Victor Davis Hanson talks about guilt and the blame game at the National Review. He was commenting on Barney Frank’s public outrage over the payment of bonuses to AIG execs at a time when the company was receiving taxpayer subsidies. Dr. Hanson argued that since guilt over AIG’s condition was shared, why not the pain? What gave Barney Frank the moral authority to float above the fray?
Quite aside from his former partners (the gigolo fellow who used Frank’s facilities for illegal activities, and the other boyfriend Herb Moses — self-described as part of the “congressional gay-spouse caucus” — who, as an exec, was helping to make Fannie policy at the very time Frank was voting on its appropriateness), Frank received more than $40,000 in campaign contributions from the bankrupt Freddie and Fannie, despite his own role as supposed fiscal watchdog on the House Financial Services Committee.
A modest suggestion? Let us agree on the following:No more corporate fat cats partying, jetting, and bonusing around after their tottering companies got federal cash; and all congressional-people and senators who took any contributions from any corporate or quasi-government entity that is a recipient of federal bailout money, must pay that money back, plus interest, to the government. After all, as in the Madoff mess, these congressional-people usually got the cash at a time when their benefactors were already in trouble, albeit hiding their fraudulent or unethical practices through cooked statements and high living. So please, Representative Frank, Senator Dodd, and all the rest — give back all that campaign cash to our government, and then in silence endure what you helped to conceive.
The role of government in corporate decision making will only expand. The TARP bill under consideration (see the Thomas catalogue) will manage the behavior of institutions which receive money from the government to a significant degree. The CRS summary of the bill is here and confirms the outlines of Heritage’s observation that TARP will increase government involvement in the corporate boardroom, and it “expands the program into consumer loans, student loans, commercial real estate, and municipal securities”, bails out the auto industry and institutes a program to prevent foreclosures. Whatever you think of more government intervention, it is hard to argue that there will be more of it. Given that increasing role, what are the odds that Hanson’s plea for both the public officials and private executives to keep their hands off the money will be heeded?
The odds of the plea being heard are not very great, I think. Huge industries and their regulators have an urge to expand their scope, often at the expense of the principal, the people, who remains the nominally the object of their concern while retaining fewer and fewer real prerogatives. In that kind of society the guardians do everything “for the children” while simultaneously exerting every effort to keep them that way.
Bill Dalton described the dance between the leaders of huge institutions in which only one thing is constant: the customer or the taxpayer always winds up paying for everything.
“We’ve asked the car dealers to restructure their organization, including workers restructuring their union contracts in order to save the auto industry,” said Sen. John Cornyn, R-Texas. “We ought to be asking the leadership at AIG to make the same kind of concessions to save AIG and the taxpayers’ dollars.”
But experts in executive compensation say those contracts, written before the government stepped in to bail out AIG, would be difficult, if not impossible, to break. Challenging those contracts might end up costing AIG and the government even more money including legal fees, according to attorney Aliza Herzberg of Olshan Grundman Frome in New York.
“These are contracts from a year and a half ago,” she said. “We have to live by them.”
The employment contracts became so complex, with pay packages consisting of stock options and other forms of deferred compensation, largely because of Congress’ attempts to control soaring executive salaries.
In 1993, Congress limited the tax deduction companies could take for cash payments to $1 million. The result was a cottage industry of lawyers, consultants and advisors who structure even bigger pay packages with creative legal strategies that now make the AIG bonuses difficult to rescind.
But never fear. The dance will go on. Just where micro-management taken to its ultimate conclusion leads is illustrated by this set of videos. Kim Jong Il as the Great Fashion Designer and …
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YouTube Direkt
Update: Just One Minute has a much more granular look at the AIG situation. He basically argues that public attention is being focused on its credit derivatives losses than its securities operation, where far more money was lost.
AIG FP was supported on credit derivatives, some municipal investment agreements, and maturing debt. Of a total of $52.4 billion in support for that unit from Sept to Dec 2008, $27.4 was related to credit derivatives.
On the last page of the filing (insufficiently glamorous to get its own pie chart) are the payments made in support of AIG’s security ending, handled in a different division. The amount: $43.7 billion. Without benefit of a calculator I can assure you that $43.7 billion is much larger than $27.4 billion, yet I note that public outrage is much less.
