- Rage is all the rage! Today we are all feeling rage at insurance AIG, which paid $165 million in bonuses to the people who ruined the company (and the world). [AP]
- But will citizen rage eventually turn on President Obama, who keeps getting caught flat-footed by these duplicitous financial institutions? [Washington Post]
- New York City is bucking the jobless trend with a lower-than-average unemployment rate. Maybe this is because New York City doesn’t depend on a construction industry that erects 4500-square-foot stucco shacks in three weeks for subprime borrowers. [New York Times]
- Maybe stress gave Don Imus cancer, in his prostate? [ABC News]
- Avigdor Lieberman has joined Benjamin Netanyahu’s governing coalition in Israel. He talks like a hawk but maybe he’ll be pragmatic when it comes to the Palestinians, who knows. [Wall Street Journal]
- You’ll never guess who’s thriving in the New Depression: bankruptcy software and services companies. [Reuters]
Erupting Boils Of Rage And Pustules Of Righteousness, Coast To Coast
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Jeebus, it’s Zen and the Art of US America Politics.
The thing I’ve noticed about the Barry is how he gives folks enough rope to hang themselves whether it be Hilsbot, Walnuts, Palin, Boner, Cantor, Sanford, McDonnell, Rush, etc, etc, etc. Sometimes it comes across as naive and/or too nice, but for the victim the rope suddenly tightens (whether it be by him or by public outrage) and whoopsie you’re dangling from a tree with your Trucknutz flopping in the breeze.
No, silly. New York City is thriving because of its low taxes and limited government.
When did Avigdor give up his Senate seat in Connecticut?
Didn’t Shas, one of the religious nut parties in Israel, declare Lieberman to be Satanic and threaten anyone who voted for him with eternal damnation? G-d knows what they’ll say now (unless they are part of the coaltion)….
Zhu Bajie
Content be damned. The headline rocks, I just erupted!!
Let’s just take to the streets with pitchforks and other crude gardening implements. We’ll march down to the nearest castle, kill the monster and be done with it.
28 days later…
Don Imus with cancer is like Britney Spears with a concussion.
Is this where I’m supposed to write something like “while I find Don Imus disagreeable I wouldn’t wish cancer on anyone?” Because I’m having a hard time formulating that thought. In fact another, much less generous thought keeps crowding it out.
“But will citizen rage eventually turn on President Obama, who keeps getting caught flat-footed by these duplicitous financial institutions?” … makes me think of the Batman show openings filled with dramatic questions about the fates of our caped crusaders. Of course I was just basking yesterday in the Penguin-vs-Batman debate.
Can’t we go back to 2003 when Republicans and their media shills were all aghast at the notion that anyone would propose there was such a thing as obscene levels of compensation? Seriously, this new populism doesn’t suit them… it’s like dressing pat Buchannan as one of the Village People. You’d think it would be funny at first, but it just ends up being awkward and gross and you just want it to go away.
This AIG bonus story is a joke, and insulting. Also it is is worth noting that these governors who think by using the stimulus money for state debt, probably have less of a chance of getting reelected.
http://www.governmentalityblog.com/my_weblog/2009/03/more-rejected-stimulus-funds-.html
Maybe we should have thought about the AIG bonuses before we bailed them out. Or, we could have let them seek bankruptcy protection so they could get their wage structure in line. Now AIG is obligated to pay them and any attempt to stop them will only end up costing us more.
It’s worth repeating: “Man will never be free until the last finacial exec is strangled with the entrails of the last CNBC pundit.”
Uh, didn’t the AIG bailout happen under the *last* administration? The one that did a heck-of-a-job.
[re=266830]x111e7thst[/re]: It’s true that Keith Olbermann has a lot of guts.
Barney Frank told Rachel last night it’s the Fed’s fault for originally giving AIG money last fall w/no strings attached. He said Congress isn’t playing that game with the $$$ they’ve given AIG.
I love watching Barney Frank simply for the pleasure of knowing that somewhere a wingtard is apoplectic with rage at his very existence.
[re=266833]hobospacejungle[/re]: Barney Frank kicks ass and chews bubblegum, and he’s all out of gum.
You know, I’m originally from Iowa, although not Grassley’s district, so I have somewhat followed his career. He is a nasty Republican warmonger from way back (like forever). However, what he said about “AIG executives should follow the Japanese model and just resign or go kill themselves” was pretty cool.
[re=266828]Canmon (the Inadequate)[/re]: My company, (as an unsecured creditor) is on the short, dirty end of the stick of a bankruptcy. (The company in bankruptcy owes us $4million). The company filing bancruptcy filed a petition to allow the continued payment of bonuses on the same day they filed the bankruptcy petition. Also on that day they filed a petition seeking to terminate pension benefits and health care coverage for all their hourly wage workers. The Court granted both petitions.
NYC just builds glass towers for subprime financial crooks.
Fraud in the inducement! Fraud in the inducement! Now back to your regularly schedule recovery.
O.K., I’m figured this out.
Prostate cancer is caused by racism.
70% of males who live long enough wil develop prostate cancer.
Ergo, 70% of old males are racists.
As a corollary, one of the risks of racism is impotence
New York has plenty of recently constructed square footage that will not possibly be sold or rented for what the developers expected. The basketball arena proposed for Brooklyn is dead in the water. Give it time, it’ll be The Warriors again.
[re=266836]gurukalehuru[/re]: Yes, but only if it also applies to person who supported the previous administration. On a different subject, I’m doing a new start-up business dealing in Hari-Kari swords.
If Congress and the President are unable to properly deal with these AIG miscreants, then just the post names and faces of their executives online.
