In fifteen words or fewer: simple solutions to stupid problems (#2), featuring Senator Carl Levin (D-General Motors)
Here's a pretty old post from the blog archives of Geekery Today; it was written about 15 years ago, in 2009, on the World Wide Web.
From a recent generally appalling column by Maureen Dowd:
How could Citigroup be so dumb as to go ahead with plans to get a new $50 million corporate jet, the exclusive Dassault Falcon 7X seating 12, after losing $28.5 billion in the past 15 months and receiving $345 billion in government investments and guarantees?
… The former masters of the universe don't seem to fully comprehend that their universe has crumbled and, thanks to them, so has ours. Real people are losing real jobs at Caterpillar, Home Depot and Sprint Nextel; these and other companies announced on Monday that they would cut more than 75,000 jobs in the U.S. and around the world, as consumer confidence and home prices swan-dived.
Prodded by an appalled Senator Carl Levin, Tim Geithner — even as he was being confirmed as Treasury secretary — directed Treasury officials to call the Citiboobs and tell them the new jet would not fly.
They woke up pretty quickly,says a Treasury official, adding that they protested for a bit.Six months ago, they would have kept the plane and flown it to Washington.Senator Levin said that the financiers will not be able to change their warped mentality, but will have to be reined in by Geithner’s new leashes.
I have no confidence that they intend or desire to change,Levin told me.These bankers got away with murder, and it's obscene that close to nothing is being asked of financial institutions. I get incensed at the thought that a bank that's getting billions of dollars in taxpayer money is out there buying fancy new airplanes.
So why not stop giving them billions of dollars in taxpayer money?
Jesus H. Christ.
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“Neo-fascism”, state socialism, or plain old naturally evolving capitialism! Whether you be left-lib, right-lib, or libertarian commie/left-anarchist, you can agree that this ain’t your ideal.
I don’t really like how the focus is not on the class exploitation/robbery involved but on lavish spending. Yes, a lot of mucgh poorer people should not be compelled to sacrifice their interests, so Citigroup CEOs can enjoy a new jet. That said, it seems that generalized anti-consumerism gets mixed in with this kind of criticism sometimes. I don’t really care if CEO’s fly to D.C. on comfortable nice jets. What I am concerned about is the loot involved in sustaining their business model. We not feel ashamed at material success per se.
Ugh! This is what I get for writing under the influence of Ambien ( :
*We need not feel ashamed about material sucess per se
*Yes, a lot of much poorer people
“So why not stop giving them billions of dollars in taxpayer money?”
In case you haven’t noticed, the patrician liberals in Washington and their court intelligentsia around the country will never try to solve a problem by stopping anything. This would give them nothing positive to do. As I have written elsewhere, they want to make things better, “but want that betterment to depend on a very important political class consisting mainly of themselves.”
Or, as Robert Anton Wilson has defined modern liberalism:
That school of capitalist philosophy which attempts to correct the injustices of capitalism by adding new laws to the existing laws. Each time conservatives pass a law creating privilege, liberals pass another law modifying privilege, leading conservatives to pass a more subtle law recreating privilege, etc., until “everything not forbidden is compulsory” and “everything not compulsory is forbidden”.
So no, this is not good for anyone with libertarian tendencies, but heaven itself for our patrician liberals.
Congress would rather spend its time asking Wall Street executives why they like money so much. They then proceed to throw more money at them…
Discussed at radgeek.com /#
Rad Geek People’s Daily 2009-02-24 – On the social engineering of the governmentalist Left and the social engineering of the governmentalist Right: