The Obamanation

[classicman]

No that was sir simplesomething OH I see you are he and he you. Another sockpuppet -
So you're one of them then.


BUSTED!

[BDS]

Originally Posted by classicman

No that was sir simplesomething OH I see you are he and he you. Another sockpuppet -
So you're one of them then.


BUSTED!

Incorrect. I indeed was Sir_Simpletoon, from when I came over from the Safari. I thought I'd pop in tonight, attempted to register BDS, as I'd forgotten the password to Sir_Simpletoon.
Of course, in your great and wise benevolence, this forum is based on an activation system, thus meaning I couldn't post. So, I put more effort into finding the pass for Sir_Simpletoon, which lo and behold, I cracked.
But then, when this accout was activated, I switched back to here.

Would you like to many any more assumptions, while you're at it? Maybe I'm secretly a lizard overlord. Or maybe I'm actually seven people, each behind a different proxy.

Jesus fucking Christ you're an idiot.

[classicman]

Uh, I was just bustin your chops - sheesh.
Dish it out, but can't take it much? WTF?

[BDS]

Hey, I can take it.
I just like to respond with... Shall we say, a more aggresive tactic than Merc?

[TheMercenary]

Dodd Blames Obama Administration for Bonus Amendment (Update2)

By Ryan J. Donmoyer

March 19 (Bloomberg) -- Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said the Obama administration asked him to insert a provision in last month’s $787 billion economic- stimulus legislation that had the effect of authorizing American International Group Inc.’s bonuses.

Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, said yesterday he agreed to modify restrictions on executive pay at companies receiving taxpayer assistance to exempt bonuses already agreed upon in contracts. He said he did so without realizing the change would benefit AIG, whose recent $165 million payment to employees has sparked a public furor.

Dodd said he had wanted to limit executive compensation at companies that got money from the government’s financial-rescue fund. AIG has received $173 billion in bailout money. His provision was changed as the stimulus legislation was negotiated between the House and Senate.

“I did not want to make any changes to my original Senate-passed amendment” to the stimulus bill, “but I did so at the request of administration officials, who gave us no indication that this was in any way related to AIG,” Dodd said in a statement released last night. “Let me be clear -- I was completely unaware of these AIG bonuses until I learned of them last week.” He didn’t name the administration officials who made the request.

No Insistence

An administration official said last night that representatives of President Barack Obama didn’t insist on the change, though they did contend that the language in Dodd’s amendment could be legally challenged because it would apply retroactively to bonus agreements. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity.

That provision in the stimulus bill may undercut complaints by congressional Democrats about the AIG bonuses because most of them voted for the legislation. No Republicans in the House and only three in the Senate supported the stimulus measure

“Taxpayers deserve better than this from their government, and this is just the latest reason why legislation must be transparent for all Americans to see before it is recklessly signed into law,” said Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House.

The new law, approved by Congress Feb. 13 and signed into law by Obama the next week, effectively authorized bonus arrangements at companies receiving taxpayer bailouts as long as they were in place before Feb. 11. The AIG bonuses qualified under that provision.

Obama and many lawmakers who voted for the legislation, such as Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, are demanding AIG employees surrender their bonuses.

Schumer Letter

Schumer yesterday sent a letter to AIG Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy warning him to return bonuses or face confiscatory taxes on them. The letter was signed by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, and seven other senators.

Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Schumer, said the senator “supported a provision on the Senate floor that would have prevented these types of bonuses, but he was not on the conference committee that negotiated the final language.”

A House vote is planned for today on a bill to impose a 90 percent tax on executive bonuses paid by AIG and other companies getting more than $5 billion in federal bailout funds.

“I expect it to pass in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, told reporters yesterday in Washington.

Republican Attacks

Republicans seized on the provision in the stimulus bill to paint Democrats as hypocrites.

“The fact is that the bill the president signed, which protected the AIG bonuses and others, was written behind closed doors by Democratic leaders of the House and Senate,” Iowa Senator Charles Grassley said in a statement.

AIG donated a total of $854,905 to political campaigns in 2008, according to the Center for Responsive Politics, a Washington-based research group. AIG employees as a group represent Dodd’s fourth-biggest donor during his career, the group’s research shows. The company’s political action committee, employees and immediate family members have given Dodd more than $280,000, the group said.

Dodd said the provision was written to give the Treasury Department enough discretion to reclaim bonuses as necessary.

“Fortunately, we wrote this amendment in a way that allows the Treasury Department to go back and review these bonus contracts and seek to recover the money for taxpayers,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told lawmakers in a letter this week that department lawyers believe it would be “legally difficult” to prevent AIG from paying bonuses.

Other Democrats who voted for the stimulus bill have ramped up criticism of AIG’s bonuses, including Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who told reporters, “I think the time has come to exercise our ownership rights.”

http://www.bloomberg.com

[classicman]

Oh, you mean being a bigger asshole? It showed.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by classicman

Oh, you mean being a bigger asshole? It showed.

