Govenment to cause exodus of financial talent.

[Calabrio]

Banker fury over tax ‘witch-hunt’
By FT reporters

Published: March 20 2009 19:39 | Last updated: March 20 2009 23:32

Bankers on Wall Street and in Europe have struck back against moves by US lawmakers to slap punitive taxes on bonuses paid to high earners at bailed-out institutions.

Senior executives on both sides of the Atlantic on Friday warned of an exodus of talent from some of the biggest names in US finance, saying the “anti-American” measures smacked of “a McCarthy witch-hunt” that would send the country “back to the stone age”.

There were fears that the backlash triggered by AIG’s payment of $165m in bonuses to executives responsible for losses that forced a $170bn taxpayer-funded rescue would have devastating consequences for the largest banks.

“Finance is one of America’s great industries, and they’re destroying it,” said one banker at a firm that has accepted public money. “This happened out of haste and anger over AIG, but we’re not like AIG.”

The banker added: “It’s like a McCarthy witch-hunt...This is the most profoundly anti- American thing I’ve ever seen.”

Vikram Pandit, Citigroup’s chief executive, told employees in a memo that some anger about executive compensation was “warranted”. But he hit out against the idea of a special tax. “The work we have all done to try to stabilise the financial system and to get this economy moving again would be significantly set back if we lose our talented people because Congress imposes a special tax on financial services employees,” he wrote.

Some policymakers expressed concern that banks may try to break out of the government’s embrace by paying back public capital even if the price is a more severe credit squeeze.

They also fear that financial institutions may decide not to take part in public-private partnerships to finance credit markets and acquire toxic assets.

The outcry followed Thursday’s approval by the House of Representatives of a bill that would impose 90 per cent tax on bonuses to employees whose gross income exceeded $250,000 at bailed-out firms.

Next week the Senate will also consider a hefty tax on bail-out bonuses amid calls for an investigation into who was responsible for allowing the pay-outs. Some senators are calling for a committee hearing on a bill that would impose a 70 per cent tax at bailed-out institutions, half paid by employees and half by companies, arguing that a delay would help cool political anger.

“There are three big industries where the US has global leadership: financial services, media and technology. Introducing this 90 per cent tax is like taking one of those industries out the back and shooting it,” said a top Wall Street executive.

In Frankfurt one employee at a US investment bank said the new tax measures would “send [the US] back to the stone age”.

“Commodity traders are already moving to companies like BP where they can make as much money as they used to,” said another banker at a US firm.

Bankers at Deutsche Bank said it could benefit from the proposed legislation by poaching its US rivals’ most talented employees.

 

[04SCTLS]

Oh Boo Hoo!
These people are mostly bluffing, as "talent" they helped create the current crisis and havn't earned the bonuses this year and they can leave if they don't like it.
Mostly these people are not losing their jobs or homes or healthcare and should be humble and consider themselves lucky.
I'm sure the'll all prefer working in the US for US companies when things improve, however long that may take.

 

[Calabrio]

Oh Boo Hoo!
These people are mostly bluffing, as "talent" they helped create the current crisis and havn't earned the bonuses this year and they can leave if they don't like it.
Mostly these people are not losing their jobs or homes or healthcare and should be humble and consider themselves lucky.
I'm sure the'll all prefer working in the US for US companies when things improve, however long that may take.

You don't think that it'd be a bad thing if all of the best talent were to leave American firms and simply work for those overseas?

When that happens, who'll be left to staff the companies here?

An additional note, but at a company like AIG or Citi, most of their divisions are well run and profitable.

 

[fossten]

Oh Boo Hoo!
These people are mostly bluffing, as "talent" they helped create the current crisis and havn't earned the bonuses this year and they can leave if they don't like it.
Mostly these people are not losing their jobs or homes or healthcare and should be humble and consider themselves lucky.
I'm sure the'll all prefer working in the US for US companies when things improve, however long that may take.

I will say this for the umpteenth time - you REALLY need to read Atlas Shrugged to see what happens to a country when the government demonizes business.

