I will be fine. The rest of us (the top 1%) will be fine. Free market economics really only helps us out. It lets us keep you, the middle and lower classes, work your fingers to the bone to make us more money.

I retired before all this deregulation that got us to this point. Doesn’t mean I did not invest heavily in companies that I knew were taking advantage of government leaving the markets.

Afterall, people in my position do not need credit. We can buy things flat out…whether it is another house or a another yacht. Just remember, “free market” capitalism allowed those of us with enormous amounts of capital to dump on all of you that don’t.

I know that is not the American dream most of you were brought up with. All these lies about working your way up and equal opportunity are illusions. They are the shadow puppets on the walls of the cave we call the United States. The economic elite are holding those puppets in front of the candle light to provide the rest of you cattle with an illusion of reality in this country. It seems that every now and again a few people escape the cave and are blinded by the light. It just so happens that the liberals embrace reality now, and the conservatives want to destroy those that come back with the truth. Hence hacks like Rush and Erick preferring Obama to fail. For any of this to succeed, even marginally, would mean that the conservative ideology held by the right wing is wrong again.

If you want to blame somebody, blame yourselves. All of you morons bought into this crap because the Cold War made you afraid of anything government being involved in the markets or financial institutions. Heck…none you even knew about these toxifying financial arrangements before it blew up in your faces and layoffs started happening.

The madness and insanity is that this country has not embraced social-capitalism. The right wing doesn’t want to think for themselves and the left doesn’t do much thinking at all.

The official debt stood at $5.8 trillion when Bush took office. By the time he left it was around $10.5 trillion. The debt of Fannie and Freddie is $6 trillion and that was nationalized last summer. We are now at $11 trillion official, ISSUED debt, plus $6 trillion GSE debt for a total of $17 trillion. Bush did not include costs of Iraq, but Obama is. Obama will run a DEFICIT (one year’s increase in the debt) that they are admitting will approach $2 trillion, but in reality will be $3.5 trillion minimum.

In the last year the Fed has created another $9 trillion in bailouts and just this week took the step to financial Armageddon by announcing that they are firing up the money printing machine to the tune of more than a $trillion.

Words just don’t describe this ….try “madness” ….”insanity”….pick your own.

We go through these cycles occasionally. We, America, always has…because we do not know or agree on our own history. No, we will not go down as the biggest fools. That honor belongs to the free market conservatives of the 1920′s…and then to anybody who thought it prudent to engage in a ground war in Asia (the list is long).

I bring up the Black Swan because of all of this. Politics is a game…it always has been and always will be. Democrats will eventually lose their majority…unless the GOP divides and we devolve to a more parliamentary structure of coalition politics.

In the end, economic terms need to be taught to the next generation properly. I do not know how capitalism and socialism have become redefined…perhaps it is left over from Cold War politics. What has been going on for the better part of 15 years has been a tug of war between two opposing sides…with both sides going to extremes to win out. This has left a huge vacuum…a sort of Tragedy of the Commons, if you will.

The world is not as simple and clean cut as liberal vs conservative. There is an entire spectrum of political ideology and flexibility between many of them. Many modern liberal ideas are destructive and just as many modern conservative ideas are as well.I

In the end, we need to reconcile. I am not trying to work my hand is matters of persuasion. Persuasion has never been my cup of tea. Facts interest me,…even if they are hard to face or seem offensive.

Every non-visceral issue of today can solved. American politics has gotten to the point where solving any of these issues only reduces the job security of the politicians charged with creating solutions. What incentive is there to do anything in these offices? Take Paul Broun or John Lewis for example. The 10th will always elect Paul Broun so long as he calls democrats baby killers. The 5th will always elected Lewis so long as he is John Lewis. Why bother working?

Perhaps I am just getting disillusioned in my old age…but all of this crap has become just one big popularity contest. None of the partisans care about this country…they only care about getting their way.

As for the tax on bail-out bonuses, that is a diversion totally. This story came out on Bloomberg on 2/9/09. I can go find the link if anyone doubts this. Anyone saying that they just found out is LYING. This tax is unconstitutional and does not erase the fact that CONGRESS AND THE PRESIDENT are responsible for the bail-out money.

Now YOUR money is being used by the recipients to fund all manner of give-aways, including a Bank Of AMerica promotion for a Dreamworks movie.

All manner of outrages will pop up, because of the sheer size of the $11 trillion bailouts that DOUBLED THE NATIONAL DEBT IN SIX MONTHS.

While everyone was distracted by the bonus imbroglio, the TALF was being modified to allow the fraudsters to essentially COUNTERFEIT ‘toxic’ assets and dump them on all of us to the tune of HUNDREDS OF BILLIONS.

This era will define “INSANITY.”

And WE will go down as the biggest FOOLS to have ever been birthed since the dawn of man.

Unfortunately, there is a chance that the tax will be found unconstitutional if it is passed and signed into law.

Indy brought up a subject that very good book was written on, has anybody here read “The Black Swan.”

They actually so much contempt for the people that they think THIS is going to placate us?

They stole our futures then bailed out the robber barons.

This is becoming more apparent by the day.

Today the Wall Street Journal opined “This needs to be repeated every time someone
pleads, “Who could have known?” Plenty of people did see the disaster coming. Most of them were marginalized, however, laboring at out-of-the-way econ departments, blogs and B-list think tanks.

They were excluded and even ridiculed because their larger understanding of the economy was not one that fit well with the sort of Wall Street worship preached by the likes of CNBC.”

Thanks WSJ, that was entirely too late, yet accurate.

