Who’s Who in America?
Josh Marshall makes a great point about the whole, rotten AIG bonus mess. It's not really about the money, in reality a drop in the bucket. It's about who's running the show. Us or them?
The problem is what appears to be the president's mortifying impotence in the face of bankers and financiers who created the problem. The president speaks and acts for the federal government, which is to say, the American people, who have mobilized more than a trillion dollars and all powers of the state to repair the damage emerging out of the financial sector. And with all that, he's jacked up on a employment agreement between a company the government now owns and derivatives traders who sank the world economy and may quite likely be looking at criminal charges for their activities in the not too distant future? Anyone can look at that and see that the equation of power and accountability is all screwed up. Yes. And an understatement at that. The nice little show of outrage by the House on Thursday, the snap-passage of a 90% tax on the bonuses, is just that. A show. It will never make it to the Senate. And if somehow it does, the Supremes will rightfully strike it down as unconstitutional -- a bill of attainder. I find it doubtful that these monies will ever be recovered. The real question, is whether or not the Obama administration is going to recover its own dignity and start getting really tough with these bloodsuckers. It's gonna be hard when you have a couple of Wall Streeters running your own program. As I said last night, the Democrats are up to their necks in this one. And they're gonna have to come up with something better than the BS measure they passed today. Perhaps we could start with a censure of Chris Dodd -- a long-time functionary of the insurance lobby-- for his ignominious role in this disaster. And then maybe take a long, hard look at Mssrs. Geitner and Summers. The Republicans, meanwhile, make themselves ever more irrelevant. This all began on their watch and the same blowhard demagogues who were today shouting about the sanctity of "contracts" are the same folks who yesterday were demanding that auto workers shred their own collective bargaining contracts. These are very desperate times and the calendar is very short for Obama. Time to get tough. Really tough. With the Wall Streeters outside and inside his own administration. Question: why can't we just nationalize AIG? We already own it.
March 20th, 2009 at 2:53 am
Question: why can’t we just nationalize AIG? We already own it.
Because we’re affraid we’ll get teabagged.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:54 am
This does go to the point of populism, in a way. Summers and Geithner are from the environment they are tasked with regulating. They believe, as good Robert Rubin boys, that everybody they work with is basically ok, just a few bad apples. The problem is systemic, and that means remaking the system, not just tossing aside a CEO or two.
March 20th, 2009 at 6:55 am
Marc: I find it doubtful that these monies will ever be recovered.
Right, just run off or fire senior management and see how much you recover. Rather than beating up on management, you should be glad that they are knowledgeable enough about the company and their industry to make necessary changes and that they will stay around, partly because of the bonuses, to keep the government from losing more money on its stupid socialist venture and to, perhaps, make it possible to pay the money back.
Otherwise, let Obama’s experts at ACORN run AIG and see how much they’ll return to the taxpayers.
March 20th, 2009 at 7:31 am
(Well, I see that Marc’s filter is cutting out what I wrote, so let’s try it in pieces.)
1 of 2
One other point on which Marc doesn’t do justice is that the Democrats are trying to punish a narrow group of individuals with an illegal tax law for political purposes, which is a dangerous departure from the intent of the 16th Amendment covering tax law.
What is this bill of attainder other than a fancy phrase to be passed over quickly, as above? Let’s see.
Bill of attainder — “A bill of attainder may be defined to be an Act of Parliament for putting a man to death or for otherwise punishing him without trial in the usual form. Thus by a legislative act a man is put in the same position as if he had been convicted after a regular trial.”
Yep, stripping people of their civil rights without a trial. Why mess with a court and jury when you want to ram something through yourself?
March 20th, 2009 at 7:34 am
(Hmmm. Two didn’t work. Let’s make this 2 of 4 to see what the offending words might be.)
2 of 4
Imagine if we put a 90% tax on illegal aliens working in our country? Oh, that might work, but it’s different…right? Illegal aliens are encouraged to break laws and Obama’s administration isn’t going to make raids on companies to enforce any laws against them, but let management use a loophole in the bailout provisions put there by Obama and they’ll pay for the embarrassment!!
March 20th, 2009 at 7:35 am
3 of 4
Also, the Democrats are making the bill retroactive, a violation of ex post facto provision of Section 9 of the Constitution. (But, what’s a little ignoring of the Constitution matter to liberals and activist judges?)
March 20th, 2009 at 7:40 am
I give up on the fourth one. Too bad, it was a very good link. Maybe later.
March 20th, 2009 at 9:27 am
“Question: why can’t we just nationalize AIG? We already own it.”
Good question.
So I called my Congressman and asked him exactly that. The staff person informed me that Dana Rohrabacher voted yes on the Bonus Tax. (Whoopee)
But the matter of nationalizing AIG and/or straightening out the financial sector is well, um, …I’ll have to call back in a while to get an answer on that one.
How long is a “while”?
March 20th, 2009 at 10:55 am
If AIG has to give the bonus money back to the taxpayers, shouldn’t Obama and Dodd have to pay back the political donations given to them by AIG?
March 20th, 2009 at 11:28 am
Grocholski , a “while” = the end of the U.S.
It must suck to have Dana the surfer as your congressman.
OH, whoops.
I “forgot” mine (“liberal Democrat” Henry Waxman ) also voted for corporate bailouts, and the oh so fiscallyand politically sound attack on Iraq.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:18 pm
There’s a lot of chatter about being on the hook for trillions and trillions of dollars, if we do. But, it sure seems like we’re on the hook for all of that now. What bothers me is the degree to which anyone from Bush/Paulson/Bernake to Obama/Geithner/Bernake has demonstrated they are at all serious about stemming the hemorrhage. As time has gone on, and events unfold, I’m a lot less confident that things aren’t progressing exactly as these trios wanted things to go. The only one in the mix for whom I am mildly surprised is Obama. I’d hoped for better.
