The Daily Whim
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Sat. Feb 07, 2009
My Brain As A Source Of Steam Power
There are days that I believe my brain could be a wonderful source of energy, if I could just tap the steam venting from my ears due to the acts of our elected representatives, and the businesses that support them. Three such stories are heating my home at the moment.
First, from right here in Georgia, we have the Peanut Corporation of America: “As far back as 2007, salmonella-laced products were shipped by a Georgia peanut company that knew the peanuts probably were tainted and sometimes after tests confirmed that contamination, inspection records show.”
They knowingly shipped tainted product. In the end, eight people died and nearly 600 more were made ill in 43 states.
In some circles, knowingly giving someone poisoned food is called “premeditated murder.” There are certainly people in Guantanamo who’ve done less.
Why is this company … still a company? Why are there no criminal charges yet filed?
Because we live in the Land Of No Accountability.
It’s a land where you can run your multi-billion dollar financial services company into the ground, cost your customers their nest eggs while giving out billions in bonuses, then get a government bailout to save your butt, and have your hefty salaries defended by sitting Senators against the $500,000 annual salary cap proposed by the President:
Senate Minority Whip Jon Kyl (R-AZ) blamed the “tone deaf” bankers for creating the political environment that allows Obama to call for a cap.
“Because of their excesses, very bad things begin to happen, like the United States government telling a company what it can pay its employees. That’s not a good thing in America,” Kyl told the Huffington Post.
“What executives have done is troubling, but it’s equally troubling to have government telling shareholders how much they can pay the executives,” said Sen. Mel Martinez (R-FL).
Sen. James Inhofe (R-OK) said that he is “one of the chief defenders of Obama on the Republican side” for the president’s efforts to reach across the aisle. But, said Inhofe, “as I was listening to him make those statements I thought, is this still America? Do we really tell people how to run [a business], and who to pay and how much to pay?”
GOP Opposes Pay Limits On Bailed-Out Bankers
Yes, sir, Senator, we do. We tell them “you may forgo a public bailout, go bankrupt, and pay yourself whatever you want out of the remnants. But if you’ve run your company to the point it is [1] too big to fail, [2] is failing anyway, and [3] therefore requires a bailout to stay in business, you have already effectively lost control of your company, and you will have to live by the terms of the lenders. Or go home. This is life in the ‘free market’.”
We tell them, “Apple Inc. is free to pay Steve Jobs and his VP’s as much as they wish, because they haven’t run their company so poorly they required a bailout. You, however, need some forced humility.”
We tell them, “the fact you are being allowed to keep ANY job, never mind one earning a half million per year, makes you far, far, FAR luckier than the 600,000 Americans who lost their jobs in January.”
Then you tell them to STFU before a rider is added demanding that all CEO’s and board members of bailed out companies must resign immediately, due to their clear professional failure. Because they deserve to lose their jobs far more than the 600,000 who lost theirs in January.
Of course, that pay cap was a part of the stimulus package that the Senate is still arguing about. It’s my understanding that Republicans have pointed out $19 billion in spending in this package that they consider wasteful.
It’s about an $800 billion package, so that’s about 2% “waste.” Or as we know from our American advertising, it’s “98% pure” or “98% fat free.”
And some of the objections are laughable. One example:
What in heaven’s name does Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell have against honeybees?
That question haunted my days after I saw the Kentucky Republican on TV fulminating about a provision he found in the proposed government stimulus package. The provision, he said, would provide $150 million for “honeybee insurance.”
“This is nonsense,” he said, as if he took it personally. You had to think he got stung as a kid or maybe caught a local swarm in the act of recruiting aphids for Al Qaeda.
Their campaign was joined Tuesday by Sen. David Vitter (R-La.), who stood on the floor of the chamber challenging “any member to come and explain what that provision was.”
I’m no senator, but I’m pleased to inform Vitter that it is, in fact, a disaster insurance program for all livestock producers. Beekeepers obviously would be minor beneficiaries next to, say, cattle ranchers, so it’s a tad bit dishonest to label the whole program “honeybee insurance.”
The provision simply continues a program enacted by Congress last year, overriding a veto by President Bush. In other words, the Senate voted on it twice in 2008 — once to enact and once to override. Connoisseurs of political comedy will see the punch line coming: McConnell and Vitter voted yea both times.