The folks who GOT IT RIGHT are still being ignored.

The Dems and GOP are wreaking havoc with what little chance remains for us to pull our fat from the fire.

Regardless, of your political affiliation – our country has just moved in a direction that could be called the mother of all Consitution busters to date. I hope there will be a filabuster in the Senate.

It’s official. The Socialist-Democratic-Republican Party has now congealed into a single party.

My decision to become a Libertarian is re-enforced daily while these clowns (federal and state) are in session.

The bill specified AIG by name?

Dodd Blames Obama Administration for Bonus Amendment (Update1)

By Ryan J. Donmoyer

March 19 (Bloomberg) — Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said the Obama administration asked him to insert a provision in last month’s $787 billion economic- stimulus legislation that had the effect of authorizing American International Group Inc.’s bonuses.

Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, said yesterday he agreed to modify restrictions on executive pay at companies receiving taxpayer assistance to exempt bonuses already agreed upon in contracts. He said he did so without realizing the change would benefit AIG, whose recent $165 million payment to employees has sparked a public furor.

Dodd said he had wanted to limit executive compensation at companies that got money from the government’s financial-rescue fund. AIG has received $173 billion in bailout money. His provision was changed as the stimulus legislation was negotiated between the House and Senate.

“I did not want to make any changes to my original Senate- passed amendment” to the stimulus bill, “but I did so at the request of administration officials, who gave us no indication that this was in any way related to AIG,” Dodd said in a statement released last night. “Let me be clear — I was completely unaware of these AIG bonuses until I learned of them last week.” He didn’t name the administration officials who made the request.

No Insistence

An administration official said last night that representatives of President Barack Obama didn’t insist on the change, though they did contend that the language in Dodd’s amendment could be legally challenged because it would apply retroactively to bonus agreements. The official spoke on the condition of anonymity.

That provision in the stimulus bill may undercut complaints by congressional Democrats about the AIG bonuses because most of them voted for the legislation. No Republicans in the House and only three in the Senate supported the stimulus measure

“Taxpayers deserve better than this from their government, and this is just the latest reason why legislation must be transparent for all Americans to see before it is recklessly signed into law,” said Eric Cantor, the No. 2 Republican in the House.

The new law, approved by Congress Feb. 13 and signed into law by Obama the next week, effectively authorized bonus arrangements at companies receiving taxpayer bailouts as long as they were in place before Feb. 11. The AIG bonuses qualified under that provision.

Obama and many lawmakers who voted for the legislation, such as Senator Charles Schumer, a New York Democrat, and Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus, a Montana Democrat, are demanding AIG employees surrender their bonuses.

Schumer Letter

Schumer yesterday sent a letter to AIG Chief Executive Officer Edward Liddy warning him to return bonuses or face confiscatory taxes on them. The letter was signed by Senate Majority leader Harry Reid, a Nevada Democrat, and seven other senators.

Brian Fallon, a spokesman for Schumer, said the senator “supported a provision on the Senate floor that would have prevented these types of bonuses, but he was not on the conference committee that negotiated the final language.”

A House vote is planned for today on a bill to impose a 90 percent tax on executive bonuses paid by AIG and other companies getting more than $5 billion in federal bailout funds.

“I expect it to pass in overwhelmingly bipartisan fashion,” House Majority Leader Steny Hoyer, a Maryland Democrat, told reporters yesterday in Washington.

Republican Attacks

Republicans seized on the provision in the stimulus bill to paint Democrats as hypocrites.

“The fact is that the bill the president signed, which protected the AIG bonuses and others, was written behind closed doors by Democratic leaders of the House and Senate,” Iowa Senator Charles Grassley said in a statement.

Dodd said the provision was written to give the Treasury Department enough discretion to reclaim bonuses as necessary.

“Fortunately, we wrote this amendment in a way that allows the Treasury Department to go back and review these bonus contracts and seek to recover the money for taxpayers,” he said.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner told lawmakers in a letter this week that department lawyers believe it would be “legally difficult” to prevent AIG from paying bonuses.

Other Democrats who voted for the stimulus bill have ramped up criticism of AIG’s bonuses, including Massachusetts Representative Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, who told reporters, “I think the time has come to exercise our ownership rights.”

To contact the reporter on this story: Ryan J. Donmoyer in Washington at rdonmoyer@bloomberg.net

Last Updated: March 19, 2009 08:31 EDT

Wow …. just wow.

Listen, this is harldy the first time a bill was passed that was not read. Anybody remember the PATRIOT Act. Yeah, that wasn’t read either. Everything put together, that bill has cost nearly $1trillion over the past several years as well and has resulted in a long list of items on court dockets.

If these measures do not work, who isn’t there to blame? The Negligence of the GOP got us here, then they added an a$$ load of “pork” to a bill that they voted down (getting their cake and eating it too). The Dems tried something that worked before, and we will see if it works again.

Dodd is safe in his seat, deb. Thinking he will go anywhere is as stupid as thinking GA is a swing state. Remember Lamont…yeah, Connecticut is not GA. The people there are smart and politcally savvy. Hell, Lieberman was too conservative for Conn. Furthermore, Simmons is somewhat of a light weight.

The BOY is in over his head and just wait he will start point fingers blaming someone else. After the glitter and lights have gone he will be exposed for what he is… a state senator out of his league. But hey he can play round ball and go on Leno while the financial markets are in a whirlwind. And have you heard he is getting a 500k advance on a childrens book. What a joke he is, and he has lessened the office of the presidency. CHANGE you weaklings got it, it’s embarrassing for this great country.