So que pasa? Well, bashing highly paid Wall Street financiers peddling products no one understands is a lot more fun than bashing a bunch of collateral clerks doing something or other about which no one cares.
That misdirection allows politicians to focus the spotlight on parts of the regulatory regime where they want more power, without necessarily addressing the parts of the regulatory regime which failed badly and with which they don’t want to be identified. It’s old and hoary story of using a position of power to CYA. The basic takeaway is that things are not as clear-cut as they seem; and in the blame-game we are now in, just as in a situation where the cops have suspects in different rooms, the classic Prisoner’s Dilemma suggests it is a race to lay as much on the Other Guy as is possible. The astute detective must decide who to believe and to what extent. But one thing is probable: the suspects are spinning their stories to look good. And there is this wrinkle: the cops may be involved in this caper too. Who plays the role of internal affairs in this mess? The public via the ballot box? Maybe.
The proper roll of government in a republic of fee citizens should be severely limited in scope to only protecting the rights of citizens in matters where they cannot realistically protect themselves.
A republic form of government should:
Provide a military which protects the nation and its citizens from foreign armed menace. In a perfect republic all able bodied citizens are the militia!
Establish rule of English Common Law for EVERYONE including corporations. There should be no trial except by jury. No crime has occurred unless injury has been done to someone. And yes, intent of the accused is a factor in determining if a crime has been committed! The penalty for bribery should be DEATH!
Set national standards & issue patents so that commerce and innovation may thrive.
Use the law to protect citizens from any business monopoly(s) that may corner a market and hold the citizens at financial gunpoint. (Note: In a truly free market this shouldn’t be a problem for very long, since entrepreneurs will come out of the woodwork to compete if there are profits to be made)
All other matters should be left to local governments or the people themselves.
The further we move away from these ideals and empower a central government, the more we lessen our individual liberties and risk serfdom.
As a compromise, I’ll settle for the U.S. Constitution as understood in 1790 but without legalized slavery!
A real risk for all of us is that the banks start giving the money back before they should just so they can get the gov’t off their backs.
Dick Fuld probably could’ve saved Lehman, or at least saved the equity holders from being wiped out if he’d acted sooner. The point is that humans are often poor risk managers as this whole debacle keeps illustrating, and no CEO of *any* company, big or small, wants the gov’t telling them what to do.
For this reason they will naturally take on additional risk to avoid this situation in marginal cases.
VDH is and has been years of great reading, problem is he has been a lifelong democrat, supporting most of what lead us to where we are, not paying attention the hand writing on the wall long before we came to “0″ (Zerobama), still VDH is a top notch professional in his field, always worth the read, historical perceptive is awesome!
Barney Frank should be in jail.
He is probably the single person most responsible for the mortgage problems (although there is plenty of blame to go around).
There’s a video clip circulating where he says he wants to “roll the dice” on Fannie/Freddie, and push them to take on more risk. The thing was, he was playing with our money.
Just watched Barney Frank on The News Hour on PBS. He was in full bleat that as he now owns the company he should be able to declare that these employees have not earned their bonuses, and he blamed Bush/Paulson for not providing sufficient oversight. The draw dropping moment was when he said that “it is natural for everyone to cover their own mistakes” and therefor the people who caused the problem should not be allowed to evaluate the performance of employees. He meant it as a criticism of AIG’s current management’s fitness to award bonuses. The truth is that as VDH and The Old Guy make clear Barney Frank, along with Dodd, Raines, and Gorleck, is among the last people to be trusted with evaluating a two teller Savings and Loan let alone a firm like AIG.
Based on my time in the DC area, frequently dealing with Congress and various government agencies. I have concluded that the majority of the things the Federal Government does MUST fail because of one thing.
The Federal Government, especially inside the beltway, does not believe in management. And by that I don’t mean a certain type of management but ANY management.
So many PC and Must Do and Regulatory, and Choose My Favorite Contractor and Also Build My Favorite University a New Solarium, limitations and requirements apply that there is really nothing left to manage down where The Stuff Gets Done.
