The Stalinists in Washington.
It is surprising, even creepy, that American citizens are being made into pariahs like the infamous and completely destroyed kulaks of the Stalinist state, and the media and the pols go along with it. From the Wall Street Journal story by Liam Pleven:
Management at American International Group Inc.'s financial products unit has asked employees to let the unit know by 5 p.m. on Monday if they plan to return all or part of the controversial bonuses they received under a retention program, according to a person familiar with the matter....
...A number of employees at the unit have already given up significant income, according to AIG. In a letter to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner dated March 14, AIG's government-installed CEO, Edward Liddy, said the "25-highest-paid active contract employees at AIG Financial Products have agreed to reduce their remaining 2009 salary to $1. Salaries for this group range up to $500,000, and the average salary is in excess of $270,000."
....Rank-and-file employees know they're in the process of winding down the financial products unit -- in essence, working themselves out of a job. How long that will take could vary depending on the book of business the employee is responsible for. The unit had a number of different lines of business, many of them distinct from the credit default swaps that helped spur the government bailout. If employees leave the unit soon, they'll be entering a difficult job market. Some may view the retention payments they've already received as hedges against an uncertain future.
The Wrong Path
It is important to say that the AIG employees did not ask to be made servants of the state who must surrender their property at the state's demand. The Fed and Treasury made the decision to take over AIG on September 15-16 2008. It was a poor decision. I opposed it then, and I oppose it still; and I am comfortable saying that the vast majority of American people opposed it then and oppose it now. This did not give the Fed and Treasury the power of theft of private property. If an AIG employee in any unit, including the boneheaded financial unit that is at the heart of the story, had left AIG on September 15, 2008, he or she would be entitled to every dollar of 2008 salary and bonus earned. Do we now watch as the Congress appropriates the property of ex-employees, or of all employees? The Fed and Treasury of both the Bush administration and Obama administration have taken a wrong path. I am not following that path. I am turning back on the trail. Back to September 14 when Lehman died, to September 15 when the market crashed and AIG squealed for its CDOs, to the night of September 15 and into September 16 when Ben Bernanke, Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner caved into the fear-mongering by the bankers. Who fear-mongered? Suspects include investment bankers such as L. Blankfein of GS and other super bankers at Chase, at Citi, including not a few European super bankers, all of whom made certain they got their counterparty swag out of the AIG bail-out cash from the Fed. That is when AIG went from bad news to black hole. That is where the fault lies. These bankers are not kulaks, or even members of a Politburo. These bankers are weak actors, who acted out of fear or haste or self-dealing, and who must answer now for their errors along with their enablers, Paulson, Bernanke and Geithner.
but are they not Kulaks?
Excuse my for asking the most obvious question - regardless of who we point the finger at
didn't they play a role in the collapse? Government through open the doors and told the investment firms go out into swill and eat up true enough- but the overwhelming gluttony is proving tragic ... but that is what happens when hogs are allow at the trough without restriction...Self restraint?
Are we All Kulaks now?
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Two left-wing Columbia University professors named Cloward and Piven mapped out the techniques for destroying democracy by overburdening government with spending. Barack Obama was groomed from childhood in this school of thought.
Follow the lineage of American socialism from Cloward-Piven, through Saul Alinsky, to Frank Marshall Davis and his protege, Barack Obama.
The author of this series, Jim Simpson, is a former White House budget analyst.
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part I: Manufactured Crisis:
http://frontpage.americandaughter.com/?p=1878
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part II: Barack Obama and the Strategy of Manufactured Crisis:
http://frontpage.americandaughter.com/?p=1999
The Cloward-Piven Strategy, Part III: Conspiracy of the Lemmings:
http://frontpage.americandaughter.com/?p=2114
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And so it begins...the war on capital and excellence and achievement. Those who have "too much" must be brought down because they damage the self-esteem of the underachievers and excite the greed of our political clown-class, the hollow men. Where and when will it end...at the bottom, in a vast grey wasteland, from sea to shining sea...with a wimper, not a bang.
