Nominally, he withdrew because of tax questions, but there are reports that this New York Times OP/ED convinced him to withdraw.
When even the New York Times realizes that you have functioned as an über lobbyist and calls you on it as game over.
Matt Taibbi was far more colorful in his description of Daschle and his revolving door porfiteering, “Tom Daschle would suck off a corpse for a cheeseburger.”
It appears that for investment banking types an outrageous salary is not enough.
They also need bonuses. Bonuses whether their company makes money or not. Whether their company is on the bederal dole or not.
It’s because….It’s because….I don’t know why, but the rules don’t apply to them.
BTW, the last paragraph of the story is the killer:
“Without a doubt, $18 billion is a lot of money, but it’s a drop in the bucket on Wall Street,” said Gustavo Dolfino, president of the WhiteRock Group, a headhunter for the banks. “These bonuses are down, and the salaries are not enough for these people. They can’t live on $150 to $180,000, so they haven’t saved any money. They put it on credit lines and at bonus time, they thought they’d pay it off.
Median family income is $49K/year, and they cannot live on three times that.
Andred Lahde got it right when he called them, “The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government.“
AIG is looking getting more US government aid to unload its dodgy assets because at this point it has only been able to unload about $1b in assets, and that money had to go to retention payments:
So far, AIG has announced sales of only a few smaller businesses that, at least based on deals where a sale price was announced, will earn it a little over $1 billion. That is about what AIG is paying employees in retention payments to keep them from leaving for rivals, which could further erode the value of its units.
They need to pay money to the the very people who ran the company into the ground, in an employment scenario where no one on Wall Street is hiring, because they are worried they might go somewhere else.
I’m not just referring to the people who actually sold insurance here, I’m referring to the people who actually set up the CDS catastrophe that took the company down:
American International Group Inc., the insurer saved from collapse by government money after losses on credit-default swaps, offered about $450 million in retention pay to employees of the unit that sold the derivatives, according to two people familiar with the situation.
About 400 workers at the financial products unit may get the money in two installments, said the people, who declined to be named because details of the payments were confidential. The business was responsible for about $34 billion in writedowns since 2007 as the market value of swaps AIG sold to banks plunged amid the subprime mortgage market collapse.
They are not just paying people who were passengers at some car wreck in another division, they are paying the driver of the car that crashed.
What’s more, the driver was drunk, sending a text message, getting a blow job, and speeding at about 150 mph when they plowed into an orphanage.
Again, heads I win, tails you lose remuneration, bonuses to the tune of over a million dollars per employee to the folks who bankrupted the company.
After $3.5 billion (Aus) it won’t meet specifications, and it is going to be 4 years late.
And the government of Australia’s response appears to be to say, “Thank you sir, can I have another,” they are revising the terms of their contract to match what Boeing isn’t delivering.
There is already so much money down the drain that Boeing owns the Australian ministry of defence.
So he has been removed from office, and Pat Quinn, the Lt. Governor, assumes his powers.
Good. Not only do we have cloture, but I don’t have to struggle with spelling “Blagojevich” any more.
Update: Democratic members of the Judiciary Committee have just denied that Holder said any such thing. I’d like to see Holder deny this too.
If this report in the Washington Times is accurate, Eric Holder just agreed not to prosecute people who engaged in torture:
Sen. Christopher “Kit” Bond, a Republican from Missouri and the vice chairman of the Senate Select Committee on Intelligence, said in an interview with The Washington Times that he will support Eric H. Holder Jr.’s nomination for Attorney General because Mr. Holder assured him privately that Mr. Obama’s Justice Department will not prosecute former Bush officials involved in the interrogations program.
Mr. Holder’s promise apparently was key to moving his nomination forward. Today, the Senate Judiciary Committee voted 17-2 to favorably recommend Holder for the post. He is likely to be confirmed by the Senate soon.
Sen. Bond also said that Mr. Holder told him in a private meeting Tuesday that he will not strip the telecommunications companies that cooperated with the National Security Agency after the Sept. 11, 2001, attacks of retroactive legal immunity from civil lawsuits–removing another potential sticking point among GOP senators.