The idea of this crew telling people in private industry what to do is utterly absurd.
One wonders how much money the bonus recipients would be earning today if AIG had been allowed to go bankrupt?
One of the key reasons for the defeat of the Luftwaffe was the economic meddling by Goering & Co. He had his favorite (palm greasing) players. Thus many promising designs, lacking a patron, didn’t enter the war until it was hopeless. A super-loser like the Me-210 got the nod instead.
Indeed the larger Nazi economy was based on the shakedown and payoff. This was so debilitating that even the rampant theft of alien property and enslavement of a continent was unable to compete with America.
BHO is basically giving us Nazism with a human face: he’s a meddling black-supremacist-racist with the management style of a gonnabee.
Soro’s kid looks like a lock to collapse the worlds reserve currency.
The four horsemen shall be on the march before BHO is turfed out.
The only positive outcome will be that BHO does for Leftism what AH did for Nazism.
VDH is a clear thinker and writer. Barney, Maxine W. Chris D and no doubt many others are as crooked and culpable as the AIG execs.
Without the power of government the elites have no “product” that anyone is willing to buy. With the power of government everyone is forced to buy their product, whether they want to or not.
Its amazing in a sense how much the structures of socialism resemble the caricatures of capitalism that they claim to hate.
The AIG slush account was set up to save the government of France and her largest bank.
One Lehman Brothers was enough.
BTW, AIG keeps bringing up Lehman over and over when pleading for $$$$$$$$$$$$$.
I used to think I was being a bit on the paranoid side back when I concluded this whole bail-out program was a gigantic looting of the public treasury. Can anyone really argue otherwise now? There’s clearly no oversight in Congress, not even the pretense anymore; all we get are Lefty “red meat” rantings designed to show the base that the Dems in Congress are really sticking it to these Wall Street fat-cats.
More and more, it seems like this WAS the plan: “Barney, quick, while everyone is panicking, throw billions at favored corporations, political donors, and people who have bribed us! We can always blame it on Bush later!” The phrase “kabuki theater” is being tossed around, but it’s really more like “fait accompli.”
If I were a designer kid
I’d want Barney for a daddy
I’d love him for the things he did
Though some say he’s a baddy
So what he’s played the Congress game
‘Cause so do many others
What e’re he’s done it’s just the same
As his Congressional brothers
What’s that you say, he’s not a star?
He’s not what I’ve been thinkin’
He’s not a purple dinosaur
He’s pink and somewhat stinkin’?
Well just for that I take it back
We’ll fit him for some nooses
If I’da known he’s just a hack
From lib’ral Massachoosses
I used to think I was being a bit on the paranoid side back when I concluded this whole bail-out program was a gigantic looting of the public treasury.
The press talks about “toxic assets” as if they just happened. But they just didn’t materialize one day out the clear blue. They were created by faulty systems and toxic people. After Pearl Harbor was bombed and 9/11 happened, Commissions were formed to inquire into how such a thing could have happened. What’s striking about the response to this crisis is the curious disinterest in unearthing its causes, apart from throwaway generalities. I believe that’s because there are enough people, on both sides of the political aisle, as well as considerable numbers of eminent financiers, who will be looking at a stretch in jail or ruin, perhaps both, if we ever started turning over some rocks.
So the bailout package is not just an occasion to loot the public treasury. It’s also hush money. Because the guys who have the goods on the regulators need to be kept in business — which in the nature of things may be rackets — by bailout money. Notice that the market, left to itself, would have taken care of the financiers. They’d be ruined; forced to live on macaroni and cheese or whatever they consider equivalent to it, unless rescued by their silent partners.
The real fiction is to think that they had no silent partners, either by commission or ommission; that all we need to do now is empower these very bureaucrats who must of necessity have had to be part of the problem; to give them more power and the keys to the treasury. The public, if it isn’t careful, will wind up keeping the old system in place by funding a lease on its life at the expense of life savings. Of course they’ll go through it too. Scams are like that. But that’s tomorrow. Today we eat, drink and be merry.