How has America come to this: Law-abiding, private citizens targeted by political grandstanding; bad facts; faulty and incomplete reporting in the media? This, according to yesterday’s New York Times: “The Connecticut Working Families party, which has support from organized labor, is planning bus tours of A.I.G. executives’ homes on Saturday…” The same front page article by James Barron and Russ Buettner goes on to detail executives’ concern for the physical safety of their families – having received death threats – forced to hire private security guards; companies advising their employees not to display ID tags with corporate logos in public; etc.
I remember, just after 9/11 the Bush administration working hard to contain public anger. Some say, we may have gone too far when we ourselves became the focus of protests and endless litigation. Still, we avoided what seems to be developing now with the full support of our current crop of elected representatives. Is it not government’s job to protect ourselves from ourselves? The last thing we would expect is for our government to incite us to turn against our neighbors.
How long before fatwas are issued against clergy; Republicans; editors; bloggers; bakers; academics; etc.? How long before we splinter into lawless tribes, tearing each other apart in the streets. Is it not a function of government to protect each and every one of us: rich; poor; black; white; male; female; young; old; etc.? Perhaps government itself is the problem now.
Thomas Paine once said that "government, even in its best state, is but a necessary evil." What if government becomes no longer ‘necessary’? What if government itself becomes the cause and promoter of ‘evil’? It’s happened before (elsewhere) and can happen again (here). Why do we presume ourselves to be exempt from “evil’ government? Why did the Germans presume as much when installing Hitler? The Palestinians, when installing Hamas? The Venezuelans, when installing Chavez? (The list is endless.)
When a U.S. Senator suggests that A.I.G. executives commit suicide we have crossed a line in this country. Ironically, it was these very same executives who are now under fire who contributed most generously to President Obama’s election campaign while ignoring the signals that were well apparent early on. This may have been their only sin.
"So it begins" with the Pujo hearings, 1912. So it continues with the AIG hearings, 2009. The socialists are preparing for the celebration of 100 years of virtually uninterrupted rule in this country. The lie that my parents told me when I was a child that this was a free country, has been the hardest lie to unlearn.
Gotta do something to get these mobs under control...maybe a Civilian National Security Force...
You go, JB!! I agree with every word of what you say above. It is so refreshing to hear the word "theft" used in reference to 90% taxation, rather than to the more mundane uses of the word such as to describe the tax returns of Messrs. Daschle, Rangel, and Geithner.
Bankruptcy is the only viable option for AIG, sell off the valuable assets and let the chips fall where they lie. Clawbacks (that word again) may be necessary for the Big Banks that rushed in to collect claims against AIG. Investors need to share the pain, not the taxpayers!
Wisdom
'Rotten Luck'Willie: [smiling] I call for a vote on Ben's proposal! Any man who votes against it is a traitor!
Ben Rumson: Pardner, there comes a time when the party of the first part has no recourse but to knock some sense into the party of the second part! You're stayin'!
Rumson: As a matter of fact, Pardner, you're right. But I ain't yet sunk to horse stealin'. Oh, I've salted claims, yeah. And I've sold whiskey to Injuns. And once a man in Walla Walla come at me with a gun and I killed him. I can't think of one commandment I ain't shattered regular. I never did fancy my mother and father, let alone respect 'em or honor 'em. And I have coveted my neighbor's wife - whenever I had a neighbor and he had a wife, mm, mmm! And I gamble and I cheat at cards, but there's one thing I do not do. I ain't never gulled a pardner. The one sacred thing, even to low scuff like me, is a man's pardner.
Parson: Ye godless jaspers! Who are ya? Freemasons? Rosicrucians? Heathen emissaries from the depths of Babylon? Boozers! Gluttons! Gamblers! Fornicators!
I was born under a wandering star... a wandering, wandering star.
Language, at best, is but shorthand for our thoughts. In order to understand what is actually being said, however, we have to establish intent. This can be done by knowing something of the history (or background) of the speaker. When a man tells a woman he loves her, it would be helpful if she knew, for instance, that he had been married (like the celebrated King Henry VIII) six times before.
