You Know What Else Bankers Are Like? Hostage Takers!
The hits just keep on coming, don’t they?
LOS ANGELES – President Barack Obama said Thursday evening that he was “stunned” to hear about the $165 million in bonuses that were paid to employees of troubled insurer AIG over the weekend, promising to do everything he could to “get these bonuses back.”
“These financial industries are holding us hostage,” Obama said in an interview on NBC’s “Tonight Show With Jay Leno,” which NBC said was the first time a sitting president had been a guest on a late-night talk show.
[Emphasis Mine]
Well, that’s only true if you have no idea how bankruptcy works.
The truth is that our government chose to bail AIG and most other banks out of its problems. The President walked into the AIG situation with his eyes wide open. His administration knew about the bonus payments. His administration asked Congress to exempt them from restrictions. His administration is now using AIG as a way of covering its own stunning ignorance of how the private sector really works.
We could be rid of AIG tomorrow if the President simply let them slip into an orderly, supervised bankruptcy. he can’t do that, though, because he has far too large a political investment in the whole enormous bailout scheme. He’d rather continue to throw our money at failing companies to keep them on life support rather then let the natural order of business and the intelligence of the free market handle matters.
It comes down to trust. President Obama doesn’t trust any of us to handle our economic affairs. He sure as hell doesn’t trust the people who have agreed to try to salvage the useful parts of AIG to know what they’re doing. I can’t imagine what gives the President any reason to believe that he knows best. Well, aside from arrogance and his mislaid faith in Mommy Government.
Read on in the link to see what our President thinks about a system where a company in trouble actually has to pay essential employees for the rare skills they have. It’s simply scandalous that we have this whole capitalism thing going on in America, isn’t it?
Other Posts of Interest:
- The Administration’s Response to the AIG Bonuses Smell Like Desperation
- Compassionate Conservatism Just Means Making Different People Hurt
- Well, He’s No Multitasker-in-Chief, That’s For Sure.
Category: President Barack Obama, The Economy and Your Money
"It comes down to trust."
Ultimately, that's the truth of the economy. It's all trust. And when trust fails, things get really ugly. We supposedly had private financial institutions like AIG to back our economy. That's what conservatives always said, private finance can always save us, right? It turns out that that concept was merely a sham. AIG and the other private insurers of our financial world were just paper tigers. They simply couldn't do the job the government used to do in a responsible manner. We can still trust the government, but we obviously cannot trust the private managers of money. AIG makes that point quite clear. But it's not just AIG, our desire to deregulate these businesses created de facto ponzi schemes, and we knew it when we passed the law. And yes, Clinton deserves his scorn for not vetoing the law. But can the Republicans at least admit that it was their law that Clinton didn't veto? They are now claiming that they hold no responsibility for the very laws they enacted. How's that work? Clinton certainly deserves some serious scorn here, but Phil Gramm deserves the guillotine. Clinton was a pussy for not stopping Gramm's antics. But Gramm wanted to use Republican philosophy to rape our economy, and he did it. But Clinton watched, so he's culpable of conspiracy.
As for you, I find it quite strange that you didn't rail against the philosophy that got us into this mess. Oh yeah, you thought it would work. Lay off your Ayn Rand novels and at least move up to comic books.
Oh, dear God, fostert thinks we can still trust the government. Despite the rest of his post being nothing but evidence to the contrary. We really don't have any common ground for discussion.