Since these companies haven’t been run very well by people making significantly more than $250K I guess he has a point.

“WTF?”

He’s probably operating off the premise that people being paid obscene amounts of money will be left with no real option but to be virtuous, because they’re receiving so much legitimately that they couldn’t possibly be so greedy as to want more and thereby be tempted into theft or illegitimate business practices in pursuit of it.  Either that or he’s really, really hoping the viewing audience is sympathetic to this particular fantasy.

The obnoxious thing is that I don’t think people tend to really object to $10 million executive salaries so much as they object to $10 million executive salaries coupled with $20,000 regular-worker salaries or $10 million salaries going to executives who were an active detriment to the company.

... we left a lot of Nazis in place because they were the ones who made the trains run on time and the bureaucracy function properly, etc. And it was distasteful, but you needed them.

No, the French and British did that. “We” and the Russians were complete and total hardasses about denazification (unless they were scientists or intelligence agents) and had approximately zero problems replacing these people.

And in fact, our experience in Iraq kind of demonstrates the wisdom of that, because in Iraq we replaced the Baathist bureaucrats and the result was chaos.

That would be because we replaced the Baathist bureaucrats with ideological neocon morons.

Not to compare Wall Street to Iraq or Nazi Germany, but the point is you need people who know what they’re doing.

So let’s keep the people who caused the mess in the 1st place? Fucking brilliant!

I’ll run you corporation into the ground for $200k/year. Shit, $150k even.

Yeah, the Nazi thing sounds about right, considering how many people will be losing their jobs and starving to death as a result of these economic geniuses.

The Nazis did not in fact make the trains run on time, in any particularly special fashion.  He’s mixed up (in oh so many ways); the original urban legend is that Mussonlini made the trains run on time.  This has been comprehensively debunked on Snopes.

Shorter version: he’s an arse, and an ignorant one at that.

Well…actually the Nazis did make sure certain trains ran on time - the ones diverted to take victims to the death camps.  I’m REALLY sure he wanted to reference so-called Nazi bureaucratic efficiency when applied to mass slaughter to justify keeping Wall Street MBAs employed.

As a point of fact, until the Soviets began to push their own patsies into power in Eastern Europe between ‘46 and ‘49 the United States was firm on de-Nazification of public officials, only giving jobs to individuals with proven records of resistence to the Nazi regime.  After the Iron Curtain fell the US rehabilitated a lot of ex-Nazi Party members - after all, the Commies were coming and the little eccentricities of a lot of Germans from ‘33 to ‘45 were overlooked.

So, in reality, his analogy is complete shit.  I’m absolutely amazed that this jackass would use the Nazi Party to justify entitlement of a bunch of incompetent business executives.

Apparently your value as a human being is literally measured by how well you can manipulate the system in your favor.  Not whether you actually perform, but whether you can “work it” or not.

So can we put to rest forever the idea that if you work hard and keep your nose clean (as my parents would always tell me as a kid) you have a chance to make it to the top?  You really have a better chance of winning big in the lottery than actually leveraging your brains and your talent to succeed in business.  Besides, the people already at the top nail the door shut as soon as they arrive. 

Somewhere, down in a deep and dark corner of Hell, Ayn Rand is looking up at all this and smiling.  After all is said and done, in the end she won.  Morality and human rights lost.  If we have too much more “freedom” like this, we’ll all be wearing barrels instead of clothes…

Godwin’s Law:

The law states: “As a Usenet discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” References to Godwin’s Law often actually refer to a corollary of it which determines that the person who first makes an unwarranted reference to Nazi Germany or Hitler in an argument loses that argument automatically.

You know, it occurs to me that Godwin’s law kinda applied to the decline of Movement Conservativism. When the Republicans couldn’t keep selling their wars without throwing “-fascist” on whatever they didn’t like, as if it were a suffix, and when Goldberg wasn’t laughed off the stage for his children’s’ book, the Movement had begun its long, tortured decline.

Because if you can’t criticize your opponents around flaws they actually have, or explain why would should pursue a course of action without allusions to Hitler, you really don’t have a case.

Just as an aside from a historian, can we just put the “the Nazis were SOOOOO efficient” crap to death already?  Anyone who spouts that is an idiot.  The Nazi system makes your average local DMV office look like the model of customer service and productivity.  Actually, let’s just ban anyone whose familiarity with history consists of Hogan’s Heroes from talking in public about the subject.

”...ideological neocon morons.”...that’s really redundant…

And for those who believe that Fascism and Marxism are the same, who no doubt believe that FDR not only didn’t end the Great Depression but actually had a hand in making the stock market crash:  We didn’t leave Hitler, Himmler, Goering, Goebbels, or any of the other Top Nazis in power.  In fact, we prosecuted them and/or their underlings for war crimes, and most of them ended up hung.

