The Princes and the Paupers
By Susie Madrak Monday Dec 15, 2008 10:00amCompare and contrast - I'm sure the Senate's southern caucus is as upset about this as they are about auto workers making $28 an hour:
Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.
But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.
Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.
At least we've laid one myth to rest. It's never been that BushCo is incompetent. Clearly, they're very focused and directed when it comes to the economic privilege of the upper classes.
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America's been sold.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-DjYUmHjix4
BUSH &Co. are pro's at changing/inserting language into a document.......ie. Signing Statements. Nothing
new here they have been doing this the entire 8 yrs. and the beat goes on. Secrecy& Deception.
BUSH &Co. are pro(s) at changing/inserting language into a document.......ie. Signing Statements. Nothing
new here they have been doing this the entire 8 yrs. and the beat goes on. Secrecy& Deception. BUSH is
authoritarian. his philosophy represents a few.
Since the outrageously high wages paid to autoworkers is apparently the cause of the economic bust, why not just ban ANYONE in any industry receiving government funds, including the banks and financial houses, from being paid more than $28/hour?
Makes sense. If $28/hour is the issue (or $50, or $70, or whatever), then bust all bailout wages down to the same maximum level.
And if autoworkers' health care costs are so excessive, then all those Republican congressmen and senators should be the first to give up their own health coverage. Just to set an example.
I like it. And I can hear the distant screams of "socialism" just thinking about the idea.
I think those weasels gave up their right to whine about socialism when they insisted on socializing their losses. The Guardian had a great piece on this earlier this year.
how dare you draw attention to the hyper-hypocritical ruling class logic! we, the little ones, are NOT to comment on our indentured lives.
this is america pal, and you can take your canadian ideals of justice, fairness and equality and smoke it!
/snark off
When can we call the police and report this theft? We've been robbed.
The Executive proposes, the Legislature disposes.
The so called oversight is a joke. The so called taxpayer safeguards are a joke.
The joke is on us.
Everything about this is an enormous insult to the American people.
The Fat Cats take the money and do what they want, they can use it to lobby for even more money.
This is the height of corruption.
We are the stooges.
The time of the big push back is coming.
And oh by the way, you forgot the over $2 Trillion the Federal Reserve has thrown into the the Wall Street Bookies money pit. The Fed, that bastion of American democracy.
They are taking the Mortgage Backed Securities as 'collateral' against mega loans.
The SAME SECURITIES that originally were the object of the TARP 'auctions' and the subject of your post.
They may be making this sh!t up as they go but the HEIST is real.
Alice mentioned the mortgage backed securities are collateral.
Following is an exerpt from a great read, though 9 pages, about a guy that had a front row seat for the mortgage meltdown. His name is Michael Lewis and he wrote the book Liars Poker (about how investment firms work)
That's when Eisman finally got it. Here he'd been making these side bets with Goldman Sachs and Deutsche Bank on the fate of the BBB tranche (low rated mortgage backed security) without fully understanding why those firms were so eager to make the bets. Now he saw. There weren't enough Americans with shitty credit taking out loans to satisfy investors' appetite for the end product. The firms used Eisman's bet to synthesize more of them. Here, then, was the difference between fantasy finance and fantasy football: When a fantasy player drafts Peyton Manning, he doesn't create a second Peyton Manning to inflate the league's stats. But when Eisman bought a credit-default swap, he enabled Deutsche Bank to create another bond identical in every respect but one to the original. The only difference was that there was no actual homebuyer or borrower. The only assets backing the bonds were the side bets Eisman and others made with firms like Goldman Sachs. Eisman, in effect, was paying to Goldman the interest on a subprime mortgage. In fact, there was no mortgage at all. "They weren't satisfied getting lots of unqualified borrowers to borrow money to buy a house they couldn't afford," Eisman says. "They were creating them out of whole cloth. One hundred times over! That's why the losses are so much greater than the loans. But that's when I realized they needed us to keep the machine running. I was like, This is allowed?":
http://www.portfolio.com/news-markets/nationa...
Don't the people in congress know this already? Doesn't their radar start clanging whenever this admin changes some wording or something? OF COURSE they intended for it to be a loophole.
This is the most vile, crooked presidency/vicepresidency in the history of this country.
Sounds like standard operating procedure for Bu$hCo. ...just taking care of their base, the economicaly privileged upper class.
Bu$hCo is not the disease. He's only the smallest of the symptoms. The fact that America has become a plutocracy is systemic, and people like Bush are just the tip of the iceberg. 90% of Congress, and 90% of the state legislators are on board with the plutocrat program, too. And, as if that wasn't bad enough, 90% of the dupes who pull the lever on voting day have been bamboozled by their snake oil.
