Here come the Clampetts

By Mustang Bobby

Matt Taibbi sums up the bailout of Wall Street:

It has been four long winters since the federal government, in the hulking, shaven-skulled, Alien Nation-esque form of then-Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, committed $700 billion in taxpayer money to rescue Wall Street from its own chicanery and greed. To listen to the bankers and their allies in Washington tell it, you'd think the bailout was the best thing to hit the American economy since the invention of the assembly line. Not only did it prevent another Great Depression, we've been told, but the money has all been paid back, and the government even made a profit. No harm, no foul – right?

Wrong.

It was all a lie – one of the biggest and most elaborate falsehoods ever sold to the American people. We were told that the taxpayer was stepping in – only temporarily, mind you – to prop up the economy and save the world from financial catastrophe. What we actually ended up doing was the exact opposite: committing American taxpayers to permanent, blind support of an ungovernable, unregulatable, hyperconcentrated new financial system that exacerbates the greed and inequality that caused the crash, and forces Wall Street banks like Goldman Sachs and Citigroup to increase risk rather than reduce it. The result is one of those deals where one wrong decision early on blossoms into a lush nightmare of unintended consequences. We thought we were just letting a friend crash at the house for a few days; we ended up with a family of hillbillies who moved in forever, sleeping nine to a bed and building a meth lab on the front lawn.

And now AIG, one of the companies we helped get through rehab – and is running a PR campaign to say "Thank you" – is thinking about suing the U.S. government because their stockholders didn't get a pony. 

Digby says that's chutzpah. Wrong; it's typical.

(Cross-posted at Bark Bark Woof Woof.)

Be careful which enemies you make

By Edward Copeland 

In Charles Ferguson's outstanding documentary on the financial meltdown, Inside Job, one of his interview subjects is former N.Y. Attorney General Eliot Spitzer, who'd been known as the Sheriff of Wall Street for going after shady business practices long before the collapse. Toward the end of Inside Job, it makes the point that none of the financial firms ever faced investigations for their traders writing off high-priced escort services as business expenses, but the Justice Department did pursue Spitzer when it was discovered after he was governor that he used an escort service. The work that Spitzer did and the promise he held as a gifted politician that came crashing down because of his personal weakness are detailed well in another excellent documentary from the prolific filmmaker Alex Gibney, Client 9: The Rise and Fall of Eliot Spitzer.

Gibney also made the great 2010 documentary Casino Jack and the United States of Money as well as the similarly outstanding Taxi to Dark Side and Enron: The Smartest Guys in the World. He also served in producing capacities on Ferguson's excellent No End in Sight and the brilliant Who Killed the Electric Car?

While Client 9 definitely makes the case that the political downfall of Spitzer may have been an orchestrated hit by his enemies in the business community and the Republican Party, Gibney doesn't try to downplay Spitzer's faults beyond the weakness that led him to seek high-priced sexual companionship in the first place. The film paints a broader portrait of the man's achievements and his hubris, which include a superiority complex and an approach that makes him come off as a bully, even if what he was trying to do was right.

As with the best documentaries, Client 9 teaches you things that you didn't know. It seems as if so many of the recent outstanding documentaries, no matter what their subject may be, show how spoonfed the U.S. media are, regurgitating "facts" that get handed to them while seldom checking their veracity. As far as I knew (and I imagine this to be the case with most people who heard about Spitzer and the call girl), his preferred escort was "Kristen" aka Ashley DuPre, who then turned herself into another of those freak celebrities, who ended up with a job at Rupert Murdoch's New York Post as a love and sex columnist.

Client 9, through interviews with one of the owners of The Emperors Club escort service, reveals that Spitzer saw "Kristen" maybe once but mainly went out with a woman who went by the name Angelica. Gibney interviewed her, but she didn't want her face or voice revealed, so an actress plays her part and reads the transcript of her interviews. Ironically, she's now a commodities day trader.