Having now followed Lieber, Taibbi, and Galbraith, I’m nearly to the point were I’m about to accept Taylor Caldwell’s 1970s premise of the gnomes of Zurich.
When Obama begins to speak in terms of, It’s like AIG has a bomb strapped to them, then I think it’s time to begin looking at the problem a little differently.
The Treasury and the Fed continue to treat the AIGs in this mess as though they are illiquid. They aren’t illiquid. They’re insolvent. And, insolvent businesses fail all the time. What better way to detonate the default swaps to their real value, which is zero, than by letting all these counterparties go bankrupt. It’s not like municipal investments, 401ks, or mutual funds have a huge value at this point. Better the $$ trillion we are shoveling into Europe, via AIG et al, be pumped into Social Security, Medicare, etc.
My sneaking suspicion is, not only are Obama/Geithner/Bernake working their butts off to save our own elites, but they’re trying to save elites globally. Surely, there are alternatives for approaching this mess, and it’s stunning in the extreme that alternatives haven’t been – at minimum – publicly examined. If we haven’t nationalized AIG, and it doesn’t look as though we will, then the question Why not? is a reasonable one. I just don’t think anyone wants to hear, or face, the answer.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:20 pm
Taibbi
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story
/26793903/the_big_takeover/print
March 20th, 2009 at 12:38 pm
OT or No?: At one point Anderson Cooper was trying to make some hey out the fact that AIG had donated 120,000 to the
Obama Campaign (McCain getting about half that) and I thought, “Yeah Anderson, that’s almost as much as you make for showing up to work, two or three times.”
So Coop’s predictable group think on Dodd (evidence actually shows he was trying to do the right thing, such as it was) to the contrary, Woody is essentially correct: a contract is a contract.
What we CAN do is find every sign post named after Ronald Reagan, drop trow and take a mighty piss. It was the economic philosophy of Pat Bucannon that created the culture of those contracts, hundred dollar baseball tickets and 15 million dollar paydays to actors for one crummy (generally speaking) movie.
There it is, take it. If they can get it, they’re worth it. Supply and demand. The American dream. You pay nothing for a full year. You’ve been pre-approved. The company requires the signing of a confidentiality agreement. They will always send the muscle work overseas. Deficits don’t matter.
It’s morning in America.
March 20th, 2009 at 12:45 pm
What the heck. As long as I’ve compiled a reading list I’m not sure anyone will read, there’s no harm in tossing in one more.
Dean Baker
Note: it’s a .pdf
March 20th, 2009 at 7:15 pm
Thanks, Listener, for the Taibbi link. Talk about shock and awe.
If Ralph Nader were a lesser man he would be laughing his head off.
March 20th, 2009 at 8:21 pm
“The real question, is whether or not the Obama administration is going to recover its own dignity…”
Which wasn’t helped by Obama recently snubbing the British Prime Minister, and instead sending along to the PM a box of 25 DVD’s that don’t even work in a British DVD player (imagine the ridicule that Bush would have gotten for this kind of buffoonery…remember him walking into a window instead of a door?). This after the British presented him with a multi-volume first edition biography of Winston Churchill, and a wooden pen crafted from a legendary British ship.
Now the Churchill book…would go straight into my fire, agreed. But…for chrissakes Obama got a cool pen.
March 21st, 2009 at 6:47 am
I am ashamed and embarrassed by right-wing talking heads making the rounds on radio and TV making excuses for capitalism’s excesses, read that pure greed, that’s put our country and its people in a weakened and dangerous situation.
Using terms like ‘contracts must be honored’ and ‘the bonuses were only 1.5% of the total bailout they got from the government’ are classic examples of extreme allegiance to an ideology that causes eyes to dim and brains to atrophy.
Well if they showed some fairness and honor themselves by refusing extra bonus money from us long before it got to this point, all while we are paying to keep them in their jobs to begin with, jobs they should have been fired for and convicted for long ago, then we would be more open to honor. As it is, they don’t know what honor is.
And bonuses? Bonus for what, abject failure? I say take these bastards and their contracts to court and let a jury of random people like you and I decide if their contract deserves honor. Funk their, and their ideological wing-nut supporters, definition of honor.
Then I want to see the SEC and the AG do the jobs we pay them for, instead of being useless ideological stooges for their favorite party, and bring more of these criminal bastards before juries made up of the American people for judging.
I like revenge. I think it is natural and necessary healing for a wronged soul. I think it is the essence of justice. It is justice.
March 21st, 2009 at 6:59 am
Oh, and Mr. President, ramroding trillion dollar bills through and around the peoples Representatives, in the middle of the night in order to hide some of your left-wing idealogical unnecessary billions, disguised as ‘stimulus’, helped these bastard get their ‘stimulus’ through.
We are being jerked up, down, around….and off, by extremes.
March 21st, 2009 at 7:04 am
If you don’t get Nancy and Harry under control, Mr. President, a jury made of all the American people will in two years.
March 22nd, 2009 at 9:21 pm
Nothing is more absurd to me than calling the very people who got us in this mess the “experts.” yes these are very smart people but WHY must we feel that we need them to fix the mess they created? Rational people simply cannot think this way, instead they are zombies. These kinds of zombies are found in all ideological stripes. Some commies praised Stalin even when his horrors came to light. These are the piglets that legitimize this kind of awful behavior.
Praising them for possessing the knowledge and the will for creative destruction is pathetic. Plain and simple.
June 2nd, 2011 at 1:35 pm
“Joomla”…
“Joomla is the best out of all. Joomla! came into being as the result of the fork of Mambo by the development team on August 17, 2005. At that time, the Mambo name was trademarked by Miro International Pvt Ltd”…