When the United States ratified the Convention against Torture in 1994, it created an obligation to affirmatively act to prevent torture, and to prosecute torturers and co-conspirators through, “effective legislative, administrative, judicial or other measures to prevent acts of torture in any territory under its jurisdiction,” including taking steps to “ensure that all acts of torture are offenses under its criminal law”.
If the report is true, and note that it’s the Washington Times quoting Kit Bond, so the possibility that the reporter or the Senator is lying is most assuredly non-zero, so, Holder could have said something as innocuous as, “There is such a thing as prosecutorial discretion,” and Kit Bond could have related this as, “there will be no prosecutions.”
Certainly, the Republicans have in the past fabricated promises in the hope that they would become accepted as the status quo…..It’s called poisoning the well.
That being said, if what Mr. Bond related is a true description of the discussions, then Eric Holder has entered into an illegal conspiracy to coverup torture, which is, under the convention against, a violation of the Convention against Torture in and of itself.
The pertinent sections of the convention are below (all emphasis mine, and but I’m an engineer, not a lawyer, dammit!*):
*I LOVE IT when I get to go all Doctor McCoy!!!
I’ve always said that it is rife in opportunities for gaming the system and abuse.
We now can say that the system has already been gamed and abused:
China dams reveal flaws in climate-change weapon
By JOE McDONALD and CHARLES J. HANLEY – 1 day ago
XIAOXI, China (AP) — The hydroelectric dam, a low wall of concrete slicing across an old farming valley, is supposed to help a power company in distant Germany contribute to saving the climate — while putting lucrative “carbon credits” into the pockets of Chinese developers.
But in the end the new Xiaoxi dam may do nothing to lower global-warming emissions as advertised. And many of the 7,500 people displaced by the project still seethe over losing their homes and farmland.
…..
This is not a but, it’s a feature. If you want Wall Street and its worldwide siblings to run this shell game, this is what is called “value added”.
This is why a carbon tax is the way to go.
After driving Lehman Brothers into the ground, he just sold his Florida mansion to his wife for $10.
He’s burying assets with his wife so that he will be “poor” when people and regulators go after him.
I think that this would be a good time for the US Attorney to start investigating whether this is a criminal conspiracy to defraud potential litigants.
Floyd Norris notes that the recent collapse of Wall Street may lead to a reduction in pay for bankers of all stripes.
I would further add that this is a very good thing.
He cites a National Bureau of Economic Research working paper, Wages and Human Capital in the U.S. Financial Industry, 1909-2006, which notes that wages in the financial industry are at an all time high.
One of the authors the recent runup in wages to, “A new era of financial innovation,” and so the “The financial sector became once again a high-skill, high-wage industry.”
Talk about not getting the point. The stock brokers and bankers in 1929 were not highly skilled or intelligent, they had just figured out a scam that allowed them to get paid for putting the rest of the poor house, and the same applies to the investment bankers in 2007.
Banking and investment exploded as a portion of the economy in the late 1920s and 2001-2005 because it became an easy way to take people’s money. There was no real innovation, there was a simply pursuit of personal gain at the expense of the real economy.
Simply put, if you made robbing banks legal, the activity formerly known as robbing banks would explode.
Certainly, there was some additional talent attracted by this money, but the real attraction was that this was easy money for stupid people to make.
And anyone with half a brain, as Andrew Lahde so eloquently stated in his resignation letter could take them to the cleaners:
….. I was in this game for the money. The low hanging fruit, i.e. idiots whose parents paid for prep school, Yale, and then the Harvard MBA, was there for the taking. These people who were (often) truly not worthy of the education they received (or supposedly received) rose to the top of companies such as AIG, Bear Stearns and Lehman Brothers and all levels of our government. All of this behavior supporting the Aristocracy, only ended up making it easier for me to find people stupid enough to take the other side of my trades. God bless America. …..
But the important thing to remember here is that the, “low hanging fruit,” continued to make excellent wages, and obscene bonuses anyway.
Too many people have been failing upward for years because who their daddy and mommy were, and a disproportionate number of them seem to be Harvard MBAs, like this guy.
