The Evanston Everyman 4/23/09
If good looks was a minute/ You know that you could've been an hour- Smokey Robinson, 'The Way You Do The Things You Do'
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The inspector general for the TARP program announced Tuesday that more than $2 trillion of the $3 trillion dollars handed over to the financial industry lacks proper accounting. If you use the FBI figure that 10% of all federal money given to the private market gets lost to fraud, you have $30 billion dollars. Over the first three months of the year companies like GM, AIG, Citigroup, and others spent $9.2 million to lobby the government for more funds. GM received an extra $5 billion dollars last week, and Chrysler received $500 million in temporary loans to stem the tide until their restructuring deadline. Yet The Post reported that Chrsyler Financial turned down financial aid because their executives did not want to accept mandated compensation limits. Meanwhile, the rest of us struggle to make our bills and hold up our heads. Don’t let the Man ever fool you. He’ll always get his.
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Che Chairs Douchebag Benefit, Won’t Give Back Bonus (UPDATED)
Che shirt and Western suit coat? You, my friend, have the fashion sense of a troll.
The man at the right in this photo is Gary Pasciucco, a former vice chairman of Morgan Stanley who now runs AIG Financial Products. That division is the prodigal arm of the insurer which guaranteed the credits swap that unraveled the global economy. Gary and his cronies will now receive millions in bonuses, even though you and I now own AIG. Yes, the politicians should be outraged. Yes, these corporate douchebags should feel such shame that thoughts of suicide are not foreign. But, America, this is a smokescreen! The bonuses are just a small slice of the hundreds of billions of wasted dollars you, me, everybody spent in the mad dash to prop up Wall Street greedheads.
Don’t let the witch hunt to catch these bonus boneheads and Bernie Madoff distract you from the real scandal. The people who got us into this mess are running the show! Timothy Geithner ran the New York branch of the Federal Reserve which signed off on these poisonous assets!
Sphere: Related ContentThe Incredible Santelli (UPDATED)
In the video, Jon Stewart descends with furious righteousness on the CNBC network. As we’ve covered already, CNBC is the forum for the disease which is strangling our economy. The network wants to define itself as the place where Wall Street is the victim in this mess. We all know that this is false. Wall Street created this mess, and it is we taxpayers who are bailing them out from their egregious losses.
Yet again, Jon Stewart stands as a bulwark of reason against those who wish to confuse the public with populist hokum. If only more media outlets distanced themselves from their corporate teet and gave the true facts of this crisis, we might be able to have some enlightened discussion instead of panic and partisan talking points.
Sphere: Related ContentBest Network Nitwit Interview
CNBC interviewed Nouriel Roubini, RGE Monitor, and Nassim Taleb, The Black Swan author. You need to watch this! These two are rightly famous because they both predicted the economic mess we are in more than a year ago. The reason we are in such a mess? Our banks were too big and too highly leveraged. Both of them state that we need to look at a completely new way of doing business, and we must start by ridding Wall Street of those who made the mistakes in the first place. This is the exact position we at Shambollocks! have taken since this crisis began.
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O'Hare Arpt., IL