 

[shagdrum]

Oh Boo Hoo!
These people are mostly bluffing, as "talent" they helped create the current crisis and havn't earned the bonuses this year and they can leave if they don't like it.
Mostly these people are not losing their jobs or homes or healthcare and should be humble and consider themselves lucky.
I'm sure the'll all prefer working in the US for US companies when things improve, however long that may take.

Do you have no problem with the government using the tax code as they did to "get the money back"?

 

[04SCTLS]

I will say this for the umpteenth time - you REALLY need to read Atlas Shrugged to see what happens to a country when the government demonizes business.

Well I do have a copy of it here somewhere.
I suppose I could find the time to read it though as an enterpreneur
making products to help comply with government ADA regulations I may
have a point of view different from yours.
I've handed out approx 5% of my gross sales as bonuses amongst my 100 or so employees, half of that 5% amongst my key executives, over the last few years.
But it's all based on performance,and of how much value someone is to me.

 

[MonsterMark]

Do you have no problem with the government using the tax code as they did to "get the money back"?

OF course not. Stealing from the rich and giving blowing it on government blackhole projects is the change we've been waiting for.

Wait, I think I see 04SCTLS in the lower right hand corner following Obama.

 

[04SCTLS]

Do you have no problem with the government using the tax code as they did to "get the money back"?

Theatrics to satisfy the public outrage at this moment.
When it dies down a bit they'll make some other more palatible legislation.
Already no bonus rules are being writt
en for banks and businesses that accept 5 Billion or more in bailout money.

 

[shagdrum]

Theatrics to satisfy the public outrage at this moment.
When it dies down a bit they'll make some other more palatible legislation.
Already no bonus rules are being writt
en for banks and businesses that accept 5 Billion or more in bailout money.

Those "theatrics" are exceedingly unconstitutional! The government is ignoring the laws it is expected to function under. It is acting in a totalitarian fashion and disregarding the rule of law. You have no problem with that?

This is not something to be simply dismissed.

 

[04SCTLS]

Those "theatrics" are exceedingly unconstitutional! The government is ignoring the laws it is expected to function under. It is acting in a totalitarian fashion and disregarding the rule of law. You have no problem with that?

This is not something to be simply dismissed.

The public wants the satisfaction of seeing somebody punished and the government is responding in hamhanded fashion.
The courts can strike it down as unconstitutional after the furor has diminished.

 

[fossten]

Well I do have a copy of it here somewhere.
I suppose I could find the time to read it though as an enterpreneur
making products to help comply with government ADA regulations I may
have a point of view different from yours.
I've handed out approx 5% of my gross sales as bonuses amongst my 100 or so employees, half of that 5% amongst my key executives, over the last few years.
But it's all based on performance,and of how much value someone is to me.

Every time I challenge you to read Atlas Shrugged, you start boasting about what a big bidnessman you are.

 

[04SCTLS]

Every time I challenge you to read Atlas Shrugged, you start boasting about what a big bidnessman you are.

Yes I suppose it's become my knee jerk response

 

[04SCTLS]

But we were talking about bonuses so I thought I'd add my 2 cents.

 

[Calabrio]

Administration Seeks Increase in Oversight of Executive Pay
By STEPHEN LABATON
Published: March 21, 2009

WASHINGTON — The Obama administration will call for increased oversight of executive pay at all banks, Wall Street firms and possibly other companies as part of a sweeping plan to overhaul financial regulation, government officials said.

The outlines of the plan are expected to be unveiled this week in preparation for President Obama’s first foreign summit meeting in early April.

Increasing oversight of executive pay has been under consideration for some time, but the decision was made in recent days as public fury over bonuses has spilled into the regulatory effort.

The officials said that the administration was still debating the details of its plan, including how broadly it should be applied and how far it could range beyond simple reporting requirements. Depending on the outcome of the discussions, the administration could seek to put the changes into effect through regulations rather than through legislation.

One proposal could impose greater requirements on the boards of companies to tie executive compensation more closely to corporate performance and to take other steps to assure that outsize bonuses are not paid before meeting financial goals.