In contrast, the way we’ve handled the Wall Street assholes is equivalent to Truman, Churchill, and Stalin handing Hitler and his henchmen hundreds of billions at the war’s end and them letting them try all over again to see if they can do better the next time…

What’s that they said about CNBC in that Vanity Fair article? Ah, yes: “No adult supervision.” And that was coming from a Bear Stearns banker, so the bar wasn’t set very high to begin with.

Really, I’d be surprised if anyone takes CNBC’s collection of clowns, spirit bunnies, confidence men and bootlickers seriously as a source of financial news after Jon Stewart’s smackdown last week.

Agreed with the others on the historical analogy—wow, that’s some strong ignorance and stupid there.

tannenburg, it is more than just the “myth” that Nazis were efficient. The Neo-Liberalism we’ve been living under since Reagan is based around the idea that any government control is bad. To see a CNBC guy reach to the Nazis as a “they straightened things out” reference is a hilarious, ironic crack in their collapsing ideology.

I mean, he literally just compared the Wall Street MOUs to Nazis to DEFEND them.

An entire regime is crumbling. Not just Jim Cramer. Not just AIG. Not just CNBC. An entire regime of individuals and ideas is falling apart. Honestly, I’m scared of what these increasingly frantic, desperate idiots are going to do to the place as they leave.

It’s the differential of power. Rich people literally believe themselves above the law and the concentration of wealth has allowed for the creation of self-centered aristocrats who believe that the world operates to serve them personally.

They literally can’t wrap their heads around the fact that the people are no longer being distracted by desperation and the false promise of wealth and has begun seeing the naked greed for what it is.

On behalf of much needed overhaul of our entire notion of capitalism, I can only encourage them. The people have been aching for a face for the mindless evil and whereas before they’d throw out illegals or the gays, things are finally bad on such a level that no one’s buying the shit sandwich and are finally figuring out who the real villains are.

And so wrapped up in themselves are they, they can’t help but brag about it on national TV.

As another interesting aside, I was recently doing some research on the Russian Revolution - in particular the “White” counter-revolutionaries who holed up in places like the Baltic, Mongolia, and the Crimea to fight the Bolsheviks - and I’m suddenly struck by the comparisions;  our own deposed (or at least disgraced) elite has the same confused outrage, the idea that somehow the “common man” (or peasant) has been hoodwinked by agitators and leftists, that their true interests lie in keeping the elite in power to “set things right.”  Again, they share the inability to see that their own actions led to their deposition, and blindness to the fact that people are outraged at their material excesses and sense of entitlement.

Or, to switch historical gears, the commoners aren’t content to be told “let them eat cake” any more - especially when the cake’s bought with public funds.  As long as everyone felt rich on the paper wealth of 401K funds and inflated house prices most people aspired to live like the financial elite; now that those chimerical riches have vanished those same elite lifestyles are a source of anger and resentment, not wistful longing and envy.

I sometimes think these assholes want their heads on pikes.  By next week CNBC will have a new show called Everyone Making Less Then $100k Should Be Blasted Into The Sun.

I hope to God you’re being sarcastic, Zifnab25, because if not you’re completely off base about Nazi Germany.

It is amazing, tannenburg, how many times that model has repeated itself through history… and the fact that these people who are supposedly the Best of Us (a literal definition of Aristocracy—rule by the best) can swallow the myths that destroy them, over and over and over again.

I tried to make this point to a friend (who is kinda an idiot) who wanted to limit voting based on study of the issues. *sigh*

Keep the secretaries (who know where everything is and know how to work the bureaucracy), and the underlings (who know how the business really works) and screw the rest. 

If they need an asshole figurehead to motivate them, have weekly showings of the movie Wall Street...

The conflation of salary and worth as a person is - well, I was going to say it’s astounding, but it isn’t. It’s just rarely expressed so blatantly.

If you took a brilliant Wall Street executive - not “brilliant,” but truly, actually brilliant (I’m sure there’s one or two out there) - and told him his salary was going to be less than $250,000 a year, bingo! The company would be run well by someone making less than $250,000 a year. If you made me head of the company and paid me $1,000,000 a year, bingo! You company is being destroyed by someone making a million a year.

Yeah, I always thought that the term “at least the trains ran on time” was a sort of dark-humor joke about the trains to the death camps never being late. I never thought of it as some sort of defense that fascism was awesome because public transit was more efficient.

also, Part of me is fascinated and curious to watch these arrogant fuckers wave their willies in the faces of the people who are suffering under this economy before we go French Revolution on their asses.

I’d be very happy to see a law tying bonuses to the actual success of the company.  If I received a ridiculously tiny bonus last year, since my company isn’t doing that well, but it still profitable, why should any executive in any failing company get a bonus this year?  What companies are actually doing well?  Campbell’s?  McDonald’s?  Those executives can get a bonus, the rest can go fuck themselves.

keshmeshi, that’s actually not a good idea.

The boom-bust cycle of the last twenty years comes back to exorbitant executive compensation. They look like they’re earning it, because the company’s making a shitload of money. In fact, they are making so much money, that after a few years (or even months), the CEO and his posse can just retire, never work again, their kids never work again, THEIR kids never work again.