People on wing pic courtesy of The Big Picture.
Executives at Merrill-Lynch rushed their bonuses so as to beat the official takeover by Bank of America, December 29 instead of January or February.
The BoA deal closed January 1, and Merrill hurridly allocated, “about $3bn to $4bn,” for bonuses, despite a $21.5 billion loss in 2008.
I guess that this is because their base salaries, probably more than $¼ million/year on the low end, were just not enough to incentivize them, because there are just so many investment banks aggressively hiring, and they would poach their valued employees.
Delightful.
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An NSA whistleblower was on Olbermann about this, and said that journalists were under constant surveillance.
As I said in May 2008, they likely wiretapped Christiane Amanpour in 2004, and her husband, James Rubin, was senior adviser for national security affairs for the John Kerry campaign.
This is not just spying on the press. This is spying on the political opposition by proxy.
It appears that now that Bush and His Evil Minions&trade are on their way out, judges are getting rather a bit more aggressive, or maybe the wheels of justice are just grinding slowly, and have caught up with reality, because Judge HenryKennedy Jr. of the US District Court for DC has just told the White House to turn over all computer storage devices in their possession, and to open up their PCs to forensic investigation, in order to support lawsuits involving the Iraq War and the Valeria Plame outing.
The judge wants all the emails.
What’s more, it appears that someone was actually looking for them, because Helen Hong, a lawyer for the DoJ civil division just said that they have found the backup tapes with the emails in question.
It’s always the tapes, isn’t it.
Pass the popcorn.
An exchange between freshman Congressman Alan Grayson and Federal Reserve Vice Chairman Donald Kohn, where the distinguished gentleman from Florida points out the Fed is spending around $4000.00 (actually, it total, it’s closer to $20,000.00 at this point when other programs are rolled in) of taxpayer money for every man, woman, and child in the US, and refusing to provide details.
The Fed is completely out of control, and has gone native, and believes that the financial industry is the economy, and Grayson shows just how corrupt the whole process has become in this exchange.
Just 3 months after we threw $350 billion at the banking system, which was more like $9 trillion when you count what the Fed is doing, we have exploding bank losses threatening bank solvency, with one of the main contributors being, “the unexpectedly high costs of shotgun mergers arranged by federal officials last year.”
Thank you Henry Paulson, now we have Bank of America getting in line for a Citi style bailout, because the black hole that is Merrill Lynch is deeper than anticipated, among other clusterf%$#s.
As Atrios says, “Just nationalize the lot of them and end this.”
Well, NY Attorney General Andrew Cuomo just caught most of the insurance industry using bogus numbers to determine usual and customary health care charges.
Screwing their customers.
Seriously, we need to go with a British style National Health Services system now. Anything that keeps health insurers in the loop will be an epic fail.
The Department of Justice’s report on Bradley Schlozman is absolutely scathing, saying that he:
But 2 weeks before the new administration, no charges will be filed.
So, we have a flat out statement that he committed perjury, you know the things that the Republicans went Jihad over with Bill Clinton when it was: (a) Arguable, depending on your definition of sex, and (b) Not related to his official duties.
Even so, because Bush and His Evil Minions™ have thoroughly polluted the Justice Department, so the U.S. Attorney’s Office for the District of Columbia has declined to prosecute him.
If anyone out there lives in Kansas, how about filing a complaint with the disciplinary authorities there, because that is where he is practicing law. (more contact information at the link)
If true….
We now have reports that Barack Obama will issue an executive order closing Guantánamo in his first week in office.
It would be nice. It would be nicer still if it were implemented immediately.
I think that the former is likely, but I think that the shut down process will take 12-18 months.
Additionally, Glenn Greenwald notes increasing indications that the closing of the camp won’t result in real trials for real criminals, and that they are still working on an extrajudicial trial system which will allow the use of torture evidence.
Reid and Durbin complete their climbdown from their unsteady moral high ground, and accept that Illinois Gov. Rod Blagojevich’s appointment of Roland Burris is in order, and they will seat him.
Well, at least it’s over.