Saturday, January 31, 2009

OUR STUPID LEADERS

Obama's a smart guy but, gosh darn it, how was he to know that Wall Street executives are thieves?

His outrage, or his public demonstration of same, that Wall Street used $18 Billion of taxpayer bailout money to pay performance bonuses, was either disingenuous shtick, or else it indicates a scary naivete on the part of the leader of the free world.

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I'm going with the shtick thing. Obama is shocked not that Wall Streeters would steal taxpayers money, but that they would do so in a way that they could be caught.

So Obama's outrage is an act. His claim that he didn't know that Wall Streeters are thieves, is, pretty much a lie.

We see the same stupidity claims in the confirmation of the tax cheats Obama has appointed to high office.

This guy Tim Geitner is smart enough to figure out how Credit Default Swaps work, but darn it, he's not smart enough to figure out how much tax he owes, and that's why he made some innocent mistakes amounting to thousands of dollars in his own favor.

And Tom Daschle, another smart guy who signed incorrect tax returns:  not only did he understate his income, he overstated his charitable contributions. These "mistakes" were in his own favor to the tune of tens of thousands of dollars.

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Daschle probably won't get away with pleading stupidity.  The overstating-charitable-contributions thing is pretty obvious fraud.

I wonder how many of Obama's appointees are so gosh darn dumb that they overpaid taxes by tens of thousands of dollars.  Innocent mistakes would result as frequently in overpayment as in underpayment.

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Similarly Ken Lay and Jeff Skilling at Enron: they were smart enough to deserve tens of millions of dollars per year in compensation, but not smart enough, or so they said, to know that their company was insolvent.

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Or Allen Greenspan who, under relentless questioning, recently admitted that his model had a flaw--he believed that corporate self-interest would effectively police individual misconduct--as if the notion of corporation-as-person were anything more than a legal fiction.

What a moroon!

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2 comments:

The Blue Elephant said...

I hope everyone saw the 30 January Bill Moyers journal about U.S. bombing of Pakistan and Afghanistan, which Obama seems eager to continue:

http://www.pbs.org/moyers/journal/01302009/transcript3.html

Anonymous said...

Millions of dollars were paid in bonuses, not $18 billion as you state. 1 billion is 1,000 times more than 1 million. I suggest you take Economics 101 before you chose to write a blog post on economic issues.