Did Wall Street bailout recipients use any of the bailout money to lobby, donate to helpful Congress and Senators campaign funds or even donate to charitble groups like private Swiss bank accounts?
How many Senators withdrew their funds from Wall Street after they gave Wall Street the money?
Well, that's what happens when you put a top Wall Street executive in charge of bailing out other top Wall Street executives and the firm he himself used to represent, among others.
Can't say we weren't warned. This whole bailout has been a huge scam.
In Class Warfare, Guess Which Class Is Winning. “There’s class warfare, all right,” Mr. Buffett said, “but it’s my class, the rich class, that’s making war, and we’re winning.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2006/11/26/business/yo...
Hard to win a war when you can't afford the weapons.
Besides, look at all the poor people who vote Republican because. I saw an interview with a single mother waitress with no health insurance, no sickdays, etc., stating that she voted for Bush because he had "values". I suppose hatred is a value, just not one I want to support.
In other news: Shoe thrower an immediate folk hero http://www.nytimes.com/2008/12/16/world/middl...
"While he has not been formally charged, Iraqi officials said he faces up to seven years in prison for committing an act of aggression against a visiting head of state."
The shoe thrower killed no one. The visiting head of state is responsible for the unecessary deaths of hundreds of thousands of innocents Iraqi civilians and 4500 American soldiers. The shoe thrower could face 7 years, Bush gets off scot free. Where's the justice? At this point, I'll settle for karma.
I wish our Iraqi brothers and sisters to know a good portion of the American citizenry, if not a majority, stand with them in support of this show of defiance. If only Pelosi and the Democats could muster as much backbone.
We just didn't fall off the potato wagon - but evidently those thick-headed legislators that we elected to look after our country did. The entire process was driven by one word and that was OVERSIGHT!! I'll never be convinced that it wasn't known from the beginning - by our legislators - that they were giving away the farm.
"mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules"
Ooooo, a mechanism for reviewing!!! now there is some tough langauge, guaranteed to mean nothing, and do nothing. scareeee.
reviewing exec comp? fuck that. howzabout this for a review: they should all be fired and be forced to live out there days pulling middle class wages, shit-ass healthcare and debt up to their eyeholes. take that bitches.
And ordering sphagetti and marinara sauce, and getting egg noodles and ketchup?
Don't you mean the Prince and the Porpoise?
(Or, at least, the Princes and the Puppets?)
Sounds fishy to me.
with this kind for go fuck-yourself
attitude from bush to the American public,
we SHOULD all take off our shoes and hope
our aim is perfect when launching them
at bush's head. what a mother-f#cker.
My opinion also.
I have been saying for years that things are going exactly the way BushCo wants, and have been from day one of this misadministration.
perhaps my little conspiracy theory can add some fuel to the fire...
http://harbingerofdoomblog.blogspot.com/
Socialism is a good idea. Maybe we should try it sometime. On the other hand, we've embraced Porkyism for two centuries and it continues to do little more than fatten hogs and fuck everything else over. Some people like to say that America was built on free enterprise. Actually, it was built on the blood and sweat of labor, free and otherwise. The porkies are parasites. We don't need them. We never did. If you can't see that now, you never will.
Lucky Congress is on our side? Otherwise, who knows what the excess-of-evil Bush administration might do to us.
But on the other hand ...
Happy holidays - bah humbug!! Is there no more to a seat in Congress than sitting on your ass? What were these damned people thinking, anyway? You would assume that, if politicians know anything, they must understand the importance of public relations/propaganda. But if they do, then why in hell did a bill in Congress to forego their annual automatic pay raises not even get out of committee? The money is trivial, to them and to the nation's budget as a whole. It would seem a perfect opportunity to earn some cheap good will from their nominal bosses - the public. For about the price of a Superbowl ad, they might at least look as if they give a shit about their constituents, and are sharing in our economic hardships, if only symbolically.
But no, they can't be bothered even to make the gesture. I understand that we have pressing problems, but how long could it have taken to put this to a vote - and to pass the thing unanimously? While we expect democracy, they're spitting in our face? That shoe-throwing Iraqi journalist has been tortured, and will be prosecuted, for a far milder [and in my opinion, rrichly deserved!!!] show of disrespect than this. Congress has just chucked its metaphorical manure-spreading boots at all of us, with plenty of fresh, aromatic, semi-liquid pig shit now dripping - or trickling down? - our figurative faces. This ain't promising, folks.
ohio exile
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