I don’t want credit for being right. I don’t believe in being pompous and I definitely do not believe in buying T-shirts that say, “Don’t Blame Me! I Voted…” But, I do, however, believe now may be a good time for Americans who read Internet news to go back and recall what was happening when the Wall Street Bailouts were handed down.
Ron Paul, a member of Congress who knows America’s free market economy better than most members of Congress, called this week's anger over the bonuses as a “distraction.”
"I rise in opposition to this rule and the bill because of the problem -- because of the lack of need for this and the disgrace that this has brought upon us…Yesterday, for instance, the Federal Reserve met and they came out and they announced that they would create new money to the tune of $1.25 trillion…Today...on emergency legislation, we're going to deal with $165 million of bonuses, which obviously shouldn't have never been given, but who's responsible for this?...It's the Congress and the president who signed this [$787 billion stimulus bill that allowed the bonuses to go forward]. So this is a distraction, this is an outrage."
It's been revealed that the Senate stripped the provision that would regulate the bonuses going to executives at corporations being bailed out like AIG.
Sen. Chris Dodd appeared on television and said he knew nothing about it and then, as the muckraking comedy show The Daily Show w/ Jon Stewart showed on Thursday night, he came back the next day to claim he went back and looked and yes, he did have something to do with a provision which allowed bonuses to go to A.I.G.
Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Larry Summers were Clinton people who were wholly supportive of Robert Rubin’s economic policies which involved repealing the Glass-Steagall Act, an act which conceivably, if still in place, would have been a huge barrier to all the Wall Street corruption being regularly exposed right now.
According to a new article from David Corn and Jonathan Stein, who write for Mother Jones, a “Top Geithner Aide Fought Against CEO Pay Reform.” Mark Patterson, now chief of staff to Timothy Geithner, was a lobbyist for Goldman Sachs who fought Obama’s “effort to limit excessive corporate pay.”
Patterson is now part of the team charged with the task of curbing executive compensation to corporations like A.I.G. receiving bailout money. Does anyone else see the obvious conflict of interest and does anybody else remember Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s connections to Goldman Sachs and how he was accused of being a "fox guarding the chicken coop"?
And how does this impact the credibility Obama built up during the campaign when he was offering sweeping condemnation of lobbyists’ influence on Washington politics? That a once-Goldman Sachs lobbyist is a member of the economic team charged with rebuilding our economy---does that impact Obama’s integrity?
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