Obama gets something right.

[redrumloa]

Obama Is Right: Wall Street's Big Bonus Pool Is "Shameful"

http://tinyurl.com/bwaoz5

Without mincing words, President Obama strongly condemned Wall Street's $18.4 billion bonus pool for 2008, calling it "the height of irresponsibility" and "shameful."

The issue is not that Obama is trying to dictate how financial services companies run their business, or what level of compensation executives make, as his critics claim.

The issue is that Wall Street firms ran themselves into the ground and came to the government hat in hand. Once your firm is on the government dole, it's outrageous for taxpayer money to be used to pay bonuses, which aren't guaranteed annually, contrary to the popular view on Wall Street.

Right on. My company didn't go to the gov asking to be bailed out and my department performed very well, yet I didn't get my measly $3k bonus this year. Why should bank CEOs get millions of taxpayer money in bonuses after running their firm and the US economy itself into the ground :?:

 

[FluffyMcDeath]

Wall Street bonuses have never had anything to do with rewarding performance. Many executive bonus packages are similarly divorced from reality - but while times were good it was hard to make people care about top execs stealing from the till.

Now when it's all falling apart people get grumpy? Hey - it's always been wrong. It's part of the reason we're in this mess - people claiming credit for work they didn't do and freeloading of the people who actually sweat.

If companies just took their bonus pools and used it to run the company through lean times instead of laying people off all over the place it would go a huge distance in healing the economy because in a consumer driven economy, as soon as people feel the fear of layoff fever, the first thing they do is stop spending. Once people see that the folks who got fat off them in the good times aren't willing to help them out through the lean times then the confidence is gone and the illusion of reciprocity shatters.

I know there are small shops around where the boss doesn't make 500 times more than the sweeper, and where there is actual human caring between owners and workers but those guys are getting killed too and it's just not right that the crooks in the mega-corps take down the good guys too. Those guys getting tax payer funded bonuses should be going to jail for their gross and willful negligence. Either that or eventually they will become lamp-post pinatas.

 

[cecilia]

"I'd like to throw these guys in the brig," Biden said in an interview with CNBC.


I love this guy!