[BurlyShirley]

The Real Housewives of Wall StreetWhy is the Federal Reserve forking over $220 million in bailout money to the wives of two Morgan Stanley bigwigs?By Matt Taibbi
April 12, 2011 9:55 AM ET


America has two national budgets, one official, one unofficial. The official budget is public record and hotly debated: Money comes in as taxes and goes out as jet fighters, DEA agents, wheat subsidies and Medicare, plus pensions and bennies for that great untamed socialist menace called a unionized public-sector workforce that Republicans are always complaining about. According to popular legend, we're broke and in so much debt that 40 years from now our granddaughters will still be hooking on weekends to pay the medical bills of this year's retirees from the IRS, the SEC and the Department of Energy.

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411?page=1

Two things:

1. I hate Obama more every time I read an article about Wall Street.

2. When is Taibbi going to hit the national spotlight with this reporting? Rolling Stone is a big deal already I know, but this should be the top story on every network. He does amazing work!

 

[Pesqueeb]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411?page=1

Two things:

1. I hate Obama more every time I read an article about Wall Street.

2. When is Taibbi going to hit the national spotlight with this reporting? Rolling Stone is a big deal already I know, but this should be the top story on every network. He does amazing work!

1. While Obama is just as guilty as anyone in the whitehouse of sucking Wall Streets cock and is deserving of your wrath, whom you actually really need to be angry at is Clinton and the Republican controlled congress of 1999.

2. While I agree, he is hardly impartial, which is why only Rolling Stone is printing his stuff.

 

[BurlyShirley]

Taibbi does report for NBC nightly news on occasion. Or at least I've seen him on there before. It's just amazing to me that he digs up this kind of dirt and it's not got people lighting torches and carrying pitchforks outside the capital and on wall street.

Being angry at Clinton instead of Obama doesnt make a lot of sense to me because Clinton hasn't been in the Whitehouse in a decade, and Obama's there now. Seriously, between this, extending Bush's tax cuts, and the BP fiasco I really have little respect at all for him.

 

[johnbryanpeters]

'K. BurlyShirly's getting caught in the trap of expecting the chief executive to be omnipotent.

I think that Obama has done about as well as anyone could at making the best of a very bad set of circumstances. It's not clear to me that I could come up with an individual who could do any better.

 

[Pesqueeb]

Burly,
For your reading pleasure: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Glass–Steagall_Act

If it wasn't for the repeal, there is a very compelling argument to be made that we would not be in the financial mess were in now, thus making a lot of Taibbi's recent writing irrelevant.

This seems particularly omniscient:

3. Securities activities can be risky, leading to enormous losses. Such losses could threaten the integrity of deposits. In turn, the Government insures deposits and could be required to pay large sums if depository institutions were to collapse as the result of securities losses.
4. Depository institutions are supposed to be managed to limit risk. Their managers thus may not be conditioned to operate prudently in more speculative securities businesses. An example is the crash of real estate investment trusts sponsored by bank holding companies (in the 1970s and 1980s).

 

[Silver]

I think that Obama has done about as well as anyone could at making the best of a very bad set of circumstances. It's not clear to me that I could come up with an individual who could do any better.

The guy who campaigned...

 

[BurlyShirley]

'K. BurlyShirly's getting caught in the trap of expecting the chief executive to be omnipotent.

How so? Only a god could not keep throwing money at wall street, not implement a media blackout in the midst of the greatest environmental catastrophe of all time, and not agree to a tax cut extention that wasn't needed?

I really don't think Im asking too much at all.

 

[Toshi]

My only complaint is the hypocritical Rep. cries to cut social programs.

Our society is built on funny money. Might as well spread it around more equitably until the day comes, some decades (?) down the road, when our T-bill interest rates simply don't allow us to spend as we do.

Saving pennies when no one has the political will, clout, or sense of impending catastrophe to cut defense and Medicare as necessary is simply grandstanding.

