Outrage I Can Believe In

[USRufnex]

I completely forgot he was gay until you brought it up. 

Yeah right..... disingenuous--1.  Not straightforward or candid - insincere or calculating.  2.  Pretending to be unaware or unsophisticated; faux-naif... roll tape...    http://www.tulsanow.org/forum/index.php?topic=11640.15                                                                             "Herb Moses.  Remember the name.  He was an assistant director at Fannie Mae from 1991 to 98.  He was also Barneys boyfriend."   

[Gaspar]

  Yeah right..... disingenuous--1.  Not straightforward or candid - insincere or calculating.  2.  Pretending to be unaware or unsophisticated; faux-naif... roll tape...    http://www.tulsanow.org/forum/index.php?topic=11640.15                                                                             "Herb Moses.  Remember the name.  He was an assistant director at Fannie Mae from 1991 to 98.  He was also Barneys boyfriend."   

Oh yeah, I forgot about Herb too.  You're right that was a real "sweat-heart" deal.  Why do you keep trying to turn this discussion to Barney's sexual preference?  Why does that matter so much?  I don't really care what he sleeps with, my focus in mentioning him was his dismal business experience.

Yippee he's gay.  So what!

[USRufnex]

Once again, I find your arguments in scapegoating Barney Frank based on a gay relationship from 10 years ago to be disingenuous... kinda along the same lines of John Kerry expressing concern for Dick Cheney's daughter during the 2004 VP debate... or, to borrow a phrase from Monty Python....

Is, uh,... Is your wife a goer, eh? Know whatahmean, know whatahmean, nudge nudge, know whatahmean, say no more?


http://www.huffingtonpost.com/rep-barney-frank/is-there-an-antidote-to-t_b_176538.html

According to the Republicans' misty memories of the period before 2007, I allegedly singlehandedly blocked their determined efforts to regulate Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and my supposed intransigence literally caused the worldwide financial crisis.

Fortunately, we have tools to aid memory -- pencil and paper, word processing, transcripts, newspapers, and the Congressional record. And as described in the most reputable published sources, in 2005 I in fact worked together with my Republican colleague Michael Oxley, then Chairman of the Financial Services Committee, to write a bill to increase regulation of Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. We passed the bill out of committee with an overwhelming majority -- every Democrat voted in favor of the legislation. However, on the House floor the Republican leadership added a poison pill amendment, which would have prevented non-profit institutions with religious affiliations from receiving funds. I voted against the legislation in protest, though I continued to work with Mr. Oxley to encourage the Senate to pass a good bill. But these efforts were defeated because President Bush blocked further consideration of the legislation. In the words of Mr. Oxley, no flaming liberal, the Bush administration gave his efforts 'the one-finger salute.'

The Republicans can claim some supposed successes despite my awesome power. In 1999 they passed the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act, which overturned a Depression-era law preventing commercial banks from acting like investment banks. In 2000, they passed another bill which loosened regulation of derivative markets. I voted against these bills -- but to no avail.

Under Republican President George W. Bush, many federal agencies turned a blind eye to activities which would later precipitate the global financial meltdown. The Securities and Exchange Commission decided to allow the nation's largest financial institutions to "self-regulate;" the Federal Reserve under Alan Greenspan declined to use its power to regulate subprime mortgages; the Comptroller of the Currency decided to preempt state consumer laws on subprime mortgages.

Meanwhile, President Bush himself demanded that Fannie and Freddie increase the percentage of subprime loans they purchased, supposedly because of his belief in an "ownership society." Incidentally, increased lending to subprime borrowers would also fuel astronomical profits by the financial services industry. I publicly opposed giving mortgages to unqualified borrowers because I believed that some families are better off renting.

Yet somehow none of this was recorded in the Republican collective memory.

[FOTD]

Priceless? An elitist snear....disgusting.

Geithner Gets a Taste of the Peasants' Anger
By Ruth Conniff, March 27, 2009
http://www.progressive.org/mag/rc032709.html


It was priceless watching Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner's stunned expression as he listened to questions from Representative Maxine Waters, Democrat of California, about his ties to Goldman Sachs.

Waters wanted to get at the "linkages and the connections among a small group of Wall Street types who are making decisions," she explained. To that end, she asked Geithner, was it possible that Goldman Sachs could have been chosen to help run the new Public Private Investment Program?

Yes, he allowed, it was possible.

And did Goldman Sachs receive money from failed insurance giant AIG?

Yes.

And did Goldman Sachs get a piece of the government's TARP program?

Yes.

And did former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson spend a lot of his career at Goldman Sachs?

Yes.

"And your CEO that you hired to work for you is from Goldman Sachs also?"

Geithner looked nonplussed. "My CEO?"

"Well, whomever—whoever works for you," Waters said impatiently. "I don't want to get the nuances to the point where we misunderstand each other. . . . Your chief of staff."

Yes, Geithner conceded (after Waters cut him off a couple of times, demanding that he answer more succinctly), his chief of staff used to work for Goldman Sachs.

Aha. "We believe," Waters said, "that Goldman Sachs will once again be one of those who will be the beneficiaries" of the government's latest bailout plan.