The AIG incident has proved inconvenient because it forces to the surface the entanglement between our Nemesis (the greedy executives at AIG) and our saviors (Barney Frank, Dodd, et al) “Oh did you know each other? Fancy that?” As I wrote several times before, it’s no use rebooting the database and getting transactions rolling again, just for the sake of it, if the processes which corrupted the data to begin with are alive and executing. It will run for a while, maybe till the close of business and then the whole nightmare will begin again. What happened to cause the meltdown? Is it a victimless crime? Should we just move on? Or are the very same agents of our difficulty even now pointing their fingers at each other?
I figure $540 M to be $360 M less than the money being given to Gaza for reconstruction.
Gaza and the West Bank get $900 M.
My only question is: how are they going to spend the money in Gaza without letting Hamas get a piece of the action?
I hear many pols screaming to “take back the money” from AIG.
If all the bailout dollars funneled into AIG were absolutely necessary, because of its critical position underpinning the financial infrastructure, it would seem that retrieving any of those dollars would insure its immediate collapse; after spending $170 billion of the taxpayers’ money.
Cuomo, NY AG threatens supeanas unless the “list of bonus recipients” is not delivered by sundown today. To what end?
There were no restrictions on bonuses in the TARP agreements? Seems not.
In my class today we were talking about the connection between interest groups and the federal budget.
The students first thought, a simple uneducated one, was that the interest groups were bad because they were gaining money from the government to fund their special interests, and they thought that the interest groups should be controlled more. But after discussion and a little education from Madison (Federalist 10), they changed their tune.
The students realized that it isn’t the interest groups or the lobbyists or the businesses that are bad- it is naturalable for man to want government benifits when those are available. No, what is bad is the government itself- an unlimited government able to distribute funds and bonuses and money to favored groups- that is wrong and bad, and that needs to be changed.
Frank is the problem with our government- he expands the government, spends more money, and then because that increase goes poorly and the money is unwisely spent he demands more money and power. He is the problem, and voters need to toss louts like him out of office.
Spot on, Wretch: The Great Mortgage Meltdown didn’t just happen by itself, but arose because presidents Carter and Clinton signed the CRA, which forced banks to make loans to people who normally would have been considered too high-risk.
With their millions of datapoints, the credit-rating rules were as close to an accurate profile of human behavior as one could get, and when the folks who got the squirrely loans (at the point of the government’s gun-barrel) began doing exactly what the rating rules said they’d do, the consequences were entirely predictable.
Now Bawney Fwank as the astounding audacity to puff himself up as if he were an injured party who had nothing whatsoever to do with the whole debacle.
It’s hard to imagine a fitting punishment for this level of brazen lying. But it’s a fair bet that mere prison would be far too generous for Bawney and his co-conspirators in what must surely be the most putrid congress in our nation’s history.
If I were ever to go into politics, I would have to be a Democrat. There, I could be corrupt as hell and they would watch my back, fighting tooth and nail to cover for me, lest I lose the seat to a Republican. They would help me use every dirty method, if that is what it took, to take down my opponent.
If I were a corrupt Republican and got caught, members of my own party would be right besides the Dems throwing up the rope to hang me.
The Republicans need to learn to play for keeps.
Eliot Spitzer ran Hank Greenberg out of AIG.
The new CEO was appointed by the Govt!
(Dem campaign contributor)
About 90 Billion went to Goldman Sucks or Europe.
Many players ex Goldman, of course.
AIG’s Not Very Transparent List of Counterparties
It’s good that AIG has released a list of its counterparties. But if it really believes in “the importance of upholding a high degree of transparency with respect to the use of public funds”, this is a very odd way of releasing the information.
If you’re not already familiar with the intricacies of AIG’s operations, it’s very easy to just start adding up the numbers in the various appendices, coming up with a kind of bailout league table: Goldman Got $12.9 billion! Barclays got $8.5 billion! But in fact it’s much more complicated than that.
There are four appendices in all. Before we get to them, it’s worth reading a bit of Gretchen Morgenson today:
Even A.I.G.’s own independent directors haven’t been told which of the counterparties were paid…
Such secrecy raised hackles because the insurance claims were paid off in full, even though widespread defaults on the underlying debt have not occurred. Why, many people wonder, did the Fed make A.I.G.’s counterparties whole on losses that have not happened yet?