The new rules will cover all financial institutions, including those not now covered by any pay rules because they are not receiving federal bailout money. Officials say the rules could also be applied more broadly to publicly traded companies, which already report about some executive pay practices to the Securities and Exchange Commission. Last month, as part of the stimulus package, Congress barred top executives at large banks getting rescue money from receiving bonuses exceeding one-third of their annual pay.

Beyond the pay rules, officials said the regulatory plan is expected to call for a broad new role for the Federal Reserve to oversee large companies, including major hedge funds, whose problems could pose risks to the entire financial system.

It will propose that many kinds of derivatives and other exotic financial instruments that contributed to the crisis be traded on exchanges or through clearinghouses so they are more transparent and can be more tightly regulated. And to protect consumers, it will call for federal standards for mortgage lenders beyond what the Federal Reserve adopted last year, as well as more aggressive enforcement of the mortgage rules.

The plan is being put together in advance of the meeting of the Group of 20 industrialized and developing nations in London, which is expected to be dominated by the global financial crisis and discussions about better oversight of large financial companies whose problems could threaten to undermine international markets.

An important part of the plan still under debate is how to regulate the shadow banking system that Wall Street firms use to package and trade mortgage-backed securities, the so-called toxic assets held by many banks and blamed for the credit crisis.

Officials said the plan would also call for increasing the levels of capital that financial institutions need to hold to absorb possible losses. But in a sign of the fragility of the economic system officials said the administration would emphasize that those heightened standards should not be imposed now because they could discourage more lending. Rather, they would be put in place after the economy began to rebound.

“The argument some are making is that they don’t want to be stepping on the gas pedal and the brake at the same time,” said Morris Goldstein, a senior fellow at the Peterson Institute for International Economics and a former top official at the International Monetary Fund.

Administration officials are also debating how tightly to supervise hedge funds. A broad consensus has emerged among regulators and administration officials that hedge funds must be registered and more closely monitored, probably by the Securities and Exchange Commission. But officials have not decided how much the funds will have to disclose about their investments and trading practices.

A central aspect of the plan, which has already been announced by the administration, would give the government greater authority to take over and resolve problems at large, troubled companies that are not now regulated by Washington, like insurance companies and hedge funds.

That proposal would, for instance, make it easier for the government to cancel bonus contracts like those given to executives at the American International Group, which have stoked a political furor. Under the proposal, the Treasury secretary would have the authority to seize and wind down a struggling institution after consulting with the president and upon the recommendation of two-thirds of the Federal Reserve board.

Long before he became Treasury secretary, Timothy F. Geithner had sought broader authority for the government to resolve problems at financial institutions that were not under the supervision of bank regulators.

The government now has the power to take over only the banking unit that controls federally insured deposits of large troubled institutions, not the parent company, a limit that could pose problems if large financial conglomerates like Citigroup or Bank of America continued to spiral downward.

In unveiling the regulatory plan this week, President Obama would signal to Europe that he intended to crack down on the risk-taking and other free-wheeling practices by the financial industry that resulted in the global economic meltdown.

France and Germany especially have suggested that the better response is not more government spending but tighter regulation.

The Obama administration has urged European nations to do more to restart their economies through financial stimulus. Mr. Obama is hoping that by showing a serious commitment to tighter regulation he can more easily persuade other countries to increase government spending and stimulate demand by consumers and businesses that would help pull the global economy out of a serious decline.

But the administration’s efforts, especially on tighter regulation of hedge funds, are not expected to assuage some European countries. Moreover, the hedge fund industry has significant influence on Capitol Hill and has shown that it can defeat proposals it finds onerous.

While a growing number of hedge fund advisers have voluntarily agreed to register with the S.E.C., many of the most prominent ones are expected to oppose efforts to require them to provide what they consider proprietary information about their holdings and trading practices, even on a confidential basis.

From the outset of the Obama administration, officials and European leaders have disagreed over how much to limit pay. And Mr. Geithner has discouraged the administration from imposing across-the-board limits on compensation of all employees at troubled companies receiving federal assistance and more burdensome pay restrictions at healthy institutions that the administration is trying to encourage to take government money so they can increase lending.

