bailout

Robert Gibbs has issued a statement trying to walk back his critique of the “professional left” in an interview with The Hill. Here’s Gibbs statement (via The Plum Line)

I watch too much cable, I admit. Day after day it gets frustrating. Yesterday I watched as someone called legislation to prevent teacher layoffs a bailout -- but I know that's not a view held by many, nor were the views I was frustrated about.

So what I may have said inartfully, let me say this way -- since coming to office in January 2009, this White House and Congress have worked tirelessly to put our country back on the right path. Most importantly, to dig our way out of a huge recession and build an economy that makes America more competitive and our middle class more secure. Some are frustrated that the change we want hasn't come fast enough for many Americans. That we all understand.

But in 17 months, we have seen Wall Street reform, historic health care reform, fair pay for women, a recovery act that pulled us back from a depression and got our economy moving again, record investments in clean energy that are creating jobs, student loan reforms so families can afford college, a weapons system canceled that the Pentagon didn't want, reset our relationship with the world and negotiated a nuclear weapons treaty that gets us closer to a world without fear of these weapons, just to name a few. And at the end of this month, 90,000 troops will have left Iraq and our combat mission will come to an end.

From TPM:

The message delivered at today's tea party protest of the Detroit Auto Show: protecting American jobs beats telling Democrats to "keep their hands off" the economy.

A group of Michigan tea partiers successfully shut down a protest of the Detroit Auto Show arranged by the National Tax Payer's Union today on the grounds that it was more important to protect American jobs than it was to condemn the government bailout of the auto industry. The AP was on the scene at the protest and found just two tea partiers in attendance. That's despite a national call for a rally at the show by the National Tax Day Tea Party last week.

The organizers of the rally hoped to place hundreds of angry tea partiers in the face of White House officials and prominent Democrats like Nancy Pelosi, who visited the show today. Instead, they ran into an online campaign to shut down the protest from Michigan tea partiers who called it an affront to the thousands of Michiganders who rely on the auto industry for a paycheck.

To try and shut down a convention for the main industry of the state with the highest unemployment shows there is a serious lack of brain power in the tea party. It reminds me of when Republicans were saying “just let the auto industry die” with no plans on how to reemploy the approximately 14 million Americans that would lose their job (or 10% of the U.S. work force).

Call the Pope because hell is freezing over:

Senators John McCain and Maria Cantwell are joining forces to reinstate the Depression-era Glass-Steagal [sic] Act of 1933, which separated commercial banking from Wall Street investment banking. According to Newsweek, the two plan to announce the bipartisan McCain-Cantwell bill on Wednesday morning.

The Glass-Steagall law was repealed in 1999, allowing for commercial and investment banking to combine. Bloomberg notes that its repeal has sparked debate as to whether it "helped spawn reckless lending practices and financial speculation that led to the meltdown of credit markets last year and the $700 billion U.S. bailout of troubled banks."

There is something here that really has me scratching my head. Glass-Steagall was repealed by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act  in 1999 and proudly signed into law by then-President Bill Clinton. The main author of that bill was Phil Gramm, who also served as the top economic adviser to the McCain/Palin campaign. So Gramm was good enough to advise McCain on economic issues, yet McCain now wants to repeal Gramm’s keystone legislation?

I love the idea of us getting back to real regulation in the banking sector but I really question the motives of McCain on this issue.

Hey if you are Michelle Malkin they are:

Follow the bouncing ball: TARP, the trillion-dollar-plus banking bailout, has morphed from a toxic assets purchase plan to a capital injection plan, back to a toxic assets purchase plan, to a life insurance company bailout, to an auto supplier bailout. I’m sure I forgot more.

Well, now the Democrats want to use it to bail out state governments and convert unused TARP bucks into…a government union slush fund.

The article she is referencing is this:

… Pelosi said serious thought is being given to investments in transportation infrastructure, seen by economists as one of the most efficient ways of creating jobs quickly.

She also said money could be used to preserve public-sector jobs such as firefighters, police and health-care providers.

The senior Pelosi aide said this would be distributed by bypassing state governments and providing funds directly to local or regional governments.

How dare that evil Pelosi want to do things like protect firefighters and police and improve our infrastructure!

That goddamn socialist!!!

The funniest part of Malkin’s latest installment of “rantings of a psycho” has to be the timing.

Something we aren’t used to seeing; oversight of an administration, being conducted by the administration’s own party:

A congressional oversight committee opened an investigation yesterday into whether the Obama administration is circumventing a law that limits lavish pay for executives at firms benefiting from the $700 billion federal bailout.