What Morgenson is talking about here is the second of the four appendices: the payments made by the company known as “Maiden Lane III”.
After banks insured their assets against default, AIG essentially used Maiden Lane III to take those assets onto its own books, thereby allowing it to cancel out the insurance contracts. The big winners here are SocGen and Goldman Sachs — and it’s worth noting that unlike the first appendix, where the counterparties are helpfully listed in order of size, in the second appendix there seems to be no particular order at all, and the two biggest recipients of government money are hidden in the middle of the list.
—
In any event, so many of the counterparties on this list had hedged their AIG exposure that it’s massively oversimplifying matters to conclude that even the banks with the biggest exposures on the second appendix are the ones which effectively got the biggest government bailout.
It’s not nearly as simple as that — and AIG should be much more upfront about such matters than it is being with this release.
Fair Game – At A.I.G., Good Luck Following the Money –
Representative Carolyn B. Maloney, Democrat of New York, said she had twice asked for a full accounting from Ben S. Bernanke, the chairman of the Federal Reserve, which arranged the A.I.G. rescue. She has not received it.
“They have told others it is proprietary information,” Ms. Maloney said in an interview. “But we are the proprietors now. Taxpayers own the store, and we should be able to see the books.”
My only question is: how are they going to spend the money in Gaza without letting Hamas get a piece of the action?
In a culture where anyone and everyone can be bought off, it doesn’t matter, and that’s the culture that currently controls the government of the United States. They just assume that the check will buy the behavior they want. And when it doesn’t, they just assume that the problem is that the amount of the check wasn’t sufficient to begin with, so they write another one.
Of course Hamas will get part of the check–that’s expected. But the idea that the quantity of the amount that Hamas receives will not buy them off is inconceivable. In the immortal words of Forrest Gump, “stupid is as stupid does.”
The legal definition of “Chutzpah” is killing your parents and then demanding the mercy of The Court as an orphan. Barney Frank’s portrait should appear next to the definition.
Let us consider Wretchard’s original submission. The true horror of rule by a Lil’ Kim isn’t that the buildings are ugly, or food is bad or the clothes are shoddy or the light’s go out. The true horror is in those poor women desperately applauding as Dear Leader walks by in a modest casual sweater. Watching any American yearns for a soul brave enough to step forward and yell out “Hey fat boy, you suck.” The gutless wonders of the Western Press were in Onanistic Glee when the Iraqi threw his shoes at President Bush. Like late night talk show hosts they only choose safe targets. Right now it is possible that if Obama ever gets humiliated in public he would deflate like the Wicked Witch under a bucket of water. My concern is that in three years, after Acorn gets its army together and the acolytes of Ayres get their hooks deep into the State apparatus, people may be afraid to insult the Leader.
“So the bailout package is not just an occasion to loot the public treasury.
It’s also hush money.
Because the guys who have the goods on the regulators need to be kept in business — which in the nature of things may be rackets — by bailout money. ”
—
My impression so far is that Barry’s part in this is just a repeat of what he practiced in Chicago, where he learned the basics in Community Organizing, but after the Annenberg Cash Gusher, it was a free ride.
He didn’t even have to know what was going on, just be aware of the rules he learned in Organizing 101, in fact it was necessary NOT to know in order to stay above the low life’s who were occasionally outed in one way or another.
As Freddosso or the other NRO guy pointed out, Barry’s MOD was always the same:
He might have attended all of Wright’s Sermons, but being of another World, he missed all the despicable evil stuff.
Comes out smelling like the one rose in the Chicago Cesspool.
…to the Dupes.
“They just assume that the check will buy the behavior they want”
—
As long as everyone involved is part of the team, knows the rules, and plays their appointed part.
Agree with sf @18 that 1) Barney Frank puffs himself up, and 2) he belongs in jail.
Barney Frank huffs and he puffs
But mainly he puffs when he huffs
It’s plain as can be
A man’s man is he
It’s time he was fitted for cuffs
“But they just didn’t materialize one day out the clear blue. They were created by faulty systems and toxic people.”