Where Spitzer really might have earned the enemies who were determined to stop him was when as attorney general he went after the head of AIG, Hank Greenberg, for the crooked financial games that company was playing, long before that company's collapse became a major cause of the world financial collapse and cost U.S. taxpayers billions in not one, but two bailouts. Greenberg was not at the helm by then, having been removed by his own board for violating company rules, but the methods AIG employed while Greenberg ran it were still going on and led to AIG's implosion.

U.S. Attorney Michael Garcia prevented Spitzer's pursuit of Greenberg prior to that by claiming the Justice Department was building a case against Greenberg, which they never filed. However, this same Garcia intercepted wire transfers Spitzer made and started looking into escort services that led to leaks that got Spitzer's sexual habits revealed. This also came at the time the Bush Administration was firing U.S. attorneys who weren't prosecuting enough Democrats.

Needless to say, when prosecutors go after prostitution rings, they rarely go after the clients, just the owners and the prostitutes. In contrast, around the same time, the D.C. Madam case surfaced and they only pursued the madam there, even though it was revealed that two of her clients were high-profile Republicans, including Louisiana Sen. David Vitter, who was just re-elected. He faced no legal inquiries.

Many believed that Spitzer had a good shot at being the country's first Jewish president. I just wonder if he'd been able to keep after Wall Street as he was doing, whether some of the mess that happened could have been prevented since no regulatory fixes have really been put in place to stop it since. Government of the corporations, by the corporations, for the corporations shall not perish from the United States and we the little people always will be the ones paying the price. Thank goodness we have documentary filmmakers such as Alex Gibney to do the job that journalists have long since abandoned or forgotten how to do.

(Cross-posted at Edward Copeland on Film.)

Here's a quarter...

By Carl

....call someone who cares.

I have the utmost respect for the civic duty that you are now performing at A.I.G. You are as blameless for these credit default swap losses as I am. You answered your country’s call and you are taking a tremendous beating for it.

But you also are aware that most of the employees of your financial products unit had nothing to do with the large losses. And I am disappointed and frustrated over your lack of support for us. I and many others in the unit feel betrayed that you failed to stand up for us in the face of untrue and unfair accusations from certain members of Congress last Wednesday and from the press over our retention payments, and that you didn’t defend us against the baseless and reckless comments made by the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut.

[...] I’m not sure how you will greet my resignation, but at least Attorney General Blumenthal should be relieved that I’ll leave under my own power and will not need to be “shoved out the door.”

Point one: Liddy has agreed to take one dollar as compensation, despite the fact that most of this happened off his watch. Thuis writer has, as well.

Point two: The writer, Jake DeSantis, is an executive vice president of the Financial Products division of AIG, as "head of business development for commodities", the division that has very nearly, and still may yet, sunk the entire global economy. So I think the question must be asked...

Um, dude? WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU????

OK, you had a different responsibility, I get that. But you know something?

I am an officer at a firm. My niche is very narrow, and I'm well paid for it. But as a point of order, we officers make it our business to understand what's going on in the rest of the company. Why?

You never know when you'll be put in charge of something else. That's the way American corporations work.

You ask why your CEO "betrayed" you. WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU???? when your co-workers were scamming money and making bets on bets on bets?

If you want to understand what happened at the Financial Products division of AIG, let me put forth this analogy. It's simplistic and flawed, but it's not completely wrong.

I sell you a homeowner's insurance policy. That's a bet that I make that your house won't burn down. If it does, I owe you the agreed amount. If it doesn't, well, I've scored pure profit from you (your premiums, which are pooled and invested in order to cover any losses suffered by policyholders) but you've had the peace of mind of knowing you won't take a loss.

The way I make money is not directly from your premiums, but by spreading my risk around by selling more and more policies and trying to diversify who buys them, so that if a big fire hits a neighborhood, it will only affect a percentage of the money I'm holding onto.

That's the traditional insurance business. A similar scenario works in the traditional mortgage market.