If you want to encourage CEOs to pursue long-term, stable growth strategies, make sure they never own so much that they won’t rely on that pension in retirement.

What I’d really like to see happen is a sober and exacting examination of executive salaries, performance, and profitability.  I suspect - without much evidence - that “star execs” have no real affect on the company’s bottom line in any real sense; they more than likely have an effect on SHARE PRICE but not profits.  Since share prices are based on investor’s emotions rather than hard data the share price can go up an down depending on if the executive team is seen as “stars.” 

Profitability and performance, however, I feel is more a matter of the entire company’s strengths and weaknesses.  Many CEOs and other execs justify star salaries because “talent will leave without incentives.”  What I want to know is the “talent” really there?  Moreover, just because an exec makes good decisions (or wild-ass guesses) one year does not mean they’ll make the best choices the next year.  Further, “star” execs switch companies - even entire industries - chasing the higher salary…does that really equip these people to make rational decisions about a company’s future?  Is there no real difference between, say, a pickle factory and an investment bank?

The outliers always attract attention - Steve Jobs, for instance, at Apple, but he’s a founder and visionary who has made bad choices as well as good, and is passionate about his company and almost evangelical about its future.  Many of these Wall Street execs, on the other hand, seem to be an interchangable box of “talent” who all figure will slot into any position without having to know much about the business. 

In the end I have a feeling that those so-called “essential” execs are really only essential for stock value, not productivity.  As such, with the market at 50% of its value a year ago, perhaps it’s time to wish them to the cornfield.

“Further, “star” execs switch companies - even entire industries - chasing the higher salary…does that really equip these people to make rational decisions about a company’s future?  Is there no real difference between, say, a pickle factory and an investment bank?”

Yes, there is a huge difference. 

You mention Jobs, but the more interesting example is when John Scully (ex-Pepsi president) took over Apple.

Soft drinks != Personal Computers

Jobs is an arrogant asshole.  But he knows what many people want in computers.  And with the iPod and iPhone was able to successfully branch off into other consumer products only indirectly related to computers…

Scully is probably at least as arrogant an asshole as Jobs.  But he didn’t know what kind of computers people wanted.  He basically made his money (at one time highest paid exec in Silicon Valley) and got squeezed out…

I assumed Zifnab was joking - I lol’d -  as in, the comparison only works if the Allies had to pay the “good” Nazis (as in, good at being corporate managers) an outrageous salary. And it makes me picture these Nazi CEOs standing around their boardrooms, with Allied guns pointing at them, saying, “No, vee can’t possibly vork for zat measly amount!” (Yes, they all talk like Colonel Clink in my imagination).

Haines’s whole argument is just so bizarre - you cannot make that shit up.

Yes, Mike, I was thinking of the Scully-Jobs switchover myself when I wrote that.

I just re-read that bit the knob said about the Nazis making the trains run on time…“distasteful.”  That’s the first time I’ve ever heard that term associated with the Nazi Party.  “Distasteful” is finding a hair in your soup.  “Distasteful” is stepping in someone else’s doggy doo.  “Racist Genocidal Nihilistic Assholes” are better adjectives to associate with the Nazi Party.

The Nazi comparison is quite valid when you consider how many otherwise smart people had to turn off parts of their brain in order to play along. Basic principles like “High reward is a sign of high risk,”
and “The asset value of a defaulted loan is zero” were simply ignored.

The MOUs must go, per Einstein’s observation, “The problems that exist in the world today cannot be solved by the level of thinking that created them.”  However bright they were, they all became stupid.

Unfortunately, the analogy does not extend to the possibilty that the Masters of the Universe responsible for so much economic devastation will be tried and hanged.

I’m sure Zifnab is snarking.

But the stupid comment Haines made I think betrays an admiration a lot of people (usually conservative/Republican) have for the very strict authoritarian Nazi era.  Most of them have to keep this secret (maybe even from themselves), but it seems to be far more common than good sense would indicate.

I remember being fascinated as a teen by the the Star Trek TOS episode that explored this.  That’s the kind of TV that can make you think…if you aren’t careful…

“the original urban legend is that Mussonlini made the trains run on time.”

Wasn’t that not that Mussolini made the trains run on time, but that even the fascists couldn’t get Italian trains running on time?

Yeah…the Nazis-as-efficient-authoritarians plays into the same delusions that the 1950s were a time of good stay-at-home Mothers who baked pies and Dads who dispensed gentle paternal control over bright and well-behaved children.

Conservatism, it seems, looks back on a history which did not exist, one which is not messy, contradictory, and filled wth disasterous decisions and uncomfortable facts.