Ah, true, but it is much worse than that in terms of the impact on the Left. “They were created” by basic flaws in personal philosophies and the larger beliefs underlying them about Equality, Social Justice, Civil Rights, and the government’s ability to conjure resources out of thin air in order to meet such objectives. To question these beliefs, to conclude that not everyone deserves a house of his own merely because he exists on the planet, to find that not all beliefs and lifestyles are equal and deserve equal success, to possibly even conclude that large segments of some ethnic groups are hopeless dirtbags, well, that would knock over the whole house of cards.
The CRA and other such instruments were the Left’s equivalents of Nazi Wonder Weapons, the marvelous developments that will win the war if they just hung on a little longer.
The Man in the Middle
Chuck Schumer, the brash New York senator, helped drive the Democrats’ recent rise to power with what he says is a critical insight about the American middle class—that it is more affluent, and wants different things from an activist government, than most policy makers think.
If the new administration and Congress can strengthen the bond between government and the middle class as he defines it, Schumer believes, this new Democratic era could last for a generation or longer.
“He particularly worries about Alaska, where at this very moment a jury is deciding the fate of the Republican incumbent, Ted Stevens, who was indicted for taking bribes. Buzz. “They’re still deliberating? Keep me posted.” Snap.
In most places, a bribery indictment would spell doom.
But Alaskans, like Louisianans, seem to regard corruption in their politicians as an endearing rather than a disqualifying trait:
the race is tight.
Schumer must figure out how to persuade them to retire Stevens, but without being seen as doing so. Should Alaskans decide that meddlesome outsiders are scheming to do in their beloved “Uncle Ted,” spite alone will carry him to victory. That’s where George Washington comes in. An ad treating Stevens with similar reverence—a call for change made more in sorrow than in anger—could do the trick, giving Alaskans “permission,” in the political argot, to vote Democratic. Such an ad would require just the right touch. In fact—Flip. “I want sign-off on the Stevens ad.” Snap—it could decide the race, if the jury doesn’t first. “
Lifeofthemind,
“My concern is that in three years, after Acorn gets its army together and the acolytes of Ayres get their hooks deep into the State apparatus, people may be afraid to insult the Leader.”
Nope, not as long as the people are armed. And current firearms and ammunition sales figures indicate the populace will be very well armed indeed. Furthermore, what makes you think the armed forces and police–both mostly conservative institutions–would automatically side with the government if “la mierda golpea el ventilador?”
As long as everyone involved is part of the team, knows the rules, and plays their appointed part.
Exactly. But for the most part our political class lives in a bubble. They assume that everything acts and revolves upon the model that their lives revolve around—how could it not?
I remember when my ex-girlfriend’s sister came down from New York City some years ago. She stated to me at some point that she didn’t really think that Bush had really won the election because no one she knew had voted for him. She could not look outside her bubble. The very idea that anybody could have different ideas or values from her was–unthinkable. The fact that Bush had won demonstrated, or it should have to her, that maybe, just maybe, her view of the world wasn’t quite accurate. Perhaps, just perhaps, not everyone who mattered shared her opinions. But such a thought never crossed her mind.
And that is the quality of the political class we have now. I hope too many of us don’t die because of their stupidity.
Kind of sad, really, to compare Schumer’s machinations with Steele’s jive TV appearances.
Cobb:
Breitbart wants to demonstrate in New York, rather than DC.
…the belly of the beast.
MarkJ,
Just to be clear, I do not agree with you on either your facts or your implications. I see not a shred of evidence that would lead me to believe that the armed forces or law enforcement would side with people threatening or using armed force under any circumstance including those arising from the conduct of Barack Obama. The “militia” movement of the 1990s was an embarrassment at best. The answers to our problems simply do not lay in dreams of or threats of armed revolution. I do believe in the Second Amendment and can believe that there could be circumstances in which an armed citizenry can induce a sense of caution that could mitigate abuses by an oppressive corrupt local machine, particularly in isolated communities. As a meaningful part of the national dynamic it is an invitation to disaster, as Talleyrand said of the murder of the Duc d’Enghien by Napoleon I, “It was worse than a crime, it was a blunder.” If you really want to invite repression that that is the road to follow. What is needed is harder; old fashioned politicking, constant communication, presence in every polling site to try to ensure an honest vote and instant response to every abuse or lie are where we must start.