Now let's move onto the Financial Products division.

I take that policy, and in order to score some quick cash, I let people bet that the policy will earn money. Then, in order to make even MORE money, I sell insurance to the gamblers that will cover their losses.

Oops. You'll notice what just happened: I've taken what risk I had spread out and consolidated it. Worse, I'm on the hook at both ends in the event the house burns down: I pay the policyholder and now have to pay all the gamblers who bet on the policy!

So, Jake, I ask the question again: WHERE THE FUCK WERE YOU???

If a simpleton like me, who only has an accounting degree, can understand that you're betting against yourself, why couldn't a high-powered executive vice president figure out from washroom conversations that your entire division was one big-ass house of cards? You're the head of development of business commodities! How could you not be curious about the products your own people are developing????

And there, right there, that's the problem. These aren't commodities. We're not talking about pork bellies or corn or oil.

We're talking about people's homes. Their lives. Their jobs.

So shut up, walk away, and be glad you got out with your skin and dignity.

(Cross-posted to Simply Left Behind.)

Same old, same old party

By Capt. Fogg

What's more disgusting than CNN giving copious air time to Florida Representative Connie Mack this morning so that he can continue to demand the firing or resignation of Tim Geithner for reasons of complicity in a no strings attached, unsupervised AIG bailout under Hank Paulson and the Bush administration? Why, it was natty, nasty and nefarious young Connie Mack himself. Representative Mack, in trying to pin the tail on the donkey, seems to have overlooked the fact that it's an elephant's tail and wants us to buy the notion that the AIG bonuses were not only Geithner's fault, but proof of the incompetance of President Obama in fixing the Republican train wreck. The spectacular smugfest of Republicans acting as though oversight of Wall Street was their idea is just that -- spectacular.

Asked pointedly and repeatedly on CNN this morning however, Mack refused to comment on whether Geithner or the Obama administration should attempt to recover the funds, repeating again and again that they never should have been given and asking what Geithner knew and when he knew it.

Quite simply, the Timothy Geithner experience has been a disaster.

said Mack last Wednesday. Once again, CNN missed the opportunity to ask whether the huge disaster of the last 8 years was anyone outside the current administration's responsibility and whether the 8 years of mismanagement could reasonably be expected to have been rectified in a matter of weeks without the waste of a hundredth of a percent. Are we to have forgotten that the kind of oversight that would have prevented the mess was the devil himself to every Republican of the last several decades?

I have to recall however that the Republicans waited two months longer to declare the Obama Administration a failure and disaster than they did when Bill Clinton was elected. Some couldn't wait for him to actually take office to begin the disinformation, investigation and sabotage and what can we call this but sabotage as they offer no practical alternative other than to attack, attack and attack?

One can never hope for contrition from any Republican it seems, nor can anyone expect their cooperation in any attempt to deal with their failures and misdeeds. It's just the Same Old Party and the Same Old Excuses.

(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Don't blame Dodd, revisited

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Does Sen. Chris Dodd's admission that he was, as CNN put it, "responsible for language added to the federal stimulus bill to make sure that already-existing contracts for bonuses at companies receiving federal bailout money [e.g., AIG] were honored" change matters? That is, given this mea culpa, is Dodd the one to blame for the AIG bonuses?

No.

Because it wasn't an admission -- and certainly not a mea culpa.

"The administration had expressed reservations," he said. "They asked for modifications. The alternative was losing the amendment entirely." In other words, it was the Obama Administration -- Geithner and Summers -- that pushed for the loophole, not Dodd. "I agreed reluctantly," he added. "I was changing the amendment because others were insistent."

Earlier today, I linked to, and quoted extensively from, Glenn Greenwald's post on the matter, a post that rightly credited Jane Hamsher, who has done some exceptional investigative work here, with exposing the shenanigans behind the loophole, and with pointing the finger directly at the Obama Administration. Glenn has updated his post in light of Dodd's "admission":

I explicitly wrote that it was Dodd who, after arguing vehemently against this provision, ultimately agreed to its inclusion. And the statement from Dodd's office that I quoted above included the same series of events ("Because of negotiations with the Treasury Department and the bill Conferees, several modifications were made, including adding the exemption"). That's exactly what Dodd said today on CNN.