Now the "we" Waters referred to may include people who are receiving their information on the bank bailout via tinfoil antennas. The obsessive focus on Goldman Sachs does ring a lot of conspiracy theory bells.

But the Congresswoman from California is channeling the skepticism of a whole lot of Americans when she suggests that something about the government's latest bailout plan doesn't smell right.

Why are we funneling hundreds of billions of dollars in taxpayers' money to a bunch of hedge fund managers to buy "toxic" assets from banks for more than they are worth?

And for that matter, why is Geithner, the guy who was in charge of regulating Citigroup before and during that firm's collapse while he was chair of the New York Fed, the most qualified person to re-regulate the banks?

And why do he and his chief of staff and other Obama advisers charged with cleaning up Wall Street come from the ranks of big Wall Street firms whose attitudes toward things like who should lose money when risky deals go bust significantly different from your average citizen's?

Even now, Citigroup doesn't seem to get it that there's anything wrong with using bailout money to pay dividends to shareholders. As John Kay reports in the Financial Times, "Vikram Pandit, Citigroup's chief executive, poses the issue in stark terms. When the US government announced further support, he was reported as telling analysts: 'We completely remain in day-to-day charge of the company. We are going to run Citi for shareholders.' But if I were a U.S. taxpayer, I would ask why I had provided $45 billion to a business that was going to be run for shareholders, especially when the current value of outside equity is barely 10 per cent of my own contribution."

As economist Dean Baker says, "Mr. Geithner wants to use taxpayer dollars to keep bankrupt banks in business. In effect, he wants to tax teachers, fire fighters, and Joe the Plumber to protect the wealth of the banks' shareholders and to pay high salaries to their top executives."

The teachers, fire fighters, and plumbers, and their representatives in Congress, have a few questions for Mr. Geithner about that. And, like it or not, he has to answer them.

Two worlds are colliding. Nothing less than Americans' worshipful attitude toward the wealthy is getting badly shaken up. You can see it in the House Banking Committee hearings, and on the front lawns of AIG executives' mansions, where regular citizens, some facing foreclosure on their own homes, have showed up to give the once-untouchable aristocracy a bit of a scare.

It must be head-spinning for Geithner, running back and forth between the peasants with pitchforks, represented by Waters and other populists in Congress, and the Wall Street bankers who see nothing wrong with million-dollar bonuses for running their companies into the ground.

Too bad Geithner's conversations with the bankers are not on youtube. To most of us, their ideas sound a hell of lot loopier than Maxine Waters's preoccupation with Goldman Sachs.

Even Financial Times columnist Martin Frost, who views the threat to publicize the names of AIG financial products executives who received bonuses as "an invitation to a lynching," writes that "the crisis has broken the American social contract: people were free to succeed and to fail, unassisted. Now, in the name of systemic risk, bailouts have poured staggering sums into the failed institutions that brought the economy down."

Back during the boom years of the 1990s we had another upheaval in the "social contract" when President Bill Clinton ended Aid to Families with Dependent Children. The argument went something like this: If you don't work hard and play by the rules, taxpayers shouldn't give you money. No handouts for losers.

Tim Geithner has made welfare queens out of former masters of the universe.

One silver lining in the current crisis would be if rich white men with Wall Street connections had to endure the kind of public scorn that poor, single mothers on welfare suffered during the last Democratic Administration.

[Conan71]

What you haven't heard?  Gold Man Sacks is the new Haliburton 

[Gaspar]

What you haven't heard?  Gold Man Sacks is the new Haliburton 

What?  I thought it was the new Enron?

Is Enron back in favor now? 

What about Exxon?

I don't think any Large Cap is safe.

[guido911]

Maxine Waters is the biggest moron in the Congress (since McKinney left). First, here is the video of the exchange the biggest moron in this forum referenced:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OFvnL3npQgY

Geithner was not stunned by the question. If anything, he was stunned by the stupidty and the near incoherence of a congressperson desperately trying to look smarter than she really is. Remember, Maxine Waters is the one that thought that crack cocaine was created by the CIA to attack minorities.

[Gaspar]

The 2008 AIG bonus pool just keeps getting larger and larger.

In a response to detailed questions from Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-Md.), the company has offered a third assessment of exactly how much it paid out in bonuses last year.

And the new number, offered in a document submitted to Cummings on May 1, is the highest figure the company has disclosed to date.

AIG now says it paid out more than $454 million in bonuses to its employees for work performed in 2008.

[Gaspar]

Wow!  $3,400,000,000,000 new budget, or $11,300 for each American.

But the news only reported the President saying "We've saved the American tax payer over $17 billion dollars."

Great!  That takes $56.00 off of our running tab.  Lets see, I think we are up to about $38,000 each, take away the $56 bucks and now we only owe $37,944 each.

Awesome!

[guido911]

Wow!  $3,400,000,000,000 new budget, or $11,300 for each American.

But the news only reported the President saying "We've saved the American tax payer over $17 billion dollars."

Great!  That takes $56.00 off of our running tab.  Lets see, I think we are up to about $38,000 each, take away the $56 bucks and now we only owe $37,944 each.

Awesome!

Now now gassy, don't be a hater.  This is change we can believe in.