I recently came across a blog post which likened Sweden’s neutrality during the Second World War to cowardice, contrasting it to the United State’s brave leadership of the world in destroying the Nazi threat.  This, of course, ignores the fact that the United States stayed out of the war - as a neutral - for two years and it was in fact the Democrats who were trying to get the U.S. to fight the Nazis…but the Republicans wanted nothing to do with the fight against Fascism.  When I pointed that out I was labelled a “moral relativist,” the good ol’ Republican term for “someone who uses his brain to find out facts.”

we left a lot of Nazis in place because they were the ones who made the trains run on time and the bureaucracy function properly, etc. And it was distasteful, but you needed them.

Kinda like how the Catholic Church needs them now.

<quote>If you took a brilliant Wall Street executive - not “brilliant,” but truly, actually brilliant (I’m sure there’s one or two out there) - and told him his salary was going to be less than $250,000 a year, bingo! The company would be run well by someone making less than $250,000 a year.</quote>

You’re kidding, right? I mean . . . surely, you’re kidding. You don’t think he’d quit and work someplace where he could make a helluva lot more money, given said brilliance?

This is not to imply that we should be paying the same incompetent group boku bucks, or that I buy the argument that they’re the only ones who can handle the job, so we have to turn a blind eye to their bad deeds (the whole Nazi-comparison deal).

I like DeLong’s idea—http://delong.typepad.com/sdj/2009/03/needed-for-aig-and-the-tarp-silicon-valley-compensation-schemes.html

If you want to encourage CEOs to pursue long-term, stable growth strategies, make sure they never own so much that they won’t rely on that pension in retirement.

I agree with that, but the fact remains that there’s a feeding frenzy no matter how well the company or the economy is doing.  The AIG fiasco demonstrates that.  There was also a kerfuffle several years ago over American Airlines execs taking bonuses AFTER exacting huge concessions from unions.  If anything execs are more determined to enrich themselves when the company is in trouble.  They want to ensure a soft landing for themselves and to hell with everyone else.

I’m certain that’s what’s going on with AIG.  If these execs were in any way interested in the longevity of their company, they’d volunteer to forego their bonuses.  But they don’t give a shit.  They’re desperate to get theirs before the whole thing goes to shit.

Like every office worker in town with a career of any length, I’ve spent some of mine at financial services firms. Remember those Bus Ad majors from college? The frat boys whose imaginations were limited to Letters to Penthouse and pushing the envelopes of their own general dickishness? 

That’s who’s running these businesses.

All these years they’ve been telling themselves that they get paid better than the clerical staff, or the cleaning staff, or even the IT geeks, because of some abstract intellectual quality that they’d be hard-pressed to articulate but which made them uniquely qualified for their jobs.

And it’s sort of true, to the extent that being One of The Boys is a unique intellectual quality.

It’s hard for someone in that position to recognize that there’s nothing special about themselves professionally; they’re just never, ever confronted with the fact—or even the idea—that practically anyone in the building could do their jobs, with very little training (these aren’t quants—they’re just suits). By extension, it’s hard for them to understand why they should pay attention to anyone but the other Boys when it comes to accepting those bonuses.

So, while there’s no particular reason not to toss them out on their well-upholstered asses—God knows, there’s plenty more where they came from—I feel a little sympathy . . . the sort you’d feel for a creature raised in captivity who faced the difficulty of being released into the wild.

Add to that the idea that is percolating along just under the radar, that the new taxation cuts everyone’s income to exactly 250,000.

Sure, if you make 251,001, it’s going to bite you fairly dramatically. But if you make 10 million?

Big parts of this make me feel the way I do when some trophy wife gets a divorce settlement that includes $30,000 a year for clothes and $10,000 a year for jewelry, along with three of the houses. Okay, legal is legal and all that, just don’t try to get me all sympathetic about how rough your life is and how much you need all that to survive.

You know, there’s a plan in place in most companies called “Club”.  The best salespeople are selected, and in good years Club is something like a free trip to Half Moon Bay resort in Jamaica—staying in the houses, not the hotel.  Golfing and snorkling/scuba and spa packages included.  Invites are +1 so the spouses/significant others “who helped make it possible” come along.

I got to go one year b/c my then future hubby was invited—his company believed in not only rewarding the top salespeople, but also one person from every department, in his case, marketing.  They take a big picture of the group and give a framed copy to everyone.

It’s a big big deal to the sales staff, and a big sign of appreciation to everyone else.  And to be honest, it’s probably better than paying everyone the equivalent in cash b/c it’s a big ego stroke.  It makes employees feel valuable and like their efforts are acknowledged.

These Wall Street guys aren’t just bitching about club.  They think they should go to club when they bankrupted the company.  They are so disconnected from the rest of the country, where the average salary is only $50K that they don’t understand how incredibly pissed off these unearned bonuses make people.  The average American could stop working for 15-20 years on a million dollar bonus.

They were content to be Masters of the Universe when times were good.  Now that it’s crashed around their ears, they are all crying “But I’m middle class!  I need that bonus.”  (See Dana Perino earlier this week.)

