"It's like were rewarding incompetence." B Franks

Tell me about it.

Then take a look at the generic ballot. link

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I have an idea. If you don't like the pay that AIG finachel products traders get paid, start your own company. Sell better products for less money. Take all their market share and pay yourself much less. It should be easy. I'm serious. They were price gouging.

It may be that the whole operation was a con game.

Finachel products were understandable for a wile. At first people would find each other in personal ads and then bet on stock prices or interest rates. Then brokers who might have thought they were getting cheated out of commissions set up casinos for betting on such things. They organized the games and took a commission. Brokers liked the money and got more people into the game. Then they crossed an important line. If they couldn't get some one to take one side of a bet they would take it themselves. Extreme conflict of interest like letting the ref's bet on basket ball games. To keep the marks from figuring out very high the commissions were the brokers made the bets more and more complex. At lest they kept changing the names on the same old inverse floaters. link Every thing was very proprietary. Making it harder to understand helped them keep commissions higher. (They also took the show on the road to developing country for the same reason.) Gifts to the agents who bought the products with their companys money helped too. Those gifts ranged from Bulls tickets to sacks of cash. What happens in Vegas happens every where. Lots of companys who should have been tending their knitting (focusing on core competency) just took the share holders money to the derivative casino. There were more people who were willing to buy products than there were good products to buy. This lead to funny things. Much more money could change hands betting on the price of oil than in the selling of real oil. Companys made more money betting on the Yen than they made selling their product. People started w righting mortgages to bundle and sell to hungry buyers that they would never wright if they were going to hold them. People were buying insurance policys on stocks they did not own. Todays toxic or troubled asset was yesterdays big commission.

You can prosecute on laws that existed before the crime. Making actions criminal after the fact destroy process of law. One angle is to challenge the appropriateness of the instrument for the clients they were sold too. This could demonstrate a failure to fulfill fudiary responsibility. Problem is that that would be government protecting rich costumers/buyers from rich sellers. Sorting out the mistreatment of some rich people buy some other rich people doesn't angry up the public blood like cursing some rich people to hell for being rich. It's more fun to just demand ritual suicide and toss the bodys on the bon fires of our vanitys.

Oh the storys these traders will have to tell once they have nothing left to lose. That might be motive for throwing AIG traders one last money party.

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If corporations are so evil, why dose the government own so many?

Beginning with Fanny and Freddy.

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"If we are keeping focused on all the fundamentally sound aspects of our economy, all the out standing companys, workers, all the innovation and dynamism then were going to get through this and I'm very confident about that." so says Obama, now. Who was out of touch? What this really tells us is that Obama knows that he bought the economy and it's his now. You buy it you brake it. So, now he stops mocking McCain for saying the same damb thing. Obama was wrong for not saying this on the campaign trail and now he is wrong for not facing what actions he needs to take to grow that dynamism rather than drain it.

A $552.02 one time gift from the government to each small business is a smoke screen that allows Obama to pretend he had a balanced plan. (While he is pretending that he had a plan he might as well pretend it was balanced.) As after thoughts go it's far more after and far less thought. This isn't robing Petter to pay Paul. It's taxing you to give you back a small cut of your own taxes. If they hide the taxes by embedding them in the cost of products or taking them out of payroll before you touch the money they can pretend that government gives you more than it takes away. (Government can give value for tax money some times. The Center for Disease Control aggregates lots of peoples money and provides a life saving service that no one could buy on their own. Rebate checks are the worst example of government giving back less value than it takes. Creating more than you destroy is harder than concealing how much you destroy and fibbing about how much you create.)

It is a whole lot easier for a bank to distracted people by giving them a toaster than by paying higher interest rates on saving than other banks. You didn't go to the bank because you needed a toaster. You had a toaster that you liked. You went to the bank for interest on your savings.

Obama government is toaster government not high return government.

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I love the phony outrage. "If we had only known!!!" How dare they over pay their long overpaid employees again. I look for them to tie this to Snow the way they tied the Keating four on McCain. (They turned it into the Keating five so their friends in the press could say Republicans were doing it too. Now, Republican do steal but not with Keating. He didn't work their side of K street.) Chris Dodd, don't bother we know who you are.

Isn't it fascinating that people who were on the conference committee and voted the bill out come back after the fact and say they didn't write the part about traders getting the money promised in their contracts. "Sure I voted for it but that doesn't make it my fault." Every one who voted for it is culpable for it. "I didn't read it" or "I didn't understand it" are no excuse. Why have a legislature if the only thing they are going to read is their own earmarks. "Sure, I signed the bad check and cashed it but some one else wrote the number on the check. I don't know who wrote the number but when I find them I'm going to give them a big peace of my self important congressional mind. Why they should even go to jail. The people should be happy they got me to chase bad people who write numbers on checks before I sign them. Those kind of people do a lot of damage to this country."

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This is not Stimgate. This would only have a chance of becoming Stimgate if AIG bonuses hounds were bundling big checks for Franks and company and Sec Treasury tried to help cover it up. Clearly thats not happening yet because the Sec Treasury post is still empty. Obama should get around to appointing some one.

Now that his basket ball picks are done he might get time. Hocuse Pocuse change the focuse. Obama is playing the regular guy because personal charisma is what he's got to work with. Policy woun't float his boat. See him on Jay Leno. He might tell a joke. He should teach not charm.

In his buget, A New Era of Responcibility, he wrights,

"While middle-class families have been playing by the rules, living up to their responsibilities as neighbors and citizens, those at the commanding heights of our economy have not."

"Prudent investments in education, clean energy, health care and infrastructure were sacrificed for huge tax cuts for the wealthy and well-connected."

"There's nothing wrong with making money, but there is something wrong when we allow the playing field to be tilted so far in the favor of so few. . . . It's a legacy of irresponsibility, and it is our duty to change it." All on page 5

(Wall Street Journal Digital Network By Daniel Henninger link )

These statements are true. Obama's mistake is that he feels that the "wealthy and well-connected" and "those at the commanding heights of our economy" are out side the goverment. They are not. The well-connected are the people who talk to him. The commanding heights of the economy are held exclusively by his friends in Congress. He is the very man he condems.

He can not give a convincing story of the problem because he and his friends are the problem but they are to narcisictic to see it. Bring the funny NBC.

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This is the kind of situation where Reagan would discover communists in Grenada and invade. Obama setting vets hospitals up to bill private insurance link will not have the same effect. Maybe putting troops on Mexican front will help.

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"It's like were rewarding incompetence."