Speaking of liquidity

Brilliant!

Naomi Wolf:

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

Y’know – when Bushie and Paulson buy some ownership in these banks and insurers as a part of the bailout and then leave office, OBama will be able to get these employees fired.

Contrary to McCain’s desire to fire the head of the SEC.

Thanks Lisa.

digg

I believe that money should be taken directly from the directors, from their bank account, from their retirement

this bailout has to have some strings and if they are just going to piss our money away because “that’s what they’ve done in the past” then they gotta get some personal financial hurt

We need more people to simply speak out. loud.

http://freewayblogger.blogspot…..anada.html

It’s a start…

OT: fivethirtyeight.com now projects Obama winning in November with:
90.5% likelihood
346.8 to 191.2 electoral votes
51.9% to 46.5% popular vote.

In terms of probable senate seats: 55.9% D vs 42.1% R

Well, you know, you have to threaten people with abject poverty to get a decent day’s work out of them.

Oh, wait – that’s the rule for poor people. These are rich people. The rule for them is that you have to lavish them with every conceivable reward for a job well done and then and only then ask them nicely to do the job you’ve just rewarded them for doing.

AIG is justifying this by saying that it is merely a reward for their highest-selling agents, a practice customary in the industry. The sales force is inspired by these incentives, doncha know.

So what the taxpayer is now doing is rewarding the agents who produced the *most* crap which fucked the company us?

gee, where do I send *my* check?

“…300-thread count Egyptian cotton sheets… .”

Pikers! I wouldn’t sleep on anything less than 500-thread count. /s (:>

compare and contrast:

steady beat of anecdotal reporting from military families Marines in Sadr City regularly forced to endure ration shortages

Rock Out With Your Bailout

Screw the Country First!

That’s quite the soft landing! They’re too big to fail!

and those tricky showers.

To be fair, the money spent had already been spent. No way in hell that the Ritz or St Regis would have taken a last minute cancellation on events that had been planned a year in advance without keeping every dollar (contracts and all that). Money’s gone folks, let them have that last foot massage on their way to standing in the bread line…

I would agree and disagree. true, money spent on the rooms. The travel and food etc would not have already been spent. I’ve worked for companies that have had to cancel events when bad news hits and they don’t throw more money after “money spent”.

Isn’t it interesting that there’s more outrage at a half a million in luxury spending than in a $85 billion + $37.5 billion in taxpayer dollars down the drain.

nice to know Rome, NY is using the same font that i do.
peace

puttin on the ritz

not from where i’m sitting.

OT: Per Nate Silver, “Democrats … now rate as having roughly a 1-in-4 chance of emerging with a 60-seat working majority [in the Senate].”

You don’t find it odd that the outrage is invesrely proportional to the dollars wasted?

Is the DOW going to fall thru 9K today? It is down around 100

Those Bush tax cuts just keep on working! Better make ‘em permanent fast! We don’t want American Royalty to be treated like commoners and have to pay their fair share.

Thank you for this and for your other posts, Lisa. I’ve enjoyed reading your wise work!!!!

Isn’t it interesting that there’s more outrage at a half a million in luxury spending than in a $85 billion + $37.5 billion in taxpayer dollars down the drain.

It’s the combination of driving a company into the ground, getting it bailed out to the tune of $85 billion, then the first in your face getaway, then another $37.5 billion, then another luxury “in case you didn’t understand we’re different” getaway. It bespeaks a corporate culture that is completely divorced from taking even minimal responsibility for anything.

in terms of how this affects all of us? yes. absolutely nuts. imo wrong focus.

but at some point it’s just too many zeros – by that i don’t mean that math is hard, but rather that, for me at least, it’s so much money i can’t really imagine what it means. it’s completely off my scale for any intuitive comprehension. maybe it’s the same for others who have not spent anytime thinking about such large sums of money? if that’s the case, i expect we’ll all be correcting that as we watch current events.

Palin was seen today speaking in tongues and whirling frantically as she prayed for a national Bradley Effect.

I guess it’s the fact that the symptom puts a human face on theunderlying problem that makes it a focal point. Not to mention that behavior is so far beyond what the regular voter can afford, like a tank full of gasoline.

This is a nice blog entry, but I am afraid the facts are a bit off from the ” WAPO article”

And just last week, about 70 of the company’s top performers were rewarded with a week-long stay at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., where they ran up a tab of $440,000.

it pisses me off, no doubt. but changing the amount of $ spent on junkets won’t do much to fix the very real problems we face.

I put this in a thread yesterday but this is how the Fed described its new cash injection into AIG as a loan that AIG was making to it.

Under this program, the New York Fed will borrow up to $37.8 billion in investment-grade, fixed-income securities from AIG in return for cash collateral.

http://www.federalreserve.gov/…..81008a.htm

There may be some arcane reason for describing it this way but it says something about the continuing lack of transparency in the financial system that even a straightforward loan to AIG like this has to be described backasswards.