No.  You don’t.  If you didn’t have the sense to sock money away when you were making more than 99% of people in the country and were living paycheck to million-dollar-paycheck I have no sympathy for you.  Sell the Lexus, the Land Rover and the jewelry.

——————
I’m a little hopeful in this collapse.  Perhaps the old boy network is falling apart.  It might open up opportunities for women and minorities.  If I were running things, I’d go straight to those bankers filing EEO suits and put them in charge—they’re used to being paid less anyway, and they have to be over qualified to be there inthe first place.

Most of all, I want to reregulate our industries.  No bank should ever be allowed to be so big that it cannot fail.  Monopoly-bust them.  We need local radio and TV—Clear Channel—bust it up.

—————-

The latest whine I heard?  The 90% tax is hurting the receptionists who can’t afford to lose that $5,000 bonus.

HOW?

Well, maybe she’s married to a doctor, and their family income is over $250,000, so she’ll have to give her bonus back.

They really don’t get it.  If she’s married to anyone and their family income is over $250,000 they aren’t hurting.  They can afford to lose a $5,000 bonus.  And people are not screaming over $5,000 bonuses: it’s the bonuses 100 times as big that are offending people.

In fact, if the salaries and bonuses were more equitable, people wouldn’t be so offended.  Why should the upper management make 250+ times as much as the peons?  TAX the fuck out of salaries like that.  If the company is profitable, spread it around.  Use Club to show appreciation.

Plus, who gives the receptionist a bonus?  Seriously?  It would be nice if they did, but I don’t think it’s standard practice and I don’t think they are terrified about retaining a receptionist, though honestly, a good receptionist is probably more easily employed elsewhere.

I’m sorry, but based on actual performance and not some libertarian fantasy, untrained retarded chimps could do pretty much as well as these guys did.  They are either grossly incompetent, morbidly corrupt, or both.  I really think they should pay us (the taxpayers) not to fire them all for cause.  Might have a salutary effect on ethics and performance on Wall Street.

On a small note, I’m really sick of seeing “income over $250,000” as though 250K is somehow the outer reaches of richness.  Yes, 250K puts you in the top 1.5% of households.  But the income range within that 1.5% is huge, and lumping it all together suggests that $250,000—a number that at least sounds attainable in the dreams of your average Joe (plumber or otherwise)—is somehow comparable to $2,500,000 or $25 million.

Which is precisely why I would prefer it if we were to add more tiers to the incremental tax brackets we use - a $1MM - $9.999MM bracket and then a $10MM+ bracket…

As you pointed out, while $250K puts one in very comfortable territory above 98.5% of the rest of us, it isn’t a figure that is totally inconceivable to a lot of people, even if they personally aren’t in that category.

I don’t know a single person who makes more than $1MM per year.  I don’t know anyone who even makes $500K per year.  But my uncle, a physician, clears the $250K mark.  A college classmate is an attorney making over $250K per year as well.

The point is, even though I don’t make $250K per year nor does anyone in my immediate family or social circle, I do personally know people who do make that kind of money.

And while I think that increasing these folks incremental taxes in that bracket to 39.6% is completely reasonable and justifiable, imagine if instead we were to only adjust them up to 38%, but folks making over $1MM - $9.999MM to 47%, and then people over $10MM to 56%.  I don’t know the numbers, but my bet is that if that happened, you’d bring in a ton more tax revenues than just leaving the current tax brackets in place and just raising those over $250K to 39.6%.

I mean, would people really feel that sorry for folks making $10MM per year paying 56% in taxes on their income above $10MM per year?  Especially considering that fewer than 1 out of 10,000 people in this country make that sort of money?

Whereas with folks making just around $250K per year, that’s a number that most people can at least conceive of, even if they don’t personally make that much, how much sympathy can the right really drum up for people making literally millions of dollars per year?

The nazis weren’t always efficient, but they were almost always very punctilious in their record-keeping of what they looted from their victims, what unconscionable laws they prosecuted jews and other unwanted groups under, what death quotas they were trying to meet. That comment above about the DMV is chillingly accurate in the sense of implacable large bureaucracy. (It seems to have been more of a german than a nazi characteristic; in the late 60s my grandmother got a letter saying that her house in the east zone, which she had left under duress 30 years earlier, had been seized by the state—for unpaid real estate taxes.)

That bureaucratic punctilio, btw, is exactly the opposite of most of the jerkwads on wall street, who for the most part had no idea of their total exposure, of who their counterparties were or what properties the mortgages they built their air-castles on top of actually represented.

“This guy’s argument is not necessarily cogent, but the point remains that if companies bailed out by the government can’t compete on compensation with companies that do not owe the government money, then other institutions will steal talent from them.”

Yes, but:

1) The way large companies have gone on a Godzilla stomp across their chosen market in the past ten, twenty, and thirty years means there are far fewer companies than there used to be capable of paying ungodly sums of money, especially now, to executives, and even fewer companies who are both capable of paying out and not partially on the government dime.

