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Location: Georgia, on the Florida line, right above Tallahassee
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....viewed by the regulatory authorities. U.S. Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke said in an interview with CBS news magazine "60 Minutes" that the failure of AIG would have brought down the financial system.
AIG has a rubber stamp to spend how they want, whatever they want, on whatever they want. They CAN NOT BE ALLOWED TO FAIL.
Let that sink in for a minute. It took a minute for that one little line to sink in for me. Imagine...for a moment. Your spouse comes home and you are doing her sister. "Grr!", she says. "You're so!...so....ARGH!" and then she goes to the kitchen to make you a sandwich, while you finish up with her sister. "Yeah....that's a good wife. Don't forget to cut the crusts off! I don't like the crusts!"
Imagine...you drink 1/2 a fifth of bourbon, get in your car and drive until you hit and kill someone. The police officer shows up, whips out a shovel, buries the dead and gives you his car and shotgun. "Hold on a sec', I need to load that for ya'." He waves and smiles as you drive off.
Imagine....you shoot bald eagles for sport. The game warden is your lackey and cuts the heads off for you and places them on your bald eagle necklace. Man, that's gonna look so cool when you wear your panda skin jacket.
Imagine....you put a lasso on the orcas at Sea World and drag them down the highway behind your truck while people cheer and snap quick salutes as you drive by.
It's disgusting, blatant thievery, patent disrespect for american taxpayers, total disregard for any moral description of capitalism and an assault on free markets. It's revolting and makes me ill. And it is done in broad daylight unarmed and unprosecuted.
....but anyways I watched that interview and have a few comments. One was how carefully Bernanke worded everything. "The economy will improve at the end of the year, but....". Wall Street hangs at his every word, so you can't blame him.
The key here is that Bernanke know what the problem is - it's a financial institutional crises. It has nothing to do with the elements of the recent Obama/Pelosi (anti)-stimulus bill, blame CBS interviewers for not getting any comments on that, but they seemed insistent on not making the interview political.
He didn't do a good job of explaining the potential for "financial meltdown" if these intitutions fail, other than saying what happense on wall street impacts main street. He's obviously a very intellegent person, with a working man background, and I am convinced he understands the problem (which means he is at least a step advanced from the white house and congress), but I don't think he understands the solution.
Location: Georgia, on the Florida line, right above Tallahassee
10,471 posts, read 15,833,234 times
Reputation: 6438
It's not as funny when you explain it, but here goes.... If you are not allowed to fail, you CAN NOT FAIL.
It's like giving a kid who wants a pony...every single, stinking day....a pony.
Every...single....stinking day. The kid can't fail.
It's like the Star Trek ship entering a black hole. Any other ship would be crushed to a singularity. William Shatner would be doing pushups and chasing a green skinned woman when they cut back from commercial. It can't fail.
It's like Paul Bunyan being given a stack of 50 pancakes. There is no failure. There is only 1 stack of 50 pancakes being eaten. Paul Bunyan can not fail. The person telling the tale can not say "Paul Bunyan was given a stack of 50 pancakes, but was unable to eat them all. He was but only human."
Once you have been deemed to be "infallible", you can do literally ANYTHING and it's all good. It's a license to kill, steal, maim, destroy and enjoy the fruits of total barbarity. Look at what the Treasury says, "Well, it IS a contract. We're very disappointed." "Sigh." "Tisk, tisk." "Oh, but let's just let it go."
People, who are being paid "bonuses" and "retention benefits" are being paid those for doing a "good job." And as I mentioned in another post, this is right and good. They DID do their job. The thing I just picked up on is....that...it doesn't matter WHAT KIND of job they do. They could come to work and shoot basketball all day in the office. It doesn't matter any more....because they can not be allowed to fail. We will pump money into them until there is no more money to be pumped. And then we will borrow to pump more. Until finally, we can't even borrow money. Even then, we won't let them fail. We'll watch all the lower level guys fail first.
Our government basically said, "If you're a little guy, a normal guy, a run of the mill guy, we'll let's see...you SUCK. But, this guy, oh no... this guy here...he's the **** of the Block. The King of Rock. The super Jock. We gotta save this guy. Or we're all just toast.
The idea... the truly horrifying idea! is "What if you can't save them?" What then?
What was the point?" There is no justification to what they are doing. There's just a shotgun approach of dumping barrels of money on a company that can't make good business decisions. And now, they've been given license to do...oh man...makes me madder-N-hell.
The only reason they are so "important" is they have forced us to use bank credit as money. The rest of it like life and auto insurance can be spun off. They are leeches and like any good parasite they have affected the brain of their host. Most people that are not FIRE economy propaganda zombies know that to get out of debt we don't need more debt.
Whats even more disgusting is that they are giving out 450 M in bonuses, a portion of it 165 M is to come this weekend.... and they use the bailout money to pay foreign banks... are you freaking kidding me? Yet here we are continuing to throw money at them... if they are too big to fail, its time to cut them down to size and then let them fail... yet, we aren't doing that... so much for "responsibility"... the government owns 80% of AIG, it can FIRE as many unneeded people it wants.. those who want to keep their bonuses can be the first to be fired...
Whats even more disgusting is that they are giving out 450 M in bonuses, a portion of it 165 M is to come this weekend.... and they use the bailout money to pay foreign banks... are you freaking kidding me? Yet here we are continuing to throw money at them... if they are too big to fail, its time to cut them down to size and then let them fail... yet, we aren't doing that... so much for "responsibility"... the government owns 80% of AIG, it can FIRE as many unneeded people it wants.. those who want to keep their bonuses can be the first to be fired...
Hi evilnewbie,
Actually they can't because they have contracts. They are sham contracts but they can hide behind them and collect bonuses. If it had gone to organizational bankruptcy then they could simply break the contracts.
Like Barney says... they may have contracts to secure their bonuses, but their jobs aren't secure... I would give everyone at AIG an option... 1) Take the bonus and get fired 2) Refuse the bonus and stay hired... I don't need to have taxpayers money rewarding incompetence...
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