I once did a macroeconomics presentation to my son’s fifth grade class (about 20 years ago). Told them they had to know what $1 billion was. Wrote it on the blackboard. Then taught them scientific notation which made the number much more compact. ($1 X 10 to the ninth). Then we worked out how much you would have to spend per hour to spend a billion dollars in a year. Working only a 40 hour week, with 2 weeks of vacation, because if you’re gong to spend $1 billion in a year, you don’t want to have to work long hours to do it. Then I asked what they would buy if that were their job. Every suggestion (my son’s was ski vacations) came far short of the pace required. I quit the game, with appropriate praise, when a girl said she would give it to charity. Reminded them that for the fed govt it was things like aircraft carriers. Dont know whether they liked it, but I had fun.

new post from ian: Paulson: “Forget my plan, let’s copy the Europeans”

Can someone who knows something about FISA take a look at this new Executive Order?

http://www.whitehouse.gov/news…..007-7.html

It is probably nothing….part of it reads:

“as amended by the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act of 1978 Amendments Act of 2008 (Public Law 110-261), it is hereby ordered as follows:

Section 1. Section 1-103 of Executive Order 12139 of May 23, 1979, as amended, is further amended by:

(a) striking “(7)” each place it appears and inserting in lieu thereof “(6)”;

(b) adding after subsection (h) “(i) Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”; and

(c) by adding after the sentence that begins “None of the above officials . . .”, a new sentence to read “The requirement of the preceding sentence that the named official must be appointed by the President with the advice and consent of the Senate does not apply to the Deputy Director of the Federal Bureau of Investigation.”

Just throwing it out there.

Treasury just gave AIG more money.
“The Federal Reserve on Wednesday agreed to provide insurance giant American International Group Inc. with a loan of up to $37.8 billion, on top of one made to the troubled company last month.
Under the new program, the Federal Reserve Bank of New York will borrow up to $37.8 billion in investment-grade, fixed income securities from AIG in return for cash collateral. These securities were previously lent by AIG’s insurance company subsidiaries to third parties.”
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/200…..ge/fed_aig

Hugh – not to flog my piece from yesterday, but I updated it last night with some more information about what was going on last spring during ‘l’affaire Spitzer’:
Friday, 3/7/08: Carlyle Capital, mortgage investment fund, gets in trouble; suspends shares trading. This group is associated with James Baker, the Bush family, and possibly the Saudi Arabians. They are losing money. Big time.
3/10/2008: New York Times article names Spitzer as a client of a prostitution ring being investigated by the feds
3/11/08: Fed, as part of an international central banking effort puts $200 billion into the system to support bad home mortgages
3/12/08: Carlyle announces their assets are being seized.

In other words: We, the American People, were already $200 billion in the hole last march to shore up banks with bad mortgages. So, let’s take out our calculators and just keep a running tab.

This is a nice blog entry, but I am afraid the facts are a bit off from the ” WAPO article”

And just last week, about 70 of the company’s top performers were rewarded with a week-long stay at the luxury St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., where they ran up a tab of $440,000.

Well yes, because the WaPo article is about a past trip that occurred in September. I wrote about a future trip that AIG wont call off.

Perhaps I was unclear: this is an upcoming trip, due to happen in mid October, thouhg I do make reference to the past trip. I have inserted a phrase to make that clearer, thank you for pointing that out. The first link in the article, one of my sources articles also leads to info about the upcoming trip.

You really don’t think AIG is the only bailed-out company behaving this way, did you?

I once worked at a company that did this, but they drew the line at Directors. Meaning all vice presidents (there were about 6 of them) and Directors (there were about 15 of them) could go, but no one lower. Why? They were all MALES.

Then — the unthinkable happened. A female became a director. Oh no! What to do? We CAN’T have a WOMAN on our retreat! It would spoil all the fun! So, they decided one of the higher-ups had to stay behind — you know, to mind the store. Funny — they had never had to have someone left behind in the years before. It is a no-brainer to guess which one was left behind.

But there is more to these “retreats.” Hookers. Lots of them. High-priced hookers, yes. But hookers all the same. If they allow wives along, I guess they keep the hookers to the “official business” part of it, where spouses aren’t allowed.

Or maybe, in the past 15 years or so, American business has gotten more sane, and there are too many women in high places. But somehow, I doubt it.

And, by the way, these retreats have nothing to do with business. It is all pleasure and a REWARD for their “hard work” all year. Yeah, it’s HARD WORK to lose THAT much money for the country and the shareholders.

Oops! Typo. There were about 35 Directors — not 15.

I make lots of typos in comments…And you are right, these are parties and rewards, a luxury junket. Which is why there as a $23,000 spa bill at the last one. Figure 70 people, that about $200 worth of spa services. Basically a massage and gratuity..

Doesn’t the federal government own 80% of A.I.G. now? And, as majority stockholders, shouldn’t we make employees subject to federal travel restrictions? And shouldn’t we ensure our money isn’t frittered away on frivolities like these “educational components?”

Fire Paulson First!

Lisa, I think Mr Ashooh stated that there were only 10 employees at the $443,000 event at Monarch Beach.