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the way the Founders wrote it...,
2010-05-04 01:53:40
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mortgage fraud...,
2010-05-04 18:45:28
the entitlement reform that's needed is on wall street:
not, as that irritating bit of pablum goes, on main street:
I have a friend who married a Goldman banker. When the crisis broke, she was terribly offended that people thought the bankers shouldn't get their huge bonuses. "We earned it" she practically screamed in her email to me. "Why shouldn't we get it when we worked for it." I remember thinking then, that something different had happened on Wall Street when even the relatively little fish in the big banks had that absolute sense of entitlement, but were quite ready to heap piles of scorn on the "welfare queens" and all those ordinary little people who had some sense of being "entitled" to Social Security in their old age.
When Obama’s new Deficit Commission gets going, it has plans for "partnering“--in the words of executive director Bruce Reed--with outside groups. Among them will be the foundation run by Wall Street billionaire Peter G. Peterson, who on today is upstaging the president with his own fiscal summit in Washington. Obama insists he is keeping an open mind about how to deal with the deficit and national debt--but he’s already stacked his own commission with people who lean heavily toward one particular solution: cutting entitlements for the old, the sick, the disabled, and the poor. And if that wasn't enough, he now looks to be working hand-in-glove with a wealthy private organization whose central purpose is to cut Social Security and Medicare.
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In June, according to the Washington Post, Obama’s deficit commission will be participating in a 20-city electronic town hall meeting, put together by an organization called America Speaks. It is financed by Peterson, along with the MacArthur Foundation and Kellogg Foundation. This is a truly unusual event because it marks the first time a presidential commission’s activities are financed by a private group that has long been lobbying the government on the very subjects the commission is supposed to "study."
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Meanwhile Obama--who seems to have learned nothing about strategy from the health care wars--will not say what he thinks about any of it.
Really? I'm hearing the message loud and clear.
First he meekly suggested they voluntarily forgo their bonuses. That lip made the bankers angry, so he turned around and argued that no Real 'Murkan begrudges bankers taking home gigantic bonuses on the public's dime, because "that's part of the free market system". That made the public mad, so he got back on stage a week later with yet another "on the other hand" and called the bonuses an "outrage to the taxpayers", not an outrage to him. Thus far he has done nothing at all, and why would he? Or more accurately, he's continued his predecessor's policy of letting them pillage the Treasury and the Federal Reserve like Klingons at a wedding banquet.
:: posted by buermann @ 2010-05-04 12:09:24 CST |
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