When our new Secretary of Homeland Security, Janet Napolitano, announces that the government will stop referring to the 240 terrorist suspects detained at Guantánamo as “enemy combatants”; and, furthermore, when she makes a point of saying that events such as on 9/11 will no longer be referred to as “terrorist attacks”, but rather as “manmade disasters” (like ‘Global warming’, I presume), we must pay attention. Though nothing has essentially changed, this should signal that our intent with regard to dealing with such matters has shifted significantly. The official explanation was that a confrontational approach has not been ‘helpful’; that we must now ratchet back our rhetoric to embrace something more akin to appeasement. All this can be convincingly debated and argued about either way.
Now, when the President, at a town hall meeting in Costa Mesa, Calif., compared embattled insurer A.I.G. and other large failing banks to a suicide bombers, saying, "It's almost like they've got -- they've got a bomb strapped to them and they've got their hand on the trigger. You don't want them to blow up. But you've got to kind of talk (to) them, ease that finger off the trigger", we realize that it’s not a matter simply of rhetoric at all; that hateful incitement (at least insofar as this administration is concerned) is still quite appropriate when directed towards a real enemy – in this case, bankers.
Right on, JB! I agree with every word in your AIG piece. We should have let AIG go Chapter 11; when that didn't happen, John McCain should have campaigned hard against the "Bush-Obama Bailout Scheme" right after he left DC for the second debate. If he had, McCain would be President today instead of our inappropriately grinning, gravitas-challenged Messiah, Barack Obama.
In addition, consider what happened in Connecticut this weekend. A busload of about forty people made the rounds of houses owned by AIG bonus babies and not only picketed those private family homes but also called for a blanket national law subjecting any and all bonuses or salaries exceeding $500,000 a year to confiscatory taxation, allegedly to "help just plain folks" like themselves. Obviously a repeat of the usual socialist bleat, but this gangsterism nonetheless provides significant insight into Obama's envisioned America, which is to say a country run along Alinksy-ACORN lines. All opposition to Obama will be demonized, as will any representatives of the free and prosperous capitalist America Obama so cavalierly -- even laughingly -- dismisses. And the key to demonization, as Stalin well knew, is to give opposition a face drawn from actual individuals and groups for the "toiling masses" to hate.
Integral to this effort is the "inside-outside" strategy Alinsky pioneered in Chicago in the Thirties and Forties and that ACORN in the Nineties perfected in ramming through ever looser and more irresponsible standards for home mortgage loans for unqualified -- perhaps even predatory -- borrowers. Combine "outside" pressure from below in the form of local "activists" who portray themselves as just plain middle-class folks with pressure from above in the form of "inside" left-wing legislators, bureaucrats, and judges, all supported by a sympathetic "inside" media, and the center cannot hold, as it did not hold in enabling those disastrous sub-prime mortgages and their derivatives that have wrecked our economy. The point is that in the Obama years this promises to be the vicious pattern of what we used to call "civil political discourse." If you doubt this claim, answer these questions -- who paid for the bus that transported to Connecticut all those "just plain folks" from as far away as Bloomfield, New Jersey? And who enabled those "just plain folks" to take time off from their supposed death struggle with economic privation to waste a whole day menacing certain specifically targeted American families? I would bet dollars to doughnuts that ACORN or some other radical-left group set up and paid for this faux-populist thuggish business; perhaps in Obama's America such an outrage qualifies as an economic stimulus?
My question is why you are referring to Ukrainian Kulaks starvation victims of Lenin-Stalin Fascist Communism to get at Obama. Leave the Ukraine alone. Their people are still suffering the injustices perpetrated on a peaceful peoples to commandeer agricultural land. If you think all this money talk isn't just another food fight, think again! What in hell are the WHO and Obama administration fabricating a flu pandemic for? Like all corporate Imperialism in the name of Capitalist Fascist pseudo-democracy, you, America, are responsible for the infected swine at a factory farm in Veracruz Mexico, global warming, and environmental pollution on a global scale. Think again, Flint Michigan.