It’s all part of the plan you see.
Increase the market share of government over the entire economy, increase the national debt to the point of crowding out and destroying private lending, let the tentacles of government burrow deep into the sinew of the private sector, unionize all the major private sector employers, nationalize health care and treatment decisions, increase the protection racket of dem politicians over private businesses through regulatory extortion, and after a while, one day you wake up and business and the people themselves are no longer allowed to manage their own affairs.
It’s all for your own good, Comrades. You don’t really think you can be allowed to make your own decisions about your own life, do you? Come now.
Your betters know what best for you.
So there is vein popping outrage at paying a manager or salesman at AIG a $100k bonus, here and now.
Yet it’s just fine to subsidize a UAW worker an extra $10 an hour, in perpetuity. And guarantee a lifetime pension at age 50.
Seems to me the former is preferable to the latter, from an economic stimulus perspective, because it gets the money out into circulation NOW.
And that’s what the package is all about, right?
Tcobb,
When people have their enabling paradigms threatened they can become dangerous. They will do anything to validate their beliefs that they relied on establish their connection to a coherent social network. To affirm that Bush (or someone declared to be like him) did not win, should not have won and could not be allowed to win someone like your ex-girlfriend’s sister will accept conduct that in other circumstances they would repudiate. There are a series of simple steps from agreeing with those whose approval you crave (so many never leave adolescence), to discounting evidence of misconduct by Acorn, to participating in what would be a criminal act. Few go as far as Bernadine Dohrn or Rachel Corrie but the path is well trodden. We should all stop and examine our assumptions constantly.
Unsk, Concur.
Just a one off question for all the big brains here, who manages the Congresscritters pension funds?
LifeofTheMind writes:
We should all stop and examine our assumptions constantly.
I don’t disagree with you at all. The point I was trying to make is that the people who comprise our “political class” in this day and age suffer from the same kind of myopia. They don’t interact with anyone who doesn’t share their basic beliefs. They consider anyone who disagrees with them to be, by definition, unworthy of being spoken to.
They are ignorant, arrogant and totally unaware of their own failings. The fact that so many of Obama’s proposed cabinet appointees were found to have failed on their obligations to pay their taxes is not the disease, it is merely a symptom of the disease.
Tcobb,
Absolutely, in here I may not enjoy the baiting or assumptions that come from Benjy on the left and one or two I find to reflexive on the right but I know they do us good. To a point that is, we should try not to get dragged down into trivia and I do tend to flame on if I think the integrity of the Club is threatened, by a call for misconduct for example.
“No Bill of Attainder…shall be passed”
Representative Carolyn Maloney is considering introducing a bill that taxes back 100% of the AIG bonuses.
Representative Maloney might also want to introduce herself to the US Constitution.
Yeap, she’s pushing for a bill of attainder.
Good one, Doug.
“The point I was trying to make is that the people who comprise our “political class” in this day and age suffer from the same kind of myopia. They don’t interact with anyone who doesn’t share their basic beliefs. They consider anyone who disagrees with them to be, by definition, unworthy of being spoken to.”
Breitbart spent some time in DC last week. He was shocked and saddened at the amount of chaos, infighting, and lack of leadership on the right, not only in Govt. but in our institutions, like NRO etc.
(Frum personal attacks on Limbaugh a good example.)
imo some of the neocons are virtually conservative in name only.
Breitbart was calling for term limits on all of them.
That’s Limbaugh’s strategy – he refuses to spend any significant amount of time in DC.
That was at that Atlantic article on Schumer, blert.
The Civil War established that it’s the officer corps that is at issue.
Virtually none of the US Army enlisted in 1860 went to the Confederacy…
Not so with the officer corps…
With an amazing consistency the best officers went South.
It’s always and ever the officer corps that leads the way.
http://townhall.com/Columnists/DebraJSaunders/2009/03/17/obama_on_the_economy_both_sides_now
If Obama is confident about the soundness of the U.S. economy, does that mean he “just doesn’t get it?” No, it means that he is president. Now he has to pay the political price for incessant badmouthing of the U.S. economy. Now he has to prop up the very system at which he had been sniping for years.