Last week, Ben S. Bernanke, the Federal Reserve chairman, also called on regulators to supervise executive pay at banks more closely to avoid “compensation practices that can create mismatches between the rewards and risks borne by institutions or their managers.” In advance of Mr. Obama’s trip to the economic meeting, which begins on April 2, Mr. Geithner will describe the regulatory plan when he appears before Congress on Thursday.

Much of the plan would require the approval of Congress, where divisions are already forming over how best to overhaul financial industry oversight.

Representative Barney Frank, the Massachusetts Democrat who heads the House Financial Services Committee, said he believed that giving the government new authority to take over troubled companies could be adopted by the House relatively quickly, particularly after the furor over the A.I.G. bonuses.

“This would give the government the same powers that you would get as if the company were in bankruptcy,” Mr. Frank said in an interview shortly after meeting with Mr. Geithner on the plan.

But Mr. Frank and other lawmakers said other elements of the plan could take more time, like expanding the authority of the Federal Reserve to become a systemic regulator.

In a hearing on Thursday, Senator Christopher Dodd, the Connecticut Democrat who heads the banking committee, expressed skepticism about that proposal.

“Whether or not those vast powers will reside at the Fed remains an open question,” he said, pointing out that the Federal Reserve had failed to apply tough oversight of the companies it now regulates.

 

[fossten]

But we were talking about bonuses so I thought I'd add my 2 cents.

Your braggadocio is worth every penny.

 

[04SCTLS]

Your braggadocio is worth every penny.

Glad to entertain you but this word does not apply as my (to you) bragging is not just empty boasting and/or arrogant pretension but based on real accomplishments.:F

Perhaps it is you who is the real arrogant pretensious braggadocio.
You're very intelligent and book smart but I don't know how that has translated for you in real life.
Still stockpiling goods and weapons in a bunker for the coming tyranny?

 

[04SCTLS]

From the cartoonists

 

[04SCTLS]

The New Welfare Queens


by John Avlon
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-21/the-new-welfare-queens/full/
Forget the old scare stories of the poor defrauding the government. John Avlon says the great entitlement grab in history is coming from bankers, the new symbols of government dependency.

The greatest entitlement grab in American history has come from the least likely of places—not the welfare queen, the poster child of government dependency, but Wall Street.
The original welfare queen was the oft-cited star of one of Ronald Reagan’s favorite anecdotes from his 1976 campaign. “She has fifteen names, thirty addresses, twelve Social Security cards, and is collecting veteran's benefits on four non-existing deceased husbands,” the Gipper said in genial tones. “She is collecting Social Security on her cards. She's got Medicaid, getting food stamps, and she is collecting welfare under each of her names.”

Now we’ve got both populist anger at big business and big government. It’s a perfect political storm.​