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, sent a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner asking for records on any special entities that the government believes it can use to funnel bailout money without requiring firms to abide by congressional restrictions.

"It would be unconscionable and irresponsible for the Treasury Department to permit excessive pay practices to continue at companies that have been rescued by the taxpayers," Towns wrote in the letter. "I will strongly oppose any attempt to weaken or bypass these restrictions, or to violate the spirit, if not the intent, of these laws."

To the Republicans, this would be called “treason”. How dare a party not hold true to “party loyalty”, and instead go on the side of democracy. And if someone in the administration is found to be guilty of trying to balk the regulations put into the stimulus, well they better be shown the door quickly, if not frog marched out.

Not a real shocker here, but it turns out that a lot of the TARP recipients are lining the pockets of our leaders through political donations:

In recent filings with the Federal Election Commission, the political action committee for Bank of America (which got $15 billion in bailout money) sent out $24,500 in the first two months of 2009, including $1,500 to House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer and another $15,000 to members of the House and Senate banking panels. Citigroup ($25 billion) dished out $29,620, including $2,500 to House GOP Whip Eric Cantor, who also got $10,000 from UBS which, while not a TARP recipient, got $5 billion in bailout funds as an AIG "counterparty."

With this kind of behavior, it’s no wonder that we are seeing plans that sound good and backed by leading economists fail in Congress. The problem is that we have no real fix for this. Are we going to see lawmakers cut off their own money train? If you think that will happen then I got some ocean front property in Ohio to sell you.

This also isn’t a partisan problem, it’s a systematic one. To right this major wrong we have to look seriously at redoing our campaign finance laws. Of course with the current people in Washington, loopholes are a given. Perhaps the only real way to get something done with the status quo is for some rogue member of Congress to introduce strict legislation limiting these donations, and then going out on a massive media blitz. That would help put enough pressure on law makers from their constituents that it might work.

So even though we have given AIG $165 billion of our own money, they can still make massive payouts in the form of bonuses:

American International Group is giving its executives tens of millions of dollars in new bonuses even though it received a taxpayer bailout of more than $170 billion dollars.

AIG is paying out the executive bonuses to meet a Sunday deadline, but the troubled insurance giant has agreed to administration requests to restrain future payments.

But here is the real kicker:

Geithner termed the current bonus structure unacceptable in view of the billions of dollars of taxpayer support the company is receiving, this official said.

In a letter to Geithner dated Saturday, Liddy informed Treasury that outside lawyers had informed the company that AIG had contractual obligations to make the bonus payments and could face lawsuits if it did not do so.

So they have “contractual agreements” to pay out these bonuses, so they go ahead? Think of the people out there who are losing pensions because of the economy. Oh but it’s fine to screw over those middle class people, we only need to worry about saving the rich.

It’s time for the Obama administration to tell the people what is going on and why they are wasting tax payers money to simply pay out these bonuses. Perhaps its time to tell AIG we are pulling back the money and they need to go into bankruptcy in order to straighten out these “contracts”.

Think about it. If you get in way over your head credit wise, which is a contractual agreement, the government doesn’t come in a bail you out. Instead you need to go to court and file bankruptcy in order to get your finances straightened out. Why aren’t these big companies that are getting bailed out forced to follow suit?

And we have a new definition of dumb ass – Oscar Goodman:

Sin City's mayor wants President Barack Obama to apologize for saying companies shouldn't visit Las Vegas on the taxpayer's dime.

Oscar Goodman spoke after a regular scheduled meeting with tourism officials where he expressed concern that federal lawmakers might be discouraging travel to the city.

"What's a better place, as I say, than for them to come here," Goodman told KLAS-TV. "And to change their mind and to go someplace else and to cancel _ and at the suggestion of the president of the United States _ that's outrageous."

Obama made the remarks Monday during a town hall meeting in Elkhart, Ind., where the president traveled to muster public support for economic stimulus legislation.

{[}]amp;quot;You can't get corporate jets, you can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer's dime," Obama said.

Um it appears as if Obama was talking in the sense of going to Vegas for a nice little vacation and do some gambling. Goodman can have his tax dollars go for that, but I don’t want mine to. That’s what Goodman is suggesting – that bailout money be used for these luxurious vacations instead of opening the credit markets. Maybe someone should ask the mayor why he hates America so much that he wants to see our financial institutions fail.