Bailout Sucks!

Why do we privatize profits and socialize the resulting debt?

$700 billion to buy bad debt?

Doesn't sound like a good deal, and the principle is so wrong. The FBI is investigating 26 financial firms for fraud. Why don't we just have their CEOs and other managers pay back their compensation packages over the last three years? Just the big five investment banks paid themselves $39 billion in bonuses last year. Doesn't that just make your blood boil? These bastards always pay themselves huge multi-million dollar bonuses and then complain about the economy when they the firms go under. Sounds to me like the experiment where they put a mother and baby monkey on an increasingly hot surface, and eventually the mother monkey would stand on top of the baby monkey. These guys are like the robber barons of yore. If you're "expertise" has led us to this, why are you giving yourself 15 million in annual compensation, or $50 million. I think what we need instead of a bailout is a witch hunt. I want another Enron payback where the management are indicted, humiliated and held accountable.



Or give that money to the average person. I want a bailout for myself. If you divide $700 billion by the 300 million people in the US, you get $2300 per person. If you exclude all the millionaires, that goes up a little more. Let's give this money to the people. Don't grease the economy, because the fat cats who control the economy are skimming it with impunity. Give the money to the people. Or better yet, just stop spending money we don't have!

Wall Street Robber Barrons

$39 billion: The Wall Street bonuses for the big five investment banks last year.

ABC News reports:

In 2007, Wall Street’s five biggest firms — Bear Stearns, Goldman Sachs, Lehman Brothers, Merrill Lynch, and Morgan Stanley — paid a record $39 billion in bonuses to themselves.

That’s $10 billion more than the $29 billion loan taxpayers are making to J.P. Morgan to save Bear Stearns.

Those 2007 bonuses were paid even though the shareholders in those firms last year collectively lost about $74 billion in stock declines — their worst year since 2002.

These company executives are still fiercely fighting to protect their pay. Politico notes that the Bush Treasury Department is “resisting efforts” by House Democrats “to impose pay limits on Wall Street executives and bankers.”


I think the real answer, is they can pay themselves whatever they want, but people should take all their money out of these companies and never invest in them again. We keep rewarding their selfishness.

That's why the rich keep getting richer and the rest of us suffer.