This stuff has a way of working itself out if the people are given the information they need for a “market correction.”
Just sayin…
heh
How ironic that Don Imus will spend his final weeks and months on the receiving end of multiple butt probes. I’m satisfied with the outcome.
What I’m still trying to wrap my mind around re: AIG is the contention by their lawyers that they are contractually-bound to pay these bonuses, or will face a lawsuit if they don’t. Okay, so logic follows that the bonuses don’t get paid –> lawsuits are filed –> AIG can’t pay to setting the lawsuits –> everyone involve self-immolates. It’s win-win, really.
[re=266831]TGY[/re]: That’s the kind of looking-to-the-past mentality that keeps people from looking at the future, or whatever Dick Cheney said over the weekend. And the Treasury was fine with the bonuses a few months ago, especially since talent like the kind that turned AIG into a zombie business can’t be found just anywhere.
http://lostintarnation.blogspot.com/2009/03/kill-patient-reward-disease.html
ManchuCandidate: hyperwin
Even Huffpost says Barry is doing an “about face” on AIG. Wrong. My guess is Barry & Co. put dye in the new AIG dough so they could follow where it went. Summers saying “we can’t force them to break contracts” was designed to flush out the admin’s untenable position.
You can’t flush the toilet until you dig down far enough to find the rats at the bottom (or in this case the top) clogging it up. Please pardon the broken metaphor.
[re=266854]queeraselvis v 2.0[/re]:
But AIG can pay. Remember, they’ve got $120 billion worth of tax-payer money at their disposal.
“I think it was all the stress that caused this,” [Imus] said Monday on his talk show.
Scientific studies prove that you’re more susceptible to prostate cancer when you make your asshole do the work that your brain and your mouth should be doing instead.
[re=266854]queeraselvis v 2.0[/re]: Their contention, as I understand it, and as emptywheel analyzed it to be, has nothing to do with employee contracts. They seem to be arguing that there is a doomsday scenario which must not be allowed to occur. 1) Bonuses are withheld or clawed back, 2) Executives leave, 3) The government of France appoints bureaucrats to run some European division of AIG, 4) this alters the terms of CDS contracts with counter parties, 5) the counter parties are entitled to collect the entire amount owed to them immediately plus penalties, 6) all the counter parties in the AIG universe will demand payment also, and 7) AIG can’t pay everybody because all the money on earth will have vanished.
I think that bailout money is also paying the salaries and bonuses of the lawyers who come up with this shit. Oh and as of Sunday Summers (and Geithner) were accepting and defending this argument. Until Obama became all uppity angry on they shit and whatnot you know.
[re=266804]ManchuCandidate[/re]: That’s a concise formulation of my own views. I’ll be sending my brain in the mail. Contents may have settled during shipping.
How horribly would the world economy collapse if we just declared null & void these CDS contracts but for the party who actually owns the security on which it is based? Most, it seems, were taken out by parties with no affiliation with the original AAA security, and since it’s insurance, they probably didn’t put that much money down. So they lose what they put down. Boo hoo. Obviously there’s something I’m missing in this scenario. Probably teleprompter & ACORN.
[re=266918]hobospacejungle[/re]:
Yeah, but by the time these high-risk investment vehicles were whittled down five billion times and reconstituted into the complex, vague things known as CDS, there actually isn’t any way to figure out how much they’re worth, what with these low-on-the-totem-pole objects taking it a hundred times further up the ass than the far-and-away initial investment they were based on.
It’s like, you throw in three hundred different dyes into an olympic sized swimming pool, have the entire U.S. olympic swim team run a month’s worth of practice in it, and then try to figure out how much is actually red dye #3…
Oh hamburgers! I was kind of hoping for an answer along the lines of “not that horribly.”
“But will citizen rage eventually turn on President Obama, who keeps getting caught flat-footed by these duplicitous financial institutions? (Washington Post)”
No, but citizen rage is beginning to turn on the media that’s been cheerleading deregulation and Reagatardenomics for the last 25 years.
Washington Post: CNBC of the political world.
[re=266815]Sussemilch[/re]: Win, you’re awesome.
[re=266842]Mr Blifil[/re]: Come out an Plaaaayyy!
[re=266854]queeraselvis v 2.0[/re]: I’ll bring the marshmallows.
I was just having a conversation with a friend who works for Mayor Bloomberg, and while we’re both scared about what could happen to the city in the short term as the tax base of the financial industry disappears, we both thought that there were enough hungry, young motivated people in the city that we’d still have a decent economy 5 years from now – it will look different, with more tech and entrepreneurship and creativity, and less finance – but it will survive.
The rest of the country, however, we are not so hopeful about. I mean, have you seen the average non-New Yorker American? *shudder*
Sooner or later, I expect we (and maybe Chicago and SF) will be the only part of the country with any money or jobs left, and we will have to put up fences to keep out the rest of you lot.
I kinda agree that the AIG thing makes Obama look bad but the Washington Post story was basically one of those pieces spit out by the Polital Analysiso-tron. I’m not a political reporter but even I know how to write those stories- something happens that COULD politically hurt SOMEBODY and so we asked Political Analyst A who agrees but then we asked Political Analyst B who disagrees. Then I pat myself on the back for such trenchant analysis and whine about how everybody only reads blogs these days
jagorev: Escape into New York!
Ain’t It Greedy.
[re=266979]jagorev[/re]: we will have to put up fences to keep out the rest of you lot
They’re already doing it in Ontario, CA., perversely calling it Camp Hope. AH HA HA HA HA.
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