The term quickly skull-sunk into the lexicon, becoming short-hand for the dependent (and, in this telling, criminal) underclass lurking in the heart of the inner city. The insult to injury was that the welfare queen was living high off the hog on hard-working middle class paychecks. A righteous tax revolt was not far-behind.
It turns out the story, while mostly apocryphal, did have one an actual antecedent—a woman from the south side of Chicago who was busted in 1976 for using four identities to defraud the government out of $8,000. She aimed low. She should have worked at AIG.
This week we found out that 400 lucky AIG executives got to split $165 million of taxpayer money in bonuses, despite running their company into the ground. But they are far from alone—the failed federally owned mortgage company Fannie Mae just announced they plan to pay 4 execs more than $1 million each in retention bonuses. Bank of America granted 6,200 brokers bonuses after taking $15 billion in taxpayer bailout funds. Former Merrill Lynch CEO John Thain found $1.2 million to redecorate his office—complete with a $1,200 trashcan and a $35,000 commode—after his 94-year old company was flushed down the toilet. And these pungent tales of excesses may ultimately pale next to the misuses of taxpayer funds we don’t yet know about.
Forget welfare queens. We’ve never seen an entitlement mentality quite like this—where bonuses were not rewards for work well done but guaranteed entitlements written into high-end contracts. The AIG financial division folks managed to have no performance-based criteria for their bonuses. And despite bankrupting a company they still felt entitled to an extra helping of tax-payer cash. Apologists claim such compensation packages are necessary to retain talent in a competitive business culture. Others point to the inviolate nature of contracts and shrug apologetically while pocketing the cash. Apparently “accountability” is just a word for management power-points—it has no meaning for these folks when it collides with self-interest. Proportion and perspective have lost their meaning as well—if you mention that the average household income United States is around $50,000 a year, they squint as if you’re talking about another species. That’s a fraction of financial industry base salaries, let alone bonuses—even after the house of cards collapses.
We’re heading for pitchfork politics here in America. Even during the economic gains of this decade, prosperity didn’t trickle down to the middle class because of increased energy and healthcare costs. Union members who are being asked for necessary concessions to keep their companies financially afloat are seeing executives play by an entirely different set of rules. And now a demographic that might be called the working wealthy is bracing for tax hikes in a recession while their portfolios have been decimated—all while the Wall Street super-rich with multiple mansions are relatively insulated (assuming they’re not under indictment). After watching the jet-set excesses of the Madoff-class from afar, Main Street Americans are left with less and still asked to clean up their mess.
This new populist anger isn’t going to fade away anytime soon. History shows that demagogues rise when the economy turns south. During the Great Depression, populist anger was directed at big business, pumped up by voices like Huey Long on the left and Father Coughlin on the right. When conservative populism reared its head in the late 1960s, anger shifted towards big business. But now we’ve got both— populist anger at big business and big government. It’s a perfect political storm and Republican and Democrat incumbents could be equally vulnerable to associational attack come 2010.

John P. Avlon is the author of Independent Nation: How Centrists Can Change American Politics
________________________________________________________________

Corporate Welfare Bums out of touch with reality

 

[shagdrum]

The New Welfare Queens


by John Avlon
http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2009-03-21/the-new-welfare-queens/full/
Forget the old scare stories of the poor defrauding the government. John Avlon says the great entitlement grab in history is coming from bankers, the new symbols of government dependency.

The comparison in this article is fallacious.

It is based on an equivocation of the meaning of "entitlement". That can mean the legal guarantee of a benefit and is not in any way a pejorative term. But, when used in the term "entitlement mentality", it is a pejorative term meaning a, "belief that one is deserving of or entitled to certain privileges". In the case of AIG, there was no "entitlement mentality" (as the author claims", there was a legal entitlement.

A "guaranteed entitlement" cannot be an "entitlement mentality." This line, which the argument hinges on, is blatant equivocation:

We’ve never seen an entitlement mentality quite like this—where bonuses were not rewards for work well done but guaranteed entitlements written into high-end contracts​

The author is clearly equivocating the legal definition of entitlement with the more casual pejorative.

Those execs were contractually (and thus, legally) entitled to receive those bonuses before AIG took the bailouts, and the term's of the bailouts allowed for those bonuses. There was never any law being broken by AIG or any of these execs. The "welfare queens" were committing fraud; a criminal act.

In fact, the only criminal act in the AIG fiasco is coming from the government. It is unconstitutional for them to pass this law. Thus, it is a criminal act and an abuse of power. Their totalitarian actions demand immediate removal from office. The government's intentional attack on and scapegoating of private citizens puts those private citizens in harms way; and for nothing more the cheap political gain.

Anyone who is more outraged over the legal actions of AIG and it's execs then they are about the illegal and reckless abuse of power by the government is an emotional dupe.

 

[04SCTLS]

In the Capital, a Glut of Outrage

AIG Bonuses Are Final Straw for Many Struggling Taxpayers


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dy.../21/AR2009032102050_2.html?wprss=rss_politics
By Joel Achenbach
Washington Post Staff Writer
Sunday, March 22, 2009; Page A08

History will record the third week of March 2009 as Outrage Week in Washington.
The initial outrage outbreak followed revelations of million-dollar bonuses at bailout beneficiary American International Group. Like a spring fever, outrage spread across party lines, and 85 House Republicans joined the Democratic majority in passing a punitive 90 percent tax on the bonuses.
Then came the backlash to the outrage. The sages of Washington warned of mob rule, chaos in the streets. But then some people hollered that not being outraged was itself an outrage.
At the core of all this populist outrage and elite counter-outrage is a mystery: Why now, exactly? Why did the AIG case -- $165 million in bonuses, contractually agreed upon last year -- roil the capital so feverishly after months of the government shoveling tens of billions, hundreds of billions, make that trillions of dollars, to private companies?

