Obama spanks Wall Street.

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by TGRR

No, the whole bailout sounds like "A big fucking gift to fat greedy bastards".

No actual work is required or even encouraged.

Well at least some of them got under the wire and got million dollar bonus checks or big assed parties paid for by the taxpayer. Good job Congress! Well done Pelosi and Reid! You guys rock!

Wait, I mean you guys Suck.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Well at least some of them got under the wire and got million dollar bonus checks or big assed parties paid for by the taxpayer. Good job Congress! Well done Pelosi and Reid! You guys rock!

Wait, I mean you guys Suck.

While the dems are wallowing in filth, there's plenty of filth left over for the GOP.

This isn't a "party" thing. It's a "complete failure of the American political system" thing.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

Well at least some of them got under the wire and got million dollar bonus checks or big assed parties paid for by the taxpayer. Good job Congress! Well done Pelosi and Reid! You guys rock!

Wait, I mean you guys Suck.

ummm, that wasn't Pelosi and Reid, that was Hank Paulson. the democrats wrote stuff in the bill about executive pay, but apparently Bush snuck in some clause that negated what they wrote to protect the taxpayers, and because Paulson was exclusively in charge of that money, he changed what it was supposed to be used for and gave it to his buddies on Wall Street.

[tw]

Hearsay details say that only applies to the top five executives. Stock brokers - the employees - routinely get paid more than that in bonuses. The complaint is that WS employees cannot survive on their $200,000+ annual salary. That they might leave the company.

Well, the company should have thought about their problems years ago. But then where is that employee going to go if everyone else must start paying normally and cutting fees. Mutual funds that once charges 1% must now charge 0.1% (just like discount brokerages did to full service brokerages). Or the defective top management who created this problem should step aside so that the few who actually did something to earn a bonus can now run the company.

Well, none of this is going to happen. For all the show, those restrictions are easy to get around such as pay back any TARP moneys now. Better is to simply fire employees who are getting massive bonuses despite creating losses. What would be left are the few employees who are actually productive - who actually earned profits by doing simple things such as due diligence.

When it is all done, we should see many less finance executives, much lower salaries, discounted fees even in hedge funds and mutual funds, salaries in the replacement for the SEC doubled, every investment vehicle traded only on regulated markets, and a complete overhaul of accounting standards that are still as corrupt as when Enron and LTCM existed. Not. Fools will again complain about too much regulation – and buy their favorite congressmen to subvert the rules.

There is nothing on Wall Street that can be trusted without severe regulation both by government and organized open markets. It now appears the same things that created the mythical CA energy crisis are also responsible for $4 per gallon gasoline. Deregulated finance people.

These new rules do almost nothing to address the problem. Even the definition of luxery expenses has been left to the individual Board of Directors to define.

[tw]

Researchers provide a more optimistic attitude. From the NY Times of 4 Feb 2009:

A Pay Ceiling Could Blunt the Lure of a Wall Street Job
In their National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Thomas Philippon of New York University and Ariell Reshef of the University of Virginia found that the difference in pay between finance and the rest of industry was slight, if any, except in the late 1920s to 1930 and then again from the mid-1990s to 2006. In those boom years, compensation in finance was 30 percent to 50 percent higher than in the rest of industry.

[TheMercenary]

You know I would buy into that TGRR if the Demoncrats did not control Congress and the purse strings for the last 2 years.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

You know I would buy into that TGRR if the Demoncrats did not control Congress and the purse strings for the last 2 years.

Oh, yeah...and the 5 years before that was full of angelic choirs singing, and the apotheosis of clean government and fiscal responsibility.



And all of our current financial difficulties started in January of 2007, rather than starting in the Carter administration, and carried on since then by both parties in all 3 branches of government.

Silly me. I forgot that the GOP is where all the honest politicians go.

Har har!

Originally Posted by TGRR

And all of our current financial difficulties started in January of 2007, rather than starting in the Carter administration, and carried on since then by both parties in all 3 branches of government.

I personally think it started with Reagan supply side ("voodoo" - GHW Bush) economics and deregulation (remember the $billions S&L bail out) and exacerbated by Clinton and the Republican Congress and further banking deregulation in the late 90s when the budget was getting fat and the economy was on a roll.

And then six more years of supply side economics and deregulation with virtually no Congressional oversight....while at the same time, paying for a $hundreds of billions (off budget) for an unprovoked war.

What I find most fucked up of all is that at the base of the Republican alternative stimulus package is more failed supply side economics and the "free market will fix itself" (deregulation) proposals.

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

You know I would buy into that TGRR if the Demoncrats did not control Congress and the purse strings for the last 2 years.

The Democrats really had very little control over the purse strings, with Bush vetoes (or threats of vetoes) of every appropriations bill....and no where near the 2/3 votes needed to override. Their options were to shut down the government and be blamed for not providing funds for troops on the front lines in Iraq/Afghanistan...holding up Social Security checks, etc. or find a way to at least make the Bush bills more palatable.