So it turns out that McConnell isn’t really against honeybees. He’s only using them to pretend that he’s got a principled objection to a stimulus plan aimed at pulling the country out of the most severe recession in decades.
The honeybees, and the rest of us, are merely collateral damage.
Michael Hiltzik: Republican buzz on stimulus plan has no sting
So, he’s now raising Cain about the extension of an expenditure he already voted for twice, once over the objections of his party leader. In other words, he was for it … twice … before he was against it.
For me, the steam comes from these silly word games our elected leaders play while the majority suffer. For others, the issues are far more near and dear:
As a mother of a severely disabled child I resent the question posed by the Republican leadership, and the stance of the party against special education funding for years, how is funding special education stimulative?
I had my baby. This is what you want, right? Moms to do the right thing and bear the disabled child? OK – she’s here. Where is the help, the love, the care, the support from the party that encourages this anti-abortion behavior?
Education is stimulative. Special education more so. For every child in regular ed, we hire 1/32 of a teacher. For every child in special education we hire 1/10 of a teacher, 1/5 of an aide, 1/10 of a bus driver, some part of a nurse, some part of an occupational therapist, a speech therapist, a physical therapist.
These are GOOD jobs and these are people who do good works every day of their work lives, works that most of us do not do, and that many of us, apparently, would not even pay for.
Chambliss, Isakson will vote against Obama stimulus package
The market on “tone deafness” has not been cornered by the CEO’s of financial services companies. It has always resided in the greatest quantity in the US Congress.
For now. However, events like the above make me think it is very possible that much of it will be forcibly shipped out in 2010. The people who are more concerned with winning some partisan battle than with fixing our country’s huge problems, may find in 2010 that they become far more familiar with the unemployment lines so many Americans are in today.
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As a Stanley Steamer, you’re in good company. This is my 5th recession as a small business owner. Each one has been scary and depressing for months on end, as is this one. But with this one it’s hard to simply say to myself, “things will get better, you just have to hang on”. Is this that one that forcibly retires me? Will I be saying, “Welcome to McDonalds…” in a few months? I saw a neighbor who is an airline pilot the other day wearing a Walmart smock, greeting people at the store.
To see this “Washington as usual” crap going on infuriates me. My Senators infuriate me. My Congressman, apologizing to Rush Limbaugh on the air was particularly disgusting. He needs to join my neighbor at Walmart but he figures he’s safe out here in Cobb County.
Were horrible mistakes made last fall in the great bank bailout? Sure. Is inflation a major concern? Sure. Will government spending stimulate the economy $2 for every dollar spent? Yeah, sorry conservatives, it’s been proven again and again. The only question is by how much they can water it down in some kind of point scoring game that people who have to live in the real world are completely fed up with.
Welcome to the birth of the Socialist States of America. Yes, it’s true- it’s socialism when the government owns the companies, and that’s just what you’re claiming is the case. The government gets to buy them (bail them out) when they get too big, they get no choice in this (their failures would negatively impact the country, so we MUST bail them out), and now the government gets to run them by arbitrary rules.
Don’t get me wrong, I don’t think it’s all that cool for these guys to be paying themselves millions while the boat sinks. But I REALLY REALLY don’t think it’s cool for the government to tell me as a business owner or stockholder just how much I can pay someone. In the form of taxes, congress already has the power to effectively control businesses- why give them the next big stick? Why not go the whole route, and just go ahead and grant the government ownership of all financial organizations, car companies, health care providers, and be done with it?
If our congresscritters weren’t in such a big stinking rush to pass the OMG OMG OMG IfWeDon’tPassItTomorrowWe’reAllDoomed!! bailout in the first place, they might have added a few stipulations as to it’s use. Now they’re all pissed because they did something stupid, they’re looking for some way to hide the fact that the real dupes here are the people who ramrodded the whole TARP thing to begin with (yeah, that includes Bush and the Republicans), so they’re scapegoating folks who are just being given the compensations they were contracted to years ago. While the flames from those pyres burn, they hope you won’t notice they’re about to do the same thing again, to the tune of nearly a trillion dollars.
