on its bankers/gamblers.

Last November, for example, the U.S. Government Accountability Office found widespread underreporting of the problem by company doctors and other health professionals. In a survey of 504 medical practitioners, more than half told investigators that they were pressured by bosses to downplay illnesses and injuries.

Let’s see if we can handle this little lesson in logic: One, America has a rather huge child obesity problem; two, major food corporations constantly pitch ads to children for such stuff as sugar-saturated breakfast cereals and fat-laden “Happy Meals.

Just recently, we learned from Kenneth Feinberg, the government’s special investigator of banker pay, that top executives of 17 financial giants shoveled $1.6 billion in excess compensation to themselves in 2008 — at the very moment their failing banks began to draw billions of bailout dollars from us taxpayers.

Republican lawmakers, however, are crying that the Democrats’ reform bill puts a crushing burden on the poor financial giants. While these Wall Street apologists wail and keen, though, slick operators like Dimon are wasting no time on tears. Instead, they’re devising ways to slip out of the new regulatory reins.

Why? Overuse of antibiotics led to the rapid evolution of savvy bacteria resistant to the miracle drugs. These superbugs cannot be killed, so they swarm infected patients and kill them.

These creatures are the infamous contaminated trailers that federal emergency officials bought and set up in 2005 for tens of thousands of families who had lost their homes in the devastating storm.