Bonuses? We're supposed to be in an uproar over $165 million in bonuses?
Give me a frickin' break!
Oh, but ... House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank (D) is gonna get to the bottom of this "outrageous" bonus scandal!
These people may have a right to their bonuses but they don't have a right to their jobs forever ... These bonuses are going to people who screwed this thing up enormously ... Since the federal government ... now essentially owns that company, maybe it's time to fire some people.
I'd laugh if the truth wasn't so sad.
As the Democratic Congress, the Obama administration and the mainstream media keep everyone's eyes and ears focused on the Bonus Circus, the national debt climbs its way past $11 trillion!
But hey, we gotta "crack-down" on those bonuses ...
And to hear this from the single most guilty culprit in this disaster, Barney Frank, makes my skin crawl (emphasis added):
For Frank, perhaps more than any single individual in private or public life, is responsible for both the housing market mess and subsequent bank disaster. And no, this isn't partisan hyperbole or historical exaggeration.
... from the early 1990s on, many people both inside and outside Washington were alarmed by what they saw at Fannie and Freddie.
Not Barney Frank: Starting in the early 1990s, he (and other Democrats) stood athwart efforts by regulators, Congress and the White House to get the runaway housing market under control.
He opposed reform as early as 1992. And, in response to another attempt bring Fannie-Freddie to heel in 2000, Frank responded it wasn't needed because there was "no federal liability there whatsoever."
In 2002, Frank nixed reforms again. See a pattern here?
Even after federal regulators discovered in 2003 that Fannie and Freddie executives had overstated earnings by as much as $10.6 billion in order to boost bonuses, Frank didn't miss a beat.
President Bush pushed for what the New York Times then called "the most significant regulatory overhaul in the housing finance industry since the savings and loan crisis a decade ago."
If it had passed, the housing crisis likely would have never boiled over, at least not the extent it did, taking the economy with it. Instead, led by Frank, Democrats stood as a bloc against any changes.
"Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac are not facing any kind of financial crisis," Frank, then the ranking Democrat on the Financial Services Committee, said. "The more people exaggerate these problems, the more pressure there is on these companies, the less we will see in terms of affordable housing."
The criminal cabal of Frank, Pelosi, Dodd, Summers, Geithner and Obama have been pointing fingers at "Wall Street Greed" for months, yet they're the folks who forced Fannie and Freddie into this mess, and they're also the one's who wrote the bailout bill! Maybe they should start pointing their fingers in the mirror.
Just last September, Larry Summers said the bailout was "well-designed." They knew about these bonuses back then, so what changed? The answer is ... as The New York Times inadvertently points out, is just politics as usual (emphasis added):
The Obama administration is increasingly ... worried that anger at financial institutions could also end up being directed at Congress and the White House and could complicate President Obama's agenda.
Mr. Obama's aides said any surge of such a sentiment could complicate efforts to win Congressional approval for the additional bailout packages that Mr. Obama has signaled will be necessary to stabilize the banking system.
Beyond that, a shifting political mood challenges Mr. Obama's political skills ... having the administration look ineffectual in the face of what Mr. Summers said was the worst financial abuse of the last 18 months, since the economy began turning down in earnest.
For all his political skills ... Mr. Obama, a product of Harvard Law School who calls upscale Hyde Park in Chicago home ... if he were to become identified as an advocate for the banks and Wall Street, people could take out their anger on him.
Let me summarize the above for you ... Summers, the guy who couldn't wait to put U.S. taxpayers on the hook for $700 billion to bail AIG out, says $165 million in bonuses (less than 1% of the $700 billion) that he already knew about last September, is "the worst financial abuse of the last 18 months" hoping to deflect attention away from the REAL AGENDA, which is ... MORE BAILOUTS!
So nevermind the $11 trillion ... we're gonna get those suckers and their $165 million!
Pathetic.
Last night, Glenn Beck illustrated this sleight-of-hand brilliantly. Please watch the video below.
These people probably shouldn't get the bonus money, but that's beside the point now. If AIG would have filed bankruptcy and been liquidated accordingly (as in real life), there would have been no money available to pay the bonuses.
Instead, government jumped in to "save" us all from a problem government created and ... the same as it ever was ... things only get worse.
Life sentences are the best they deserve.
Frank and his fellow failures in Washington need to practice what they preach. They have sunk this country into a whole so they should give up their salaries, health care and pensions and maybe fall on a sword and do the “honorable” thing.