News out of Washington sounds as if there will be no restrictions placed on executive pay or the dispensation of bonuses with the new Bailout. Also, if you can believe that neo-liberal, water-carrying wuss Geithner (though who the hell really knows what the lad had to say the other day), the "pigs at the trough" (i.e. our failed financial institutions and their boundlessly incompetent yet self-serving executives), a la Paulson before him, will have minimal accountability for the use of OUR money. Not one of those SOBs will be losing their job.
This is outrageous, offensive, immoral, and criminal especially in the light of some of those bank's usurious credit card policies and the more stringent bankruptcy laws pushed through a few years with the aid of none other than Chris Dodd (D-Countrywide) and Joe Biden, the "great Middle Class Hope," (if you believe that I've a bridge I'd like to sell you).
All Congress does is hold hearings. Barney Frank is a phony. Big talk, No action. No one pays except us. Laughably, the banks threaten and neutralize our so-called representatives, by threatening to not take government (i.e. OUR) money.
An article today at Washington Post <http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/02/11/AR2009021104488.html>, speaks of how bank executive pay restrictions could also not be retroactive: "It was not part of the original agreement," said Laura Thatcher, head of the executive compensation practice at Alston & Bird (...Tom Daschle's paymaster, if you're interested) "If they're going to retroactively change playing rules, it would seem to me that, in fairness, they would have to give the institutions an opportunity to back out of the deal altogether."
The sounds OK by me. Let them back out and return the money to US.
It is time to NATIONALIZE THE BANKS. To throw the executive class out. To demand our representatives represent US. In 1932, some 20,000 marchers of the Bonus Army, downtrodden, destitute, foreclosed and forgotten, descended on Washington to demand the government honor certificates for additional salary granted them at the end of the First World War. Of course, they were brutalized by their own government, as we are today by a feckless Congress in service to criminal banks and their fat-ass executives.
It's time for a new, multi-pronged "Bonus March," where tens of thousands of us, from across the country march both on Wall Street and Washington simultaneously...to show our anger, our resolve, our demand that this crisis produce CHANGE WE CAN BELIEVE IT. Don't count on President Obama...so far, he's done some good (e.g. Lilly Ledbetter, ending the gag rule), but the good stuff he does is small change. Like Clinton before him, when push comes to shove (Blanket secrecy in the courts, telecomm immunity, kissing up to the banks, soon an expanded war in Afghanistan, no prosecutions for war criminals), he's really one of them.
PS Bernie Madoff still walks free.