The point was -- and is -- that Dodd was pressured to put that carve-out in at the insistence of Treasury officials (whose opposition meant that Dodd's two choices were the limited compensation restriction favored by Geithner/Summers or no compensation limits at all), and Dodd did so only after arguing in public against it. To blame Dodd for provisions that the White House demanded is dishonest in the extreme, and what Dodd said today on CNN about the White House's advocacy of this provision confirms, not contradicts, what I wrote.

*****

It was the Treasury Department -- at least according to a Treasury official granted anonymity for the extremely compelling reason that he "asked not to be named" -- that pushed for the carve-out, and did so over Dodd's objections. That was the point from the beginning. That's precisely what made it so outrageous that the administration was trying to blame Dodd for a provision which Obama's own Treasury officials advocated, pushed for and engineered.

Now, there may be a Treasury (and Geithner/Summers) side to this that hasn't yet been effectively articulated. Perhaps, just perhaps, "the limited compensation restriction" was the best that could have been achieved. But I suspect not. And what is simply revolting -- if not nearly as revolting as the AIG bonuses, of course -- is the campaign of blame that has been waged against Dodd, an avoidance of responsibility on the part of the administration along with an assault, of sorts, on a loyal Democrat and one of the key figures in the Senate on the bailout issue.

Glenn is right. This is "dishonest in the extreme." And, as far as I can tell, it's simply indefensible.

The GOP: against regulating pay before they were for it

By Creature

I can't defend the Obama administration too much over the AIG bonus fiasco (their blaming of Chris Dodd has started an avalanche that is just unacceptable). However, it's good to see that the president today took a shot at the hypocrisy coming from the GOP on all this. Greg Sargent:

In an apparent shot at GOPers who are blasting the bonuses, Obama said that there are "a whole bunch of folks now feigning outrage" that a year or two ago would have said "we should never meddle" in the private sector.

ThinkProgress runs down the flip-flopping Republicans here.

Don't blame Dodd

By Michael J.W. Stickings

Another must-read, an extremely important one, from Greenwald:

There is a major push underway -- engineered by Obama's Treasury officials, enabled by a mindless media, and amplified by the right-wing press -- to blame Chris Dodd for the AIG bonus payments. That would be perfectly fine if it were true. But it's completely false, and the scheme to heap the blame on him for the AIG bonus payments is based on demonstrable falsehoods.

Jane Hamsher has written the definitive post narrating and indisputably documenting what actually took place. The attempt to blame Dodd is based on a patently false claim that was first fed to The New York Times on Saturday by an "administration official" granted anonymity by Times reporters Edmund Andrew and Peter Baker (in violation, as usual, of the NYT anonymity policy, since all the official was doing was disseminating pro-administration spin). The accusation against Dodd is that there is nothing the Obama administration can do about the AIG bonus payments because Dodd inserted a clause into the stimulus bill which exempted executive compensation agreements entered into before February, 2009 from the compensation limits imposed on firms receiving bailout funds. Thus, this accusation asserts, it was Dodd's amendment which explicitly allowed firms like AIG to make bonus payments that were promised before the stimulus bill was enacted.

That is simply not what happened. What actually happened is the opposite. It was Dodd who did everything possible -- including writing and advocating for an amendment -- which would have applied the limitations on executive compensation to all bailout-receiving firms, including AIG, and applied it to all future bonus payments without regard to when those payments were promised. But it was Tim Geithner and Larry Summers who openly criticized Dodd's proposal at the time and insisted that those limitations should apply only to future compensation contracts, not ones that already existed. The exemption for already existing compensation agreements -- the exact provision that is now protecting the AIG bonus payments -- was inserted at the White House's insistence and over Dodd's objections. But now that a political scandal has erupted over these payments, the White House is trying to deflect blame from itself and heap it all on Chris Dodd by claiming that it was Dodd who was responsible for that exemption.