I dunno about y’all, but when I’ve been in financial straits, I didn’t run up the credit card. That’s just what they’re doing here, and it’s going to hurt. bad.
Bailouts were a mistake, and the insanely huge government stimulus package (yes, it’s stimulating the government, not me) will be an even bigger mistake. It’s one my children will pay for for the rest of their lives.
“But I REALLY REALLY don’t think it’s cool for the government to tell me as a business owner or stockholder just how much I can pay someone.”
Well, I’ve said before about these bailed out companies, “I’m personally troubled with the idea of the government stepping in to void a contract between two private parties that was entirely legal when it was created. However, I’m absolutely pumped about the idea of a new tax law that states any bonus or parting payment that exceeds 150% of annual salary is payroll taxed (as in, withheld) at a 95% rate.”
However, I have to ask, what do you think happens in bankruptcy court? The judge voids your internal contracts to insure a dictated payment plan to those owed.
So you can take a bailout and let the government dictate executive salaries, or you can file bankruptcy and have the judge in your affairs the same way … or (here’s a radical idea) you can run your company in a manner that requires neither a bailout nor bankruptcy, and not be subject to such whims.
I’m guessing this is the course your company has chosen. Good on ya!
“I dunno about y’all, but when I’ve been in financial straits, I didn’t run up the credit card. That’s just what they’re doing here, and it’s going to hurt. bad. Bailouts were a mistake, and the insanely huge government stimulus package (yes, it’s stimulating the government, not me) will be an even bigger mistake. It’s one my children will pay for for the rest of their lives.”
And this is news?
Our national debt cracked $1 trillion about 28 years ago. My 26 year old step-son is paying interest on debt run up before he was born, during the first round of 1980’s tax cuts. His daughter, now two months old, will be paying on that decades old debt as well.
Because through the course of four presidents, over the past 26 years we have paid down the national debt exactly once. The other 25 years, we just piled on some more. That national debt cracked $10 trillion late in Bush’s second term.
The truth is that this country, public and private, has been on a spending binge for well over two decades, spun on credit. And that house of cards has crumbled.
And like any time there is a price to be paid, you can pay it all now, right now up front (i.e., take all of the unemployment, dislocation, and potential depression from a course of zero bailouts and no stimulus) … or you can pay it over time. The choice, for nearly three decades, has been the long term easy payment plan.
I don’t like where we are any more than you do. But deficit spending is nothing new, in fact, for many years it was stated policy, backed by repeated tax cuts (as it now stands, the stimulus package is 42% tax cuts).
Some things don’t change. I think the last real honest-to-God fiscal conservative left DC sometime in the 1970’s. And they haven’t been seen in the executive branch since the 1950’s.
as it now stands, the stimulus package is 42% tax cuts
Don’t fall for that line of salesmanship. Sending out a whole bunch of ‘refund’ checks to people who didn’t even pay taxes, while refusing to give one to some pretty ordinary folks isn’t a tax cut- it’s income redistribution. It’s vote purchasing. It’s a lie.
I’d much prefer that they take that money and use it to build and staff a hospital, then give vouchers to those without insurance to use that service. Yes, this is also redistribution to some degree, but at least we’re not giving someone $600 for beer and cigarettes.
I still get annoyed when people talk fondly of their earlier stimulus checks, and ask me what I did with mine. My reply is always the same: “I was forced to give mine to someone who isn’t a productive member of society, so he could use it to buy drugs.”
“Don’t fall for that line of salesmanship. Sending out a whole bunch of ‘refund’ checks to people who didn’t even pay taxes, while refusing to give one to some pretty ordinary folks isn’t a tax cut- it’s income redistribution.”
Well, you and I must have some very different sources. What I read is that the “economic stimulus package sought by President Barack Obama includes $275 billion in temporary tax breaks for businesses and individuals”
Included items for business, not individuals:
And, yes, the silly rebate for individuals in is there as well. And it will, once again, be used by people to pay down debt, pay off bills, or placed in savings for storms ahead.
At least, that’s what the people I know used the last one for, and I have no reason to expect they will this time use it to buy crack.
And, Todd, I may indeed use a portion of my ‘refund’ to buy a six pack of expensive beer. I see it as a way to celebrate the fact some tiny chunk of my money has come home.