Why should Merc have all the fun?

[classicman]

Link

Even though he was almost a member of the new Obama administration, New Hampshire Republican Judd Gregg Sunday slammed President Obama’s approach to handling the country’s fiscal outlook.

Watch: Gregg warns of fiscal 'crash'

“The practical implications of this is bankruptcy for the United States,” Gregg said of the Obama’s administration’s recently released budget blueprint. “There’s no other way around it. If we maintain the proposals that are in this budget over the ten-year period that this budget covers, this country will go bankrupt. People will not buy our debt, our dollar will become devalued. It is a very severe situation.”

Gregg, known as one of the keenest fiscal minds on Capitol Hill, also told CNN Chief National Correspondent John King that he thought it was “almost unconscionable” for the White House to continue with its planned course on fiscal matters with unprecedented actual and projected budget deficits in the coming years.

“It is as if you were flying an airplane and the gas light came on and it said ‘you 15 minutes of gas left’ and the pilot said ‘we’re not going to worry about that, we’re going to fly for another two hours.’ Well, the plane crashes and our country will crash and we’ll pass on to our kids a country that’s not affordable.”

Despite his criticism of Obama’s approach to the long-term finances of the country, Gregg praised how Obama’s top economic lieutenants are trying to get the sick banking system back to health.

“They’re doing the right things,” Gregg said about embattled Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House economic adviser Larry Summers. “They haven’t done it as definitely as they should have . . . but they are moving in the right direction and the Fed is moving in the right direction,” Gregg said on CNN’s State of the Union.

Gregg broke ranks with some of his fellow Republicans and said he did not think Geithner should step down from his Cabinet post.

On the recent scandal of more than $150 million in bonuses paid to the AIG employees whose work pushed the financial giant to the brink of collapse, Gregg criticized the plan afoot on Capitol Hill to tax those bonuses at very high rates. But, Gregg pointed out that the Obama administration and, to some extent, the Bush administration before it failed to “discipline” the bonuses paid out by AIG, which is now 80 percent owned by the federal government.

The Republican senator was appointed to be Obama’s Commerce Secretary but then bowed out unexpectedly, citing policy differences with the Democratic administration.

I wonder if tw's buddy told him what to think and say too.

[lookout123]

We NEED pay reform in this country.

Pay reform? Is that code for we need to not let people more successful than me have what I can't get?

The companies that took the government money are pretty screwed and will have to play by the rules but well run companies who are able to stand and succeed on their own should not have any input at all from the government on pay beyond the legal minimum wage guidelines.

Originally Posted by lookout123

Pay reform? Is that code for we need to not let people more successful than me have what I can't get?

The companies that took the government money are pretty screwed and will have to play by the rules but well run companies who are able to stand and succeed on their own should not have any input at all from the government on pay beyond the legal minimum wage guidelines.

Agreed. Pay reform through government regulation is a stretch.

However, I do think publicly traded companies should be required by regulation to fully disclose executive compensation (salaries, bonuses, stock options, golden parachutes, etc) to stockholders with those stockholders having greater authority to deny or adjust such compensation.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by lookout123

Pay reform? Is that code for we need to not let people more successful than me have what I can't get?

What, like "the power to ruin the banking system with irresponsible bonuses and practices"?

[sugarpop]

Originally Posted by lookout123

Pay reform? Is that code for we need to not let people more successful than me have what I can't get?

The companies that took the government money are pretty screwed and will have to play by the rules but well run companies who are able to stand and succeed on their own should not have any input at all from the government on pay beyond the legal minimum wage guidelines.

No, it is not code for that. I am saying that, over the past 30 years or so the tax codes have increasingly favored the rich, and not only that, executive pay has gone through the stratosphere while the average workers wages have stagnated severely, plus they have been losing benefits. Capitalism NEEDS checks and balances, and we haven't had any for a very, very long time. Over the past 30 years, the difference between a CEOs pay and the average worker has grown from 30 times more, to about 500 times more. While executive pay has ballooned, middle class wages have not kept up with inflation. If they had, we wouldn't need so many government programs, and people wouldn't be so far in debt. Don't you GET IT?

Minimum wage is a fucking JOKE. Who can live off of that? And you know most other wages for the middle class and working class are based on minimum wage standards, NOT what is fair or how hard the job is or how hard the person works or how valuable they are to the company or the economy, or how profitable the company is. ALL jobs are important. ALL work is important. I'm sick of executives and business graduates thinking they are so much more valuable than everyone else, because they aren't. Without many of the "lower class" or "less valuable" jobs, this country would come to a screeching halt.

[lookout123]

I agree with you on that Redux. Greater disclosure would be a positive as it would help shareholders know exactly what is happening inside their investment.

[TheMercenary]

None of that matters if the top percent pay the majority of taxes.

[TGRR]

Originally Posted by TheMercenary

None of that matters if the top percent pay the majority of taxes.

Of course it matters, if the other 99% can't afford to buy products produced by industry.