In this case, I fear, the Obama Administration has no one to blame but itself.

For more on the appalling AIG bonuses, see Steve Benen and, on Geithner and Summers, Chris Bowers. It's linked above, but make sure to read Jane Hamsher's brilliant post.

(Note that the right -- notably, Fox Business -- has picked up on the anti-Dodd smear, as Glenn mentions.)

Fake populism

By Creature

Besides being idiots, what do Rick Santelli, Glen Beck, and Rush Limbaugh have in common? They say they care about the little guy, but really they care only about the little guy who pulls in a seven figure income. Too many people in this country consume their media just like they vote. That is, against their own interests.

Guillotine! Guillotine!

By Capt. Fogg

It is the best of times. It is the worst of times. They report, you decide.

One doesn't expect the spokesmen for conservative interests to be using the French Revolution as a model for future action. Of course, I'm no kind of cynicm and so all the calls for blood, all the evocations of victims carted off to some public square to be guillotined or of some Supreme Court justice bleeding to death in his bathtub like Marat aren't at all hilarious to me when I watch Fox News.

Whether it's terrorism, international crises, domestic crime or, in this case, excessive corporate greed, some conservatives seem unable to see problems as anything other than a nail for which the only solution is a hammer,

says Think Progress. Fox's solution is a Krauthammer.

Charles Krauthammer, who like so many Fox denizens looks like he's overdone the Botox, told us all yesterday that we should hold public executions for AIG executives whose contracts include a bonus:

Have it in Times Square, invite Madame DuFarge. 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.

Conservative Mort Kondrake just wants to boil them in oil.

Okay, so it's hyperbole, although with paralyzed faces like these guys have, one has to make some guesses as to what they really mean. But inflammatory rhetoric in such times as these is like flicking your Bic with gasoline all over the floor. Put them together with Ann Coulter, who has advocated poisoning judges, and with Rush, who would rather have the country collapse than accept any offense to his "principles," and we have not only an assemblage of rogues but a perfect example of people who are not conservatives any more than were the Parisian mobs cheering as heads rolled in the Place de la Concorde in 1793.



(Cross-posted from Human Voices.)

Breaking! ... Obama takes action, seizes AIG's March Madness office pools and brackets

By J. Thomas Duffy

Feeling a building backlash to the corporate bailouts, and the news this weekend of insurance giant A.I.G. (Always Incredibly Greedy) paying out hundreds-of-millions in bonuses, federal marshalls, in this country, along with various law enforcement in other countries, raided A.I.G. offices and seized the company's March Madness office pools and tournament bracket funds.



The order came from President Obama:

"In the last six months, AIG has received substantial sums from the U.S. Treasury. I've asked Secretary Geithner to use that leverage and pursue every legal avenue to block these March Madness pools and make the American taxpayers whole," Obama said.

A spokesperson for Treasury indicated they would follow through with the president's directive but that Secretary Geithner was "unaware" that March Madness had begun.

Press Secretary Robert Gibbs said that President Obama ordered the action late yesterday, shortly after the NCAA Basketball Tournament selection process was completed:

"We expect this will net hundreds-of-thousands-of-dollars," a stern Gibbs announced, citing much taxpayer money it had already given A.I.G. in the previously-released TARP fund bailout.

"The President found it unconscionable that public funds would be used in this manner."



Rumors are circulating in the capital that President Obama is weighing issuing an executive order to effectively nationalize all March Madness office pools and bracket funds, redirecting the money to possible future stimulus packages or additional corporate bailouts.

Reaction to the move by President Obama against A.I.G fell along party lines.

Speaker of the House Nancy Pelosi hailed the action, saying it was "unfathomable" that A.I.G would be running March Madness pools in light of the dire circumstances facing the company.