At best, you could make a weak case that there was shared responsibility for the last two years....following six years of the Republican Congress abrogating its oversight responsibilities and failing to "check" the excesses of the Bush administration and instead, gave Bush a "blank check."

[TheMercenary]

Originally Posted by Redux

The Democrats really had very little control over the purse strings, with Bush vetoes (or threats of vetoes) of every appropriations bill....and no where near the 2/3 votes needed to override. Their options were to shut down the government and be blamed for not providing funds for troops on the front lines in Iraq/Afghanistan...holding up Social Security checks, etc. or find a way to at least make the Bush bills more palatable.

At best, you could make a weak case that there was shared responsibility for the last two years....following six years of the Republican Congress abrogating its oversight responsibilities and failing to "check" the excesses of the Bush administration and instead, gave Bush a "blank check."

Sorry, the Demoncrats own it.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

You know I would buy into that TGRR if the Demoncrats did not control Congress and the purse strings for the last 2 years.

*rolleyes* They had no control over anything. They had, what, a majority of 1 or 2 in the Senate? That isn't enough to pass anything. And bush just vetoed everything anyway, unless it was something he wanted.

The truth is, democrats always try to get along. They always make concessions. Republicans NEVER do. When Clinton was in office, they completely shut down the government for, what was it, 2 weeks or something? When have democrats ever been so unreasonable? And... republicans would do it again today, even with our economy slipping into the abyss, because they don't give a shit about the people of this country. They only care about their base, and their ideology.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by sugarpop

*rolleyes* They had no control over anything. They had, what, a majority of 1 or 2 in the Senate? That isn't enough to pass anything. And bush just vetoed everything anyway, unless it was something he wanted.

The truth is, democrats always try to get along. They always make concessions. Republicans NEVER do. When Clinton was in office, they completely shut down the government for, what was it, 2 weeks or something? When have democrats ever been so unreasonable? And... republicans would do it again today, even with our economy slipping into the abyss, because they don't give a shit about the people of this country. They only care about their base, and their ideology.

Clinton shut the government down (twice), when he turned the GOP's budget away for excessive spending, not the other way around.

It was about the only thing the schmuck did that was worth a damn.

[tw]

Originally Posted by TGRR

It was about the only thing the schmuck did that was worth a damn.

Haiti, the Balkans, the averted Pakistan Indian war, welfare, responsible budgets, the 1996 Federal Communication Act, completely defagging Saddam (which we did not realize at that time), stopping massive worldwide terrorism planned for the Millennium (including LAX, NY Time Square, Toronto, Egypt, Amman Jordan, etc.), worldwide respect for America never seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis, ...

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by tw

Haiti, the Balkans, the averted Pakistan Indian war,

Not our fucking problem.

Originally Posted by tw

responsible budgets,

Already said I liked that.

Originally Posted by tw

the 1996 Federal Communication Act,

That was no accomplishment. The Act was claimed to foster competition. Instead, it continued the historic industry consolidation begun by Reagan, whose actions reduced the number of major media companies from around 50 in 1983 to 10 in 1996 and 6 in 2005.

Originally Posted by tw

completely defagging Saddam (which we did not realize at that time),

Saddam was defanged during the 1990/1991 trade show.

Originally Posted by tw

stopping massive worldwide terrorism planned for the Millennium (including LAX, NY Time Square, Toronto, Egypt, Amman Jordan, etc.),

Um, yeah. Credible link to these threats?

Originally Posted by tw

worldwide respect for America never seen since the Cuban Missile Crisis, ...

...Handed over the last dregs of our country to East Asia, by signing Bush 41's NAFTA crap. Hired a Nazi named Reno. The Clipper Chip. Pardoned a pack of scumbags. Waffled on the Gays in the military business. Threatened doctors in CA who advised using pot on chemo patients.

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by TGRR

Clinton shut the government down (twice), when he turned the GOP's budget away for excessive spending, not the other way around.

It was about the only thing the schmuck did that was worth a damn.

Well then, I guess it depends on who you ask.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Federal...utdown_of_1995
The Republicans tried to blame Clinton for the shutdown, but Clinton got a break two days later when Gingrich made a widely-reported complaint about being snubbed by Clinton; Tom DeLay called it "the mistake of his [Gingrich's] life".[1]

Delay writes in his book, No Retreat, No Surrender:[3]

"He told a room full of reporters that he forced the shutdown because Clinton had rudely made him and Bob Dole sit at the back of Air Force One...Newt had been careless to say such a thing, and now the whole moral tone of the shutdown had been lost. What had been a noble battle for fiscal sanity began to look like the tirade of a spoiled child..The revolution, I can tell you, was never the same."