And I do mean years. Of course Obama spent 2007 and 2008 talking down the economy — he was running in a Democratic primary. But as far back as 2002, before he became a senator, Obama suggested that Bush was waging war against Saddam Hussein “to distract us from corporate scandals and a stock market that has just gone through the worst month since the Great Depression.” Factually, Obama was incorrect.
—
On the one hand, I think Summers is right. Fear and panic are stalling an engine that still has plenty of kick left — but it won’t start purring until the public believes again.
Now that they’re on the running-things side, Obama and company are learning that it’s a lot easier to kick the economy than to jump start it. Too bad that they were a lot better at kicking it.
It was Clinton-era Housing Secretary Henry Cisneros who urged Fannie Mae to spend 42 percent of its money buying mortgages for lower-income people and who suggested that they no longer require down payments.
And it was his successor, Andrew Cuomo, who upped the ante to 50 percent of the Fannie Mae portfolio.
AIG Faces Pressure From Obama, Subpoena From Cuomo Over Employee Bonuses…
SENATOR ON AIG EXECS: QUIT OR COMMIT SUICIDE…
(drudge links)
Obama Questioned on AIG Payouts Response
Outrage from the public and politicians over the $165M in bonuses paid out to firm’s executives is blowing back on the president and his initiatives.
Meanwhile, the BIG BUCKS go unaccounted for, as the Pols stir up populist outrage over the small change.
Doug @49:
To which BIG BUCKS do you refer? There are so many floating around these days.
Business owners (and executives) have profit objectives to answer for. And they are going to achieve that, some more honestly than others.
To my way of thinking (naive, I am sure), the root of the problem is that Congress spend other people’s money and treating it as if it is owed to them by some divine right.
to paraphrase Mark Twain,
“a man’s life, liberty, and property are never safe when congress is in session.”
Armeggedon
The 90 Billion that went directly to Goldman and European banks for losses that haven’t happened yet –
Even A.I.G.’s own independent directors haven’t been told which of the counterparties were paid…
Such secrecy raised hackles because the insurance claims were paid off in full, even though widespread defaults on the underlying debt have not occurred. Why, many people wonder, did the Fed make A.I.G.’s counterparties whole on losses that have not happened yet?
What Morgenson is talking about here is the second of the four appendices: the payments made by the company known as “Maiden Lane III”.
After banks insured their assets against default, AIG essentially used Maiden Lane III to take those assets onto its own books, thereby allowing it to cancel out the insurance contracts. The big winners here are SocGen and Goldman Sachs — and it’s worth noting that unlike the first appendix, where the counterparties are helpfully listed in order of size, in the second appendix there seems to be no particular order at all, and the two biggest recipients of government money are hidden in the middle of the list.
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see my Mar 16, 2009 – 6:51 pm above
Today Limbaugh reports that everybody KNEW what the bonuses were more than a year ago, but BHO’s faux outrage was a populist ploy to distract attention from the real theft going on, and it’s magnitude, not to mention to further the hysteria of crisis, which we all know should NEVER be WASTED.
…the bonuses are retention bonuses.
Sen. Dodd Tries to Undo Bonus Protections He Put In…
Thus begins the Democrat “Reign of Terror”. From town hall meetings used to smear the message of class envy across the country to the Main Squeak Media’s self righteous splurting of the charges and reflexive venting of this and that and the other persons talking point outrage over the good faith payment of a contract.
The motions like a precision Chinese fire drill, intended to whip the fury of the mob to class envy outrage directed away from the managers of the mess. A knee jerk response to the Chinese demand for sober and wise action on the economy, a promise of good faith on the part of the Democrat minions, an act to indicate with what good faith this administration will up hold its contractual obligations, by defaulting and (after the fact at that) criminalizing its own contractual obligations.
Mon Dieu, you just cannot make this stuff up!
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai
Je te plumerai la tete
Je te plumerai la tete
Et la tete, et la tete
Alouette, Alouette
O-o-o-o-oh
Alouette, gentille Alouette
Alouette je te plumerai
“OFF WITH HIS HEAD!!!!”