Pelosi stopped short of endorsing the possible nationalizing of March Madness pools, saying that "they are not on the table at this time."

Congressman Eric Cantor (R-VA) slammed Obama:

"The President talks about creating, or saving jobs. Well, he just wiped out dozens of them, the people that create the squares, run around the office selling them, collecting the money, having to monitor the tournament and update the squares ... That's not change you can believe in."

Senator Richard Shelby (R-AL) called on the president to direct General Motors and the UAW to downscale their March Madness office pools to match the March Madness office pools of non-union shops.



In a scathing press release, A.I.G. Chief Edward Liddy said he was "extremely disappointed in the President's actions" and that there may be "legal ramifications" to the seizing of A.I.G.'s March Madness office pools, suggesting that some of the employees "may have used their own, personal funds."

When pressed by reporters, Liddy admitted that he picked the University of Connecticut to win the tournament.

**********

Bonus "Always Incredibly Greedy" Bonus Riffs

Glenn Greenwald: The sanctity of AIG's contracts

Jane Hamsher: Who Stole Our Country, and How are We Going to Get It Back?

TBogg: Bring on the Bobs

Robert Stein: Bailout Roulette

Steve Benen: AIG'S TENTACLES...

NYT: A.I.G. Lists Which Banks It Paid With U.S. Bailout Funds

MSNBC: Obama seeking ways to block AIG bonuses ... President calls $165 million in bonuses an 'outrage to the taxpayers'

CBS News: White House May Want AIG Money Back ...Administration Investigates Ways To Retrieve Some Of The Millions AIG Used For Bonuses




(Cross-posted at The Garlic.)

Nationalize AIG

By Creature

I hate to say it, but I think Josh Mashall is right here:

Like you, I've been watching this AIG bonus story unfold over the weekend. And though I did not see it at first, I think it may prove to be a turning point, both for AIG and the government.

I don't believe the bonuses themselves are the heart of the matter, nor the fact that they're going to the very executives who caused AIG's implosion or even the galling reality that, since all money is fungible, they're being paid with taxpayer dollars. What's really driving this forward -- and what makes it such a dangerous moment for the White House -- is the jarring image of the administration's impotence.

It's not that the Obama administration is any more or less impotent than Bush's was or McCain's would've been, it's the mere fact that this now is happening under his watch. Besides the outrage over the bonuses generally, the optics are horrible . However, there is a way out for the administration. Nationalize AIG. Nationalize them now and, as I said in my earlier post, destroy the Financial Products division (the group responsible for this mess). The political and popular will would certainly be behind such a move. If AIG is really too big to fail, then the administration has no choice. It's either a takeover or they live with the AIG monkey on their back throwing shit and pissing on their grand plans for the next four years.

AIG to pay $165 million in bonuses

By Creature

I understand the systemic risks, I understand the legal reasoning, but giving bonuses to the exact people who took the entire world economy to the brink is ludicrous. With the taxpayers' $170 billion investment in AIG, do we not have have the power to simply spin off and destroy the Financial Products division of AIG (again, the group that made these bad deals and are receiving the bonuses) and leave the well-run insurance division intact?

Larry Summers today reminded us that we must respect the law and the weight these contracts (which provided for these bonuses) have. Yes, we must preserve, respect, and not set new precedent for the abrogation of contract law in the future, but these are novel times and any precedent set by breaking these contracts would certainly be limited to the extraordinary circumstances under which they were born (and hopefully destroyed).

61.7

By Creature

That's the number of dollars, in billions, lost by AIG in the fourth-quarter of last year. It's the biggest quarterly lose in the history of quarterly losses. It also means we, the people, will be ponying up another $30 billion to help keep this house of cards standing. That's $30 billion on top of the $150 billion already used to prop this giant up. Ridiculous. Don't get me wrong, I understand the systemic risk involved, but that doesn't mean I have to like it.