2) The talent in question are not special, special snowflakes.  There are 300 million of us, and we do not live in some weird fantasy novel where it’s John or Jane Smith’s Grand Ultimate Destiny to ascend to the throne of BoA and defeat the dragon of Mount Default lest we all be plunged into eternal insolvency.  Wherever that one example of precious, stolen talent came from, there are ten more who are as good or just a teensy little bit better or worse aching for a shot at president instead of VP.

I’m just wondering why financial institutions that have not been run into the ground would want to steal talent from the ones that have. Certainly there are some nontoxic divisions at the failed institutions, but since everyone is downsizing right now, why fire additional known quantities to hire unknown quantities slightly more cheaply?

That’s also in addition to the fact that you’d have to be incredibly stupid and short-sighted to jump ship from an otherwise good-looking job because you’re pissed at an earnings hit that’s going to last maybe a couple of years. Oh, right, nevermind.

(What I would expect to see is people who think they can get jobs elsewhere leaving sinking ships and blaming the prospect of federal meddling, even thought it’s actually because they expect to be laid off if they stay.)

Not to put too fine a point on it but these pricks were receiving these enormous salaries and bonuses because of their decisions which ran the economy into the ground. These guys made as much money as they did by systematically extracting wealth from the economy and then destroying all of it that they couldn’t snatch into their own dirty hands. To the man these guys should lose their jobs and then have to go find honest work, and then be put on the payment plan for making up the trillions of dollars of harm they’ve done.

“then other institutions will steal talent from them.” “

Talent? These are the same incompetant fuckwads who ruined the system. When the hell did a retention bonus mean you could still get the bonus if you left the company? Used to be your ass would be sued unless you came up with some valid reason but you still didn’t get all or even most of that bonus money.

These jokers have an inflated image of themselves back in the 1930s they would have jumped out windows or be pushed out of them. Where are the mobs to bring out these jokers out to the street and hang them?

“What he means to say is that anyone who is capable of earning the taxpayers’ money back for one of these companies is worth more than $250k, and if the government won’t let these companies pay the going rate, someone else will.”

...hell, they’ve already demonstrated a talent for running these companies into the ground and making trillions in paper profits disappear, so I suppose that somehow proves that they are most qualified to rescue them — which, of course, they would already being doing on their own, if, you know, they hadn’t run these companies so far into the ground they need billions from us to keep them from becoming smoking holes. 

Using wingnut logic, that makes sense.  Too bad it doesn’t make sense any other way…

And before I forget:  Can somebody tell me if wingnuts are supposed to be defending the bonuses today or condemning them.  Or is it more like a tag team thing?...

These crooks couldn’t make the trains run on time no matter how much carnage some hypothetical observer might be willing to overlook. If “making stuff work” was anywhere in their repertoire of goals they’d be engineers. Maybe evil engineers, but still engineers. If they were given a railway to run, they’d sell everything down to the stones on the railway tracks to the highest bidder, dazzling onlookers with how much money they are carting in, complain that timetables are curtailing their freedom of business, and yell for government transport subsidies once the last stone and the last rivet is sold.

The Nazi analogy is specific to the people who worked in toxic securities and derivatives.

Except that the analogy is faulty in the first place.

And using the Nazis favorably in a comparison?  All kinds of fucked up.

Sure, if you make 251,001, it’s going to bite you fairly dramatically.

I’m not sure if you meant that the way you wrote it…

If you make $251,001, your new tax liability once the Bush cuts expire will be increased by…. drumroll…. a whopping $37.00.  Yes, THIRTY-SEVEN whole dollars.  Less than two trips to the gas station.

When someone starts a sentence with “I know it’s politically incorrect but…”, I immediately stop listening. It saves a lot of stomach acid.

Not to compare Wall Street to Iraq or Nazi Germany, but the point is you need people who know what they’re doing.

The Nazis couldn’t pretend that they knew what they were doing about as long as the bankers could. From 1938 to 1942, the German strategy might have looked brilliant, 1943 it broke down. 1945 it was over. If we take 2008 as the year where it broke down, then ... when did this bubble take off? Would 2002 fit?

keshmeshi: I’d be very happy to see a law tying bonuses to the actual success of the company.

You’d need a reasonable measure for “success of the company” first. Quarterly stock development has failed big time. Untradable shares with a 10-year-holding requirement, maybe. But even that could be played.

tannenburg: Is there no real difference between, say, a pickle factory and an investment bank?

That used to be gospel, and I wouldn’t be surprised to learn that it still is. Kind of, “a good manager can manage everything”. Which might look good in theory, but managers so good that they can manage anything (probably by mythical people skills which allow them to always put the right person in the right place) are too rare to make much of a difference. As far as normal humans are concerned, if you do not know what your business is, you cannot make it long-term sustainable. But you can loot it.

Mighty Ponygirl: I never thought of it as some sort of defense that fascism was awesome because public transit was more efficient.