It may simply be that, after months of dismaying reports of executives getting fat bonuses, the AIG case was the final tumbler in the lock. This one clicked. And bonuses aren't abstractions: AIG might be a faceless corporation (what does it stand for, again?), but its executives can easily be pictured as they pocket their one, two, four, six million dollars in bonuses -- each.
"Why do they deserve that bonus?" asked David Donaldson, a District sanitation worker, as he emptied garbage cans near the White House on Saturday afternoon.
"We're doing labor," his co-worker Ricardo Brandon said. "We get a bonus, we get, like, 50 cents. Dealing with hazardous materials. Having to fight off rats."
Most people know exactly how much money they get paid, and they know that under no circumstance are they likely to make Wall Street kind of money. And so, from where Daisy Montague's standing, making espresso drinks for $12 an hour at the Baked & Wired coffee shop in Georgetown, the AIG executives should give back not 90 percent but 100 percent.
"What is it they do that's so valuable? And why are we rewarding the people who put us in this crisis we're in now?" the 25-year-old, who has a college degree in theater education, said Saturday morning. "I think those folks are basically stealing from taxpayers such as myself."
Neil Pfortsch, 51, a concrete pump operator working Saturday at a site in downtown Washington, said of the AIG executives, "They ought to put 'em in jail." He said he has seen the value of his 401(k) drop 40 percent over the past year. He wishes he'd gotten out of the stock market a year ago. The AIG executives will take their money, he guesses, "and hide it. Know where to without losing. That's why they're executives."
It was the president himself who began the percussive backbeat of "outrage" last Monday when, after learning of the AIG bonuses, he asked, "How do they justify this outrage?" But the president is not a natural at the language of outrage, and he took heat for not sounding more like Clint Eastwood.
The Obama administration is now in the awkward position of trying to figure out how populist it wants to be. By week's end, it was no longer clear whether the administration and its allies in Congress wanted to partner with troubled financial institutions in an attempt to stabilize them or simply blow them up.


The financial companies need the federal government but increasingly view it as untrustworthy. Headhunters prowl the headquarters of Fannie Mae, which is effectively owned by taxpayers and where top executives infuriated by the clawback tax are ready to bolt.
By Thursday night, when President Obama appeared on NBC's "The Tonight Show," he seemed to have moderated his rhetoric slightly and did not offer a full-throated endorsement of the House vote on the 90 percent tax, which host Jay Leno described as a bit scary.
"I understand Congress's frustrations, and they're responding to, I think, everybody's anger," Obama said. "But I think that the best way to handle this is to make sure that you've closed the door before the horse gets out of the barn. . . . The important thing over the next several months is making sure that we don't lurch from thing to thing, but we try to make steady progress."
Susan Hayden, a meeting planner in the District, offered her theory Saturday for why this scandal cut to the bone so much more than others: The economy has gotten worse and worse. People really feel it now, and when they ponder financial executives getting million-dollar bonuses, of course they're outraged.

