I really don't understand the massive outrage over the stimulus bonus amendment

[BzaDem]

I completely understand (and share) the outrage over the AIG bonuses in general.

But I really don't understand all the outrage on DU directed at Dodd and Geithner over the change to Dodd's amendment. Dodd's original amendment would have banned the bonuses altogether; that's clearly what Dodd was trying to accomplish. But then in conference, Treasury lawyers told Geithner that unless an exception was made to allow bonuses already promised by contract, the Government could face many expensive and time-consuming lawsuits. These would be lawsuits that the employees would ultimately win (the contracts were apparently not ambiguous), and the courts would order the bonuses turned over anyway. Geithner told Dodd this and Dodd changed the amendment.

So the main difference in outcomes between Dodd's original amendment and Dodd's new amendment (with Geithner's change) is that currently, the employees get the money without a fight. Whereas with the original amendment, the employees would have had to fight for the bonuses in court (exposing their identities to an outraged public, resulting in public shame). Even if you would rather have this be the result, I really don't fault Geithner that much for not thinking about this beforehand. His job is currently to save the US (and indirectly the world's) financial system, not to be a politican. I don't see how calling for Geithner's resignation because he failed to forsee second and third order political effects of the resulting outrage. Again, we are not talking about whether or not the bonuses would eventually be paid; we are only talking about whether they should be paid without lawsuits or as the result of lawsuits.

Flame suit on.

[FrenchieCat]

1. None of it matters much at this point

as the American people aren't looking for a witchhunt....
only the unpopular petty Republican Party and their Corporate media minions are.

The American people wants this shit not to ever happen again,
and they want to work on getting to a better future that will be increasingly brighter,
with assurances that the fixes will be made to keep greed at bay in the new Green Economy.

What they don't want is distractions away from the problem at hand.

Other than that, the outrage has died, as it wasn't organic, but rather manufactured.


In fact, I believe that if the Republicans keep playing with this, there will be a
backlash for again them acting divisive at a time of great national stress.

[BzaDem]

2. I'm talking more about the outrage on DU. n/t

[FrenchieCat]

3. Lotsa inflitrating trolls (bored out of their wits with their own)

have come here to attempt to stir shit up.

Couple them with the usual suspects, the Naderites,
the PUMAs and whomever else we should throw in for good measure,
and you've got yourself a real outrage stew.
Problem is the stew tastes like shit.

[INdemo]

5. The Repukes will use any issue they can against the Democrats and

this won't be the last.The 2010 campaign started Jan 20th and the Repukes have the corporate media on their side to echo their talking points and they won't allow this to just fade away..And it will get worse the closer we get to the 2010 election...

[FrenchieCat]

10. sadly......

but I think this administration understand what they are up against.

[JI7]

4. wouldn't those people have to show their faces in public if they had to fight for it ?

now they get it and are hiding . when Liddy was talking about the threats these people were getting i felt no sympathy for them.

[dkf]

6. The problem is that Wall Street has a tradition of bonuses that

Main Street finds appalling.

Wall Street won't change and will keep awarding them unless stopped by law. This will infuriate the regular joe who sees all these guys as the cause of the economic problems running through the country.

The AIG derivatives unit is simply an illustration of what the public suspects...that Wall Street pays its people enormous sums even if they fail, especially if they fail in the case of some executive payouts in mergers.

It goes against fundamental fairness. Its the welfare argument turned upside down, aimed at the rich instead of the poor.

[WCGreen]

7. Yea, we should hold their feet to the fire because, after all, scoring populists

points is much more important than keeping the financial system from melting down.

As has been stated here, bonuses are a part of their culture up there on Wall Street (I'm sneering, sneering, I tell you...) and Timmy G probably didn't give much thought to the bonus situation.

Am I outraged? You betcha. I am outraged that one individual can make millions for selling and parsing and selling again and again the same asset adding absolutely nothing to the health of the economy.

ANyway, this too shall pass.

But people down the road will naturally equate "Bonusgate" with Obama, sad too say.

[Clio the Leo]

8. It makes sense to me. NT

[chimpymustgo]

9. Read this. PLEASE. Rolling Stone's Matt Taibbi explains the "economic crisis". You'll be angry

and maybe even scared. It's a great read.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the ...

The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution (added bold)

MATT TAIBBI Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

-snip-


People are pissed off about this financial crisis, and about this bailout, but they're not pissed off enough. The reality is that the worldwide economic meltdown and the bailout that followed were together a kind of revolution, a coup d'état. They cemented and formalized a political trend that has been snowballing for decades: the gradual takeover of the government by a small class of connected insiders, who used money to control elections, buy influence and systematically weaken financial regulations.

The crisis was the coup de grâce: Given virtually free rein over the economy, these same insiders first wrecked the financial world, then cunningly granted themselves nearly unlimited emergency powers to clean up their own mess. And so the gambling-addict leaders of companies like AIG end up not penniless and in jail, but with an Alien-style death grip on the Treasury and the Federal Reserve — "our partners in the government," as Liddy put it with a shockingly casual matter-of-factness after the most recent bailout.

-snip-