A true apologist will talk about union-busting and autobahnen, not trains.

cynickal: Kinda like how the Catholic Church needs them now.

If there’s one organisation that never had a lack of authoritarians in millenia, the catholic church is it. Breeding authoritarians since Emperor Constantin.

Bitter Scribe: When someone starts a sentence with “I know it’s politically incorrect but…”, I immediately stop listening. It saves a lot of stomach acid.

Some insight from my USENET days: “When someone says, ‘I’m not politically correct’, they mean that they are too chicken to say ‘I’m an asshole and proud of it’.”

” From 1938 to 1942, the German strategy might have looked brilliant, 1943 it broke down. 1945 it was over.”

Without a few key people the German war effort would have collapsed. Most of the Nazis were just adequate in their jobs also to be in office one had to become a member of the Nazi party. Patton was critized for keeping Nazis around in local positions but as he said they knew what they were doing so as long as they did the job they would be kept in office rather then be replaced.

Plus these former Nazis knew they might be viewed as collaborters so they wanted to do a good job in order to keep the Allies protecting them.

These bankers need to have a mob kill a few of them to keep them in line.

“And using the Nazis favorably in a comparison?  All kinds of fucked up”

Well if you want to compare how death camps would be run the Nazis would be rated favorably compared to Catholic friars and other Catholic church officals. Yes Catholic Church officals ran death camps and offended the Nazis so much they complained and got the Catholic Church officals kicked out of the death camps in Yugoslavia.

The Nazis were efficient at one thing [beside the death camps mentioned above]—they were efficient at PR. They had, in SF author William Gibson’s words, “a scary excess of design talent.” Witness the most infamous logo in history.

It’s telling that our movement conservatives fell for this; they also created a movement that is top-heavy on image and fantasy.

I’m worried that as the economy contracts, our out-of-work business execs, advertisers and marketers will turn to creating outright scams, MLM, pyramid, and phishing schemes. (The boom in scams already merited a slot on the network news last night.) The USA will become known for the equivalent of Nigerian 419 scams. These are “illegal,” but it starts to seem that all that separates legality from illegality was our trust and credit.

“Witness the most infamous logo in history. “

Which they didn’t invent. They just made clockwise a symbol that had been around a very long time and which is considered a Christian symbol. You can go to early Christian tombs and find it on them as well as Byzantine Churches a thousand or more years old.

The Nazis usage of symbols was effective but those symbols in particular the Cross and bird of prey are which often considered highly patriotic and promoted in the US. The Nazis being a descedant of the Christian Socalist movement also knew how to get the religious on their side and a lot of them were highly religious. The religious didn’t care about being coopted by the Nazis since the nazi goals and goals of the Catholic/Protestant Churches were often the same ones and used the same language of morality.

“advertisers and marketers will turn to creating outright scams”

We already are seeing that with the Cash4gold tv and internet ads. Giving you an eight or fourth at best what the gold metal in your jewerly is worth.

Really, due to my age I wasn’t a potential employee in the pre-bush years. And my major was history for fuck’s sake. That said, if someone wanted to pay me to “understand” these financial dohickies (because I believe they were designed expressly to confound comprehension, my student loans come to considerably less than even 50,000. I’d be quite happy with a “small” salary, and a modest bonus if I “figured out” what was going on persuant to fixing the problems and prosecuting those responsible. There is no shortage of smart people. I’m here, I’m trainable, I’m employable… and so are many many others.

Special little snowflakes my ASS.

Hell, I’d be willing to lower my price to a mere 200k per annum to do a better job than these jackasses are doing.  I probably lose money even more slowly.

Earth to nutcase: not everyone possessed of brilliance (even in the financial sector) is a money-sucking leech!

we left a lot of Nazis in place because they were the ones who made the trains run on time and the bureaucracy function properly

Which has what, precisely, to do with our leaving people in place who did the exact opposite?  The analogy not only involves Nazis, but involves competent Nazis and thus has very little relevance, in addition to being distasteful.

This nitwit gets humor points for Godwinning himself, but that’s about it.

Witness the most infamous logo in history.

Which they stole from Eastern religion.

<quote>“the original urban legend is that Mussonlini made the trains run on time.”

Wasn’t that not that Mussolini made the trains run on time, but that even the fascists couldn’t get Italian trains running on time? </quote>

Plz to see Snopes - http://www.snopes.com/history/govern/trains.asp

“advertisers and marketers will turn to creating outright scams”

We already are seeing that with the Cash4gold tv and internet ads. Giving you an eight or fourth at best what the gold metal in your jewerly is worth.

Not to mention “male enhancement pills.”  I really like the one where the (sexy female) voice over says “If our product didn’t work, could we really afford to do this?”  This being run infomercials on every goddam channel.  Hey, that sounds pretty convincing, where are the credit cards?

“Hey honey, I think it worked!  It looks a little bigger.  Do you think it’s a little bigger?  Huh?  I think it got bigger, a little bit.”