 

[Toshi]

[crossposted from my blog]

If a man is defined by the scale of what troubles him, then most of the time I must be a pretty small and sad person indeed. Of all the injustices in the world, the ones that consistently rile me day in and day out involve the sense that petty assholes come out ahead here on Long Island: witness that their disrespect in cutting off other drivers on the parkway or in parking obstinately in the fire lane at the mall is never met with karmic retribution.

On the other hand, Matt Taibbi's article published yesterday in Rolling Stone, The Real Housewives of Wall Street, angers me on a vast, international scale, so perhaps I may be redeemed yet. If you haven't read it yet, go read it now.

No, really, read it.

Back again? Angry? Me, too. I can even put my finger on what angers me so: it's the same sense of injustice that I feel on the packed parkways, only writ large. It's the realization that income inequality, which doesn't bother me, per se, arises from corruption, favoritism, and cronyism rather than from merit and hard work. In short, it's a bunch of Wall Street assholes who do nothing but play with other peoples' money figuring out ways to enrich themselves at the expense of, well, everyone else, and getting away with it scot free.

It's the American Dream seen wandering drunk, unshaven, and destitute down some dimly lit back alley in Gotham City.

I can deal with my petty Long Island concerns by lanesplitting through traffic on my motorcycle and simply avoiding the madhouse of the mall. In other words, I can remove myself from the equation, and return to my favored position as an outside observer. I can't, however, remove myself from the financial system to which we all are betrothed, and my lone vote against the corporate-owned Republican and Democratic party candidates won't make a whit of a difference.

All I can do, then, is vent my frustration and bide my time until enough like-minded people coalesce into a viable movement. Such a movement doesn't exist today. The Teabaggers seem to care more about enforcing their religious mores on the populace than anything else, the Paultards are blinded by their Libertarian fervor, and the major party activists are either cynical pragmatists or naive. All I can hope is that some day people will open their eyes… some day.

 

[MMike]

Everything is just perfect in Canada though.

 

[Pesqueeb]

Everything is just perfect in Canada though.

Shut your whorish mouth you Freedom® hating pinko.

 

[-BB-]

http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/news/the-real-housewives-of-wall-street-look-whos-cashing-in-on-the-bailout-20110411?page=1

Two things:

1. I hate Obama more every time I read an article about Wall Street.

2. When is Taibbi going to hit the national spotlight with this reporting? Rolling Stone is a big deal already I know, but this should be the top story on every network. He does amazing work!

LOL... you are SUCH a hypocryte.

1) So you hate Obame bc of this? And I quote, "a huge roaring river of cash flowing out of the Federal Reserve to destinations neither chosen by the president nor reviewed by Congress, but instead handed out by fiat by unelected Fed officials using a seemingly nonsensical and apparently unknowable methodology."

2) So what about getting rid of all the tax breaks for the rich. You for or against that one? By the same arguement that most "pubs" make, this extra money that is going to these rich exec wives will "HELP STIMULATE THE ECONOMY". So which is it? Can we remove the tax breaks? You obviously don't want these folks to have more $$ at "our" expense. and by "our" I mean all of us making under $250k per year.

 

[-BB-]

Taibbi does report for NBC nightly news on occasion. Or at least I've seen him on there before. It's just amazing to me that he digs up this kind of dirt and it's not got people lighting torches and carrying pitchforks outside the capital and on wall street.

Being angry at Clinton instead of Obama doesnt make a lot of sense to me because Clinton hasn't been in the Whitehouse in a decade, and Obama's there now. Seriously, between this, extending Bush's tax cuts, and the BP fiasco I really have little respect at all for him.

OMG... I take back my words. You do have some sense in you.

So in this respect I actually AGREE with BS. Quick, duck and cover... it is the end of the world.


#1 - These folks should NOT have gotten this money - We agree on that.
#2 - By the same token, we should also not be giving them all the tax breaks that we have given them recently. I do not blame Obama for that though. You think he WANTED to give it to them? No, he had to give into the republicans on that item in order to get other things. So I blame the republicans, not him.