"These guys aren't worth it," she said. "It's kind of like the old-boy network. It's kind of exploded."
Polls would suggest that umpteen-billion-dollar bailouts to financial institutions do not enrage the public as much as mere millions going to unsavory individuals. In September, for example, a bare majority, 51 percent, of respondents to a Washington Post-ABC News poll said they opposed the initial $700 billion bailout of the financial sector, and only 29 percent of those said they "strongly" opposed it.
But in a Gallup poll Wednesday, 70 percent of Democrats and 56 percent of Republicans said they were "outraged" by the AIG bonuses, with most of the rest putting themselves down as "bothered."
In Washington, outrage is a prized political commodity. It can be a fundraising accelerant. Interest groups and partisans scurry to channel it toward their particular agenda.
The liberal activist organization MoveOn.org has started an e-mail campaign that invites recipients to throw a "virtual tomato" at an image of an AIG corporate office. Meanwhile, the conservative advocacy group Americans for Prosperity, which favors limited government and free trade, has sent out its own Action Alert, decrying the "outrage" of the AIG bonuses and, for good measure, asking members to lobby Congress to block a "cap and trade" system to limit carbon emissions linked to global warming.
"We think the outrage is an important step to demanding action. In the past, we've had a problem with silence," said Stephen Lerner, special assistant to the president of the Service Employees International Union, which has staged protests against the bonuses.
"It's not just the bonuses. It's the way these guys have gamed the entire system to enrich themselves and then have asked us to bail them out from problems that they created," Lerner said.
There's certainly more outrage than consensus in Washington.
"Something's gotta change, and something's gotta change quick," Tyler Gilbert, 33, a father of five and real estate consultant, said Saturday as he prepared for a presentation at the Georgetown waterfront.
Is he "outraged" by the AIG bonuses? He preferred a word that's not printable. Finally, he rephrased it: "I'm perturbed."
_______________________________________________________________

You may be right in your scholarly way but you're out of touch with the real world.

 

[shagdrum]

again,

Anyone who is more outraged over the legal actions of AIG and it's execs then they are about the illegal and reckless abuse of power by the government is an emotional dupe

 

[04SCTLS]

again,

Anyone who is more outraged over the legal actions of AIG and it's execs then they are about the illegal and reckless abuse of power by the government is an emotional dupe

This is only your opinion.
These bonuses are a sideshow in comparision to AIG's not being able to pay their debts.
I'm not outraged per se but this is the worst possible timing to be handing out bonuses whatever the legality.
It was legal stuff that was/is? perfectly legal that got us into this mess.

These bonuses are something easy for regular people to relate to.
Alleged illegal and reckless abuse of power by the government is a nebulous and harder thing to grasp.

 

[shagdrum]

This is only your opinion.

Actually, it is fact. Congress and the White House have been actively working to gin up populist outrage directed at the investor class, and AIG is the current, and most obvious example. This allows the Democrats in government to grab more power (in the form of taxes) through illegal means, just like totalitarian governments throughout history have done. If you bought into this clear AIG scapegoating, you are, by definition, a dupe.

one that is easily deceived or cheated​

I'm not outraged per se but this is the worst possible timing to be handing out bonuses whatever the legality.

You act as if they had a choice. They were contractually obligated to pay those bonuses.

It was legal stuff that was/is? perfectly legal that got us into this mess.

And that somehow justifies illegal governmental abuse of power to "correct" that?!

The fact is that, if the markets were left to themselves, these "perfectly legal" actions that got us into this mess would likely not have come about in the first place (at least on this massive of scale) and would have already corrected themselves.

Congress getting into the mess and bailing these companies out effectively subsidized those actions and keep them going indefinitely.

Those actions don't need to be criminalized and the drawbacks far outweigh the positives in criminalizing those actions.

 

[fossten]

I'm not outraged per se but this is the worst possible timing to be handing out bonuses whatever the legality.

Timing, yeah. Isn't it interesting that the bonuses were included IN the language of the bill that Obama SIGNED, yet nobody said anything about it UNTIL the bonuses were HANDED OUT?

I give you credit for being an intelligent person. Can you connect the dots or are you being deliberately obtuse?

 

[04SCTLS]

My opinion of Obama is that beyond his core redistributionist fantasies he makes things up as he goes along reacting to the moment.
That's how he ran his campaign and that's how he's governing.
Remember everyone he threw under the bus...
Maybe no one in his staff noticed or had the prescience to judge what the public reaction to the bonus clauses would be.
He's a greener but he's trying and learning from his mistakes and should not be underestimated.
Now that the public is in the mood for a hanging again he's turning his heals and setting the tone for some punishment the masses will eat up.
As the People's representative he has no choice and can't be making the legal arguement for the bonuses, laws and constitution be damned.
Congress and half the Republicans have joined in.
And if shag talks about laws well I just say Jury Nulification (the american public) rules this one.
Let the chips fall where they may.