Leaders
of the White House economic team and the Senate's top Republican
bellowed about bonuses at a bailed-out insurance giant and pledged to
prevent such payments in the future.From one Sunday talk show to the
next, they tore into the contracts that American International Group
asserted had to be honored, to the tune of about $165 million and
payable to executives by Sunday, even as the company has benefited from
more than $170 billion in a federal rescue. Image Credit: KOMO News
Circular Logic Defines Obama’s Turn At President
Here
we are only about 57 days into the 44th Presidency of the United States
and what we find doesn’t match up with what was promised.
Barack
Obama ran on an overriding theme of ushering a new era of
responsibility, yet all this administration can do is put forward and
hire people, Timothy Geithner, to oversee our economy and its pursuit
of increased taxes, that cheat on their responsibility to actually pay
taxes.
Case in point:
The Obama administration blames
this economy and the Government solutions put in place to correct its
downturn on the previous executive administration of George W. Bush,
yet this administration fights to keep most of the same people,
policies, and level of oversight in place from the previous
administration.
This administration decided to give a third
round of additional TARP fund billions of dollars to its largest
troubled financial institution, AIG, without pre-condition (again)
while upping the Government’s ownership (80%) in the company … then
becomes outraged (only after the disclosure of the bonus plan) when the
company honors its employment contracts with many of its top executives
by issuing $165 million dollars in bonuses – averaging $500,000 to each.
Obama
economic chief Larry Summers: AIG bonuses 'outrageous' but government
can't stop them. Image Credit: Associated Press via KDRV-TV
This excerpted and edited from NationlJournal.com –
Hotline After Dark -- Resident Evil?
March 17, 2009 8:50 AM
"World
News" led with AIG bonuses. "Evening News" led with AIG bonuses and
featured a taped interview with special inspector gen. for Iraq Stuart
Bowen Jr. "Nightly News" led with AIG bonuses.
Last
night's TV coverage was dominated by Pres. Obama's announcement that he
asked Treas. Sec. Tim Geithner to use all legal tools to block the AIG
exec bonuses. Among the reaction:
----
Weekly Standard's Ham:
"There's nothing that brings people in Washington together from both
sides of the aisle faster than the need to get on the right side of a
populist backlash" ("O'Reilly Factor," FNC, 3/16).
Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ):
"None of this should have surprised any of us. ... And it was actually
out there also for Secretary Geithner to understand coming into this,
as well. ... So it's only now that it's making headlines that the
president is coming back and basically second-guessing his own treasury
secretary on this. Why Secretary Geithner didn't raise this when he
first understood it is beyond me" ("NewsHour," PBS, 3/16).
Sen. Bob Menendez (D-NJ), asked if he's satisfied with the responses from the WH:
"I'm not satisfied. ... They have to renegotiate their contracts. There
is no reason why when the federal government is poised to do another
$30 billion that, in fact, we can't insist that those contracts get
renegotiated, and renegotiated in such a way in which those bonuses
simply don't take place." ("1600," MSNBC, 3/16).
----
FNC's Hume:
"... it is a big problem for the president. He has already added
substantially to the bailout money previously provided to AIG and to
others and will almost certainly need to add more, much more to address
the continuing credit crisis. ("Special Report," 3/16).
----
Rep. Darrell Issa (R-CA):
"The boneheads are the people in the previous administration and this
administration who gave out over $170 billion of our money and did not,
in fact, do what anyone else giving money does, which is ensure that
the money is not a conduit for simply paying out bonuses" ("Hardball,"
MSNBC, 3/16).
Syndicated columnist Charles Krauthammer:
"This is not so much an economic issue as a psychological and a
political issue. Economically, if you add up all the bonuses, it's less
than 1/10 of one percent of the bailout to AIG alone, so it's lunch
money. Psychologically, it's important because there's outrage in the
country, and ... unless there's an appeasement in the anger in the
population who are going to have to support the next bailout, which is
going to be a trillion dollars, the money won't be made available,
Congress will deny it. So that's why you get the president heaping
opprobrium on these miscreants who made the bad deals and now are
getting the bonuses."
More Krauthammer:
"I'm all in favor of keeping this heaping opprobrium. I would deny them
the bonuses if possible. I would be for an exemplary hanging or two.
Have it in Times Square, invite Madame Defarge. You borrow a guillotine
from the French and we could have a party. If that's what it takes to
maintain popular support, let's do it. But it's not going to change
anything economically" ("Special Report," FNC, 3/16).
CNN's Dobbs:
"I'm calling for Liddy to be fired. I'm calling for the Board of AIG to
be fired here tonight, and looking forward ... we can't afford in this
country any longer to tolerate corporate leaders who don't understand
the basic values of this country ... ("Lou Dobbs Tonight," 3/16).
Reference Here>>
Why is anyone surprised? Barack Obama never was an executive in charge of anything throughout his entire career.
He became educated, earned a law degree, edited a law review publication, worked as a foot soldier for
ACORN
(an organization that is funded, in part, by the federal government to
support socialism projects to people who look for handouts as opposed
to a hand up on which one can become self-sustaining),
became friends with a group of radical educators and priests,
taught constitutional law at a college, ran and secured a state senate
office in Illinois, then waged an uncontested campaign to become a
Senator from the state of Illinois to the federal government, where he
served 144 days before he declared and ran for President of the country
full time until he became elected.
And now, as President, with
the help of a Democrat political party lead congress and three
Republican political party Senators, he has been successful at
committing each and every household to an additional $18,500+ in
spending debt. He has defined his presidency by
throwing taxpayer money at continuing, and historically, self-correcting economic problems while re-labeling our effort to stop
islamofascism created violence that continues to kill thousands of innocent citizens …
from an act of ongoing war to a police action.
The
economy has lost over 40% of its value since he was voted into office
(over 15% in these last two months), South Korea and Iran threaten to
launch rockets and make nuclear bombs, Russia is moving to control the
flow of oil out of their region of the world while President Barack
Obama reverses the opening up of off-shore drilling activity in our own
country, Riots are breaking out in Pakistan, and Barack Obama pledges
$900,000,000 (nine-hundred million dollars) of United States taxpayer
money to rebuild infrastructure in Hamas (a recognized
islamofascism ideology based terrorist organization) controlled Gaza.
All of this chaos and we have only witnessed this President’s first two months in the office of executive leadership.
Circular logic … dizzying, isn’t it?