Will Congress Approve Bonus Payments To Lehman Brothers Perps; A Few $700 Billion Questions

$2.5 billion for Lehman Brothers New York staff, some of the perpetrators of this financial crisis that the Bush deregulation regime bailout plan demands taxpayers pay for.  What's wrong with this picture?
 
As Chris at AmericaBlog wrote on Saturday, "Lehman collapsed but "key players" to get $2.5 BILLION in bonuses. "   "This is yet another example of why we should let all of these bastards rot on the vine and go penniless, without any direct or indirect help. Not until the taxpayers get their profit from stepping up to save Wall Street. I don't care if $2.5 BILLION is a fraction of what they would have received had the miracle of miracles (their pyramid scheme worked) succeeded. Again, there is no reason why we should trust Wall Street insider and former Goldman Sachs executive Hank Paulson. No reason at all. What this latest story does is show us that no, bailouts somehow always end up reinforcing bad behavior. As Noriel Roubini says, it's a matter of "privatizing profits and socializing losses.

"Wall Street invested hundreds of millions over years, lobbying Republicans and Washington for a supposed "free market" economy. They got what they wanted, so let them live with the goddamn results of it. None of them ought to profit one penny - not one - from this mess. If anyone deserves to profit, it ought to be the American public, who is getting shafted here. Before one more damned penny is given out to Wall Street, let the US get it's money and then some. Let them all live on government wages for a while before they start shopping at Tiffany again. They've already been paid more than enough."
 
"As the UK Times reported: "STAFF at Lehman's New York office who helped to cause the world's biggest corporate bankruptcy are to share in a $2.5 billion bonanza.

"The bonus, which has been described by London staff as a "scandal" has been pledged by Barclays Capital, the British-based bank that last week acquired Lehman's American operation and took on 10,000 staff."

David Sirtoa asks five questions about this bailout:

"1. What will prevent the bill from allowing both parties to use the guise of purchasing worthless mortgages to further enrich their largest campaign donors?

2. How are Americans and investors supposed to feel confident that the crisis will be solved, if the very people who engineered the crisis are being relied on to solve it?

3. How is this meltdown a failure of "oversight" if it has almost nothing to do with illegality?

4. When did a crisis suddenly mean that giving away taxpayer cash to campaign donors is laudably apolitical, but spending taxpayer money on taxpayers is inappropriately "political?"

5. How are we going to pay for this?

"I explore all of these questions in the article, which you can read here. As I note, this week we will see Thomas Frank's wrecking crew using Naomi Klein's shock doctrine to justify a bigger free lunch than David Cay Johnston ever imagined. And until these basic questions are answered, nobody should have a single iota of confidence that what's being proposed is anything less than the most anti-democratic power grab and corporate giveaway in contemporary American history."

This Bush bailout scam should make American taxpayers furious and ready to revolt.

 

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