My Howard Beale moment

By Edward Copeland

I don't have to tell you things are bad. Everybody knows things are bad. It's a depression. Everybody's out of work or scared of losing their job. The dollar buys a nickel's work, banks are going bust, shopkeepers keep a gun under the counter. ... We know the air is unfit to breathe and our food is unfit to eat, and we sit watching our TVs while some local newscaster tells us that today we had 15 homicides and 63 violent crimes, as if that's the way it's supposed to be. We know things are bad - worse than bad. They're crazy. It's like everything everywhere is going crazy, so we don't go out anymore. We sit in the house, and slowly the world we are living in is getting smaller, and all we say is, 'Please, at least leave us alone in our living rooms. Let me have my toaster and my TV and my steel-belted radials and I won't say anything. Just leave us alone.' Well, I'm not gonna leave you alone. I want you to get mad! I don't want you to protest. I don't want you to riot - I don't want you to write to your congressman because I wouldn't know what to tell you to write. ... All I know is that first you've got to get mad. You've got to say, 'I'm a HUMAN BEING, Goddamnit! My life has VALUE!' So I want you to get up now. I want all of you to get up out of your chairs. I want you to get up right now and go to the window. Open it, and stick your head out, and yell, 'I'M AS MAD AS HELL, AND I'M NOT GOING TO TAKE THIS ANYMORE!' I want you to get up right now, sit up, go to your windows, open them and stick your head out and yell - 'I'm as mad as hell and I'm not going to take this anymore!' Things have got to change. But first, you've gotta get mad!... You've got to say, 'I'm as mad as hell, and I'm not going to take this anymore!'

I'm getting to that point people as I listen to idiot after idiot either report the news or comment on it. I think the valve started to blow this week when it was reported that AIG, the recipient of two previous payment of billions, who has been caught after those payments spending money on lavish junkets for its executives instead of trying to save their company, was about to report a huge loss and go back to the government with their hand out again. Screw em. Let's start practicing a little Darwininism here. If they can't save themselves, let them fail and sell them for spare parts.

Today, the steam shot the valve clean off my head as Obama introduced his budget and all the coddled members of the media started worrying about whether it was a good idea to let Dubya's tax cuts on the highest earners in the country expire in these economic conditions and return to the rate it was under Clinton. Oh dear, they cry, won't this make the big earners less likely to create jobs. Hmmm...exactly how many jobs have they been creating under this current tax rate? Another 600,000 some unemployment filings in the last week alone. (5 million jobless total, an all-time record.) Thousands upon thousands of job cuts announced each week. The fat cats aren't ever considering cutting their wages to save some workers' jobs but Chip Reid is afraid they won't create jobs if they have to pay a little more in taxes. At the same time, they seem to forget the majority of the country actually will be getting more of their money back.

CNBC has been particularly ridiculous as they told the story of the bank that received a billion or so from the TARP but used money to sponsor a golf tournament and send loads of its execs on swanky trips to the event. Larry Kudlow was turning red with anger. THIS WAS MARKETING, he declared. Labeling these banks this way will have a ripple effect. They WILL RUIN GOLF. Say it ain't so, Larry. Here, I thought Rick Santelli was the most irrational one at CNBC for acting as if the Obama Administration was about to ship him off to Gitmo because Robert Gibbs mentioned his name at a press briefing.

It's time for tough love with these assholes. Hank Paulson made a lot of these banks take money to hide which banks were really in trouble. Now everyone knows that it's Citigroup that's in trouble and the stronger banks want to give back the money they got, money they didn't want. Let them. The most infuriating thing I've heard is that the stimulus package had $75 million for FBI investigators to probe this economic meltdown and it was removed by Congress from the final bill. As Dylan Ratigan compared it, this disaster is the economic equivalent of 9/11 except we're only trying to help the victims, no one is going after the terrorists. I WANT YOU TO GET UP OUT OF YOUR CHAIR...