“Yeah yeah, it’s huge.  Are we gonna do this or not?”

I think it’s pretty clear that the US is full of suckers and con-men, and both groups resent those of us with some ability to detect bullshit.

If $250K isn’t enough, what is?  And as an important follow-up question: what sort of a bonus does Bush deserve?

“And as an important follow-up question: what sort of a bonus does Bush deserve?”

...I’m thinking a minimum wage job as a bathroom attendant at a filthy service station somewhere in the middle of Texas…

The better question is what Cheney deserves.  I wonder if it’s possible to reopen Devil’s Island, but with twice a day waterboarding…

“The people who are working now to wind down AIG’s obligations are necessary to reduce the company’s outstanding liabilities and get whatever is left of it back on track.  This is complicated stuff, and people who aren’t familiar with these kinds of contracts probably wouldn’t be able to untangle it quickly or efficiently.”

...somehow, by definition, you think the people who are smart enough to do this must earn 7-figure+ salaries/bonuses?

I guess I’m stupid enough to believe all that’s needed is a good group of forensic accountants and auditors, who will separate the jewels from the bullshit and then let us bury AIG and the others, as the Invisible Hand of the Marketplace is waiting for us to do before we can start to come back from this debacle. 

I resent in the extreme giving the people who looted all that money in the first place a second chance to rob us…

“most blameworthy are the borrowers who who bought houses they couldn’t afford”

Uh huh and who was it who pushed these houses and approved them even though there were lots of red flags that something wasn’t right?

“The books aren’t cooked.  Nothing was stolen. “

Actually more and more info is coming out that the books were cooked. Been stated for some time but a number of companies violated their internal guidelines on what loans were approved. They gamed the system in order to make their bonuses bigger.

“I resent in the extreme giving the people who looted all that money in the first place a second chance to rob us…”

I am pretty sure people would have been happy about the bonuses if they were actualy bounties paid to bring these suckers in for jail time.

The only way a below-250K salary drives talent away is if higher salaries are available to this talent elsewhere. Figures like 250K come from days of high returns on capital and creating value for shareholders. Those days are over, yet these people want taxpayer bailouts to keep their gravy train on its tracks. Please.

What happened was that a lot of mortgages were sold by people who weren’t interested in vetting the borrowers because they didn’t carry the loans on their balance sheet.  They made their money on fees, and sold the mortgages to banks that packaged them as securities. 

They thought that by aggregating loans, they could turn individually risky mortgages into safe securities.  Everyone thought this was true.  The MIT math geniuses doing the quantitative analysis, the guys in the boardroom, the sophisticated investors worldwide who bought this stuff up, the rating agencies and the insurers all thought this stuff looked great.

So didn’t the banks that bought up all of these mortgages have some fiduciary responsibility to make sure that what they were buying up wasn’t crap?

And then the investment houses who bought these bundled mortgages as financial instruments… they had no responsibility to make sure that what they were buying wasn’t crap?

And then finally, AIG… did they not have a responsibility top make sure that they weren’t insuring crap?  Or better yet, why were they even allowed to insure this stuff through “letter of the law” procedures which made their insurance not insurance so they could avoid the regulation that traditional insurance has?

You seem to want to place all the blame at the feet of homeowners and mortgage brokers for fudging their numbers in the process, but then completely exonerate everyone above them for not following enough due diligence to make sure that what they were investing in and ensuring wasn’t bad.

Yeah, the argument goes that if homeowners hadn’t lied and brokers hadn’t covered for their lies than none of this would have happened.  I argue that if a bank, investment firm, or insurance giant like AIG had done thier work and made sure not invest in these bad loans in the first place, none of this would have happened.

Because had AIG not insured this crap (even though they never had the capital to actually insure it), then the investment firms wouldn’t have bought the bundles, and then the banks wouldn’t have bought the loans in the first place, and then the brokers wouldn’t have signed off on bad loans, and then homeowners wouldn’t have bought that lie, “Sure, you can afford this $600,000 house on your $50K salary!!!”

The fact that you want to offer a blanket pardon to all parties above the mortgage brokers is just pathetic and sad.  Like these assclowns all the way up the chain didn’t know that they were investing in crap.  They didn’t care… they all got fabulously wealthy in the process.

“So didn’t the banks that bought up all of these mortgages have some fiduciary responsibility to make sure that what they were buying up wasn’t crap?

“

They full damn well knew what they were buying was crap. Once a certain act written and promoted by Republicans was passed in 1999 investment banks, mortage companies, and the credit agencies could all be one modeled into one entity rather then be kept seperate. It was one huge circle jerk that made the most largest ponzi schemes in history small potatoes.

Whoever up in the thread stated that the movers and shakers in the financial/mortgage/loan industries are known for their support of Dem candidates needs to stop the smoking of the crack. I’ve worked in those field(s) off-and-on for years, and have yet to meet anyone above lower-middle-management who is NOT a republican.