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Actions speak louder than words

By Michael J. Smith on Saturday April 4, 2009 08:10 PM

Yesterday I passed along an item that depicted Obie talking tough to bank honchos about their high-on-the-hog salaries.

The reality is a little different:

Administration Seeks an Out On Bailout Rules for Firms

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid... limits on lavish executive pay....

The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials.

Comments (6)

"At first, when the initiative was being developed last year, the Bush administration decided to apply executive-pay limits to firms participating in this program. But Obama officials reversed that decision days before it was unveiled on March 3 and lifted the curbs, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions were private."

Nuff said.

hce:

Is this the same as the new initiative which is guaranteeing big loans to hedge funds to buy up "troubled" assets? If so, it is merely part of the new charade of pretending that it's not the taxpayer but private investors who are bailing out the banks.

Nice catch. It is the hedge funds and private equity investors who are being given a taste. Watch the Tom Ferguson interviews on The Real News Network to get the details.

The best part of this angle is that it gets to the story behind the investment banks where private equity funds (read aristocracy) used the deregulated bank venture capital with little down to ream out the economy through such instruments as leveraged buy outs.

I can't wait till names start getting named.

op:

that's me
third from the left
the mush was excellent btw

notice my tail ???

has a kinda ah distinctive
graceful elegance to it
don't ya think

op:

i interupt here with a bulletin off the red wire

talk about "theoretical work"
comrade smiff read this:

http://revcom.us/avakian/Out%20into%20the%20World/Avakian_Out_into_World_pt5-en.html

Those Kids Today:

Loved your Commie Bob link. Allow me to translate. I speak commie.

This means "some people in my cult are sick of selling my newspapers. They went off and started their own newspaper and now my income's been cut in half."

"A number of erstwhile communists—including some who have gone from being in the camp of revolution to sinking into the cesspool of counter-revolution—are characterized, in their philosophical-ideological outlook, by a rather stark pragmatism and empiricism, which goes along with, and reinforces, rampant economism and revisionism, particularly in the form of “the movement is everything, the final aim nothing.” Generally, this is also combined with an embrace of bourgeois democracy—and, where this does not involve an outright abandonment of communism, it is marked by the attempt to identify communism with bourgeois democracy. Among some of these former communists (and some “intellectual fellow travelers of communism”) there is also a full-scale retreat toward relativism, agnosticism, and scholasticism. (By scholasticism I mean not just dealing with theoretical abstractions in their own right—which can be very important, particularly if this is part of an overall correct method and approach—but making a principle of divorcing theory from practice and in particular from the struggle to change the world; examining—or playing around with—ideas not only in abstraction from such practice and struggle but as a substitute for it, and as something held to be more important than understanding reality as it actually exists, let alone actually changing it.)"

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