We are mad as hell

Claire McCaskill is mad as hell and so am I. Don’t get me wrong. I don’t disagree with bonuses, especially when the companies are making insane profits, like during the mid 2000s. I understand that Wall Street augment their salary structure with bonus payments for various purposes. However, I have a problem when financial institutions like Merrill Lynch takes TAXPAYER money from TARP to pay out bonuses for their executives. How can you justify 5 billion in bonuses when your company just lost 21 BILLION dollars and are asking for federal assistance? When your business is on the verge of bankruptcy, it’s time to reconsider compensation packages along with reduction in force and other methods. In my own industry, people are losing jobs left and right. Those still employed, we are taking pay cuts, reduction in hours, benefits, etc. in order to survive and pay our bills, and we do all of these without the help of the government or taxpayers.

I also can’t believe that some on Wall Street are trying to defend their bonuses as if we, the taxpayer, owed them. Don’t try to justify taxpayers paying your bonus payments by telling me that you work hard for the money. That’s an insult to all Americans who don’t make your money, as if we don’t work just as hard.Are you telling me that the coal miners, who spend most of their days in the dark, don’t work just as hard if not harder to provide the power to run your infrastructure? and don’t throw around terms like Socialism when you don’t understand what it means. Responsibility in these times are not socialism. Curtailing the bonuses that the taxpayers are picking up is not socialism.

Desperate times call for desperate measures. Claire McCaskill is right. If you are going to come to the taxpayer and ask for help to keep your company alive, you need to show fiscal responsibility and restrain in executive pay. If you can’t be responsible enough for your own company, then we the people will have to be responsible for you. If you take TARP money, the people of America owns the company until you pay the TARP money back. I am sorry that you will be forced to live on eight times the median income until your company is back on solid footing and the taxpayer is not paying your bills. I’m sorry that you will have to fly economy instead of first class or private jets. I am sorry that you will have to give up the dinners at michelin rated restaurants for something cheaper. I am sorry that $400,000 is not enough to cover your luxurious living. I’m sorry that life is so hard for all of you and I am sorry that you will still live a better life than 90% of all Americans.

Watch her fiery speech

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Republicans must face reality

Republicans in Congress must lift their veil of ignorance and face reality on the Hill. This is the true state of this country politically. Democrats are seen as doing a better job than Republicans in the public. In addition, in a study by Gallup, this nation is trending blue (or Democrat) with the exception of FIVE states! This is the reality, not some fictional world that the GOPs seem to live  in. The will of the people is for the members of congress to work with President Obama and pass legislations to move this country forward, not for our elected officials to play naysayers and play games with our future.

I can’t believe that Republicans on the Hill is willing to risk everything, including the 2010 election, by playing the party of “no” to the Obama administration and deny him of his Mandate. Not only did the GOP miss the mark during the Presidential election, they are still out of touch now in 2009. They failed to gauge the climate of the country in 2008 and they still refuse to see it now. Instead of aggressively working with the Democrats and President Obama, they want to play politics and obstruct at every available turn. They would rather hid in their protected little world, backed by their trust funds and bailed out money of big corporations, than work to halt this country’s slid into financial disaster. Instead of protecting the interests of the middle class and the blue collared workers, they are actively working with the corporations to attack the welfare of the everday men and women.

This is the time for the GOP to wake up and realize that they are just typical Americans, not any better than your average factory worker. Their livlihood is tied into the welfare of the people. Will they come to bat or will they join Rush Limbaugh on the sidelines wishing for Obama to fail and for this country to sink into a deeper financial slump, one created by their hero, former President George Bush?

If the GOP wants to play politics with the future of this country, let them. It’s their heads that will roll come the 2010 election. As painful as it may be to us, if the only way we can move forward is remove the game playing GOPs, then we must endure.

Audacity of Corporate America

I can’t believe the audacity of corporate America. Days after receiving BILLIONS in bailout money, Bank of America hosted a conference call with conservative activists and business leaders to discuss how to defeat the Union bill. Instead of dealing with the current financial problems, they feel more compelled to take government money and spend millions attacking a legislation thats aimed at improving and protecting workers’ lives from the greedy.

Co-Founder of Home Depot called the upcoming Employee Free Choice legislation as the “demise of the civilization”. Are you kidding me? By giving workers the ability to unionize more freely, it would be the demise of our civilization? Other business representatives said that “out of control labor leaders” have damaged businesses?!?! Out of control CEOs and corporations have damaged their own businesses and threatens to take down the world with their selfishness, greed and corporate mismanagement.

When CEOs get fired, they walk away with millions of dollars in severance packages. When some one walks away from one of the bailed out corporations, they walk away with months of severance. Bailed-out corporations like Merrill Lynch used billions of government money to pay bonuses to their people in the midst of the highest unemployment rate since the Great Depression. How I pity them. When a non-union worker gets laid off, they will probably walk away only with their upcoming paycheck as the their protection. They don’t get the bonuses and severance packages that people in the “business” world get. How is that fair? Corporate America has their way of protecting their “own” people, at the same time, ignoring the livelihood of their foundation, working class employees, and they call that fair. Perhaps if they stopped giving out millions and billions in bonus, they can afford improved health care for their employee and fair wages.

Stephen Lerner, Director of the Private Equity Project at SEIU, said it best, “The biggest corporations who have created the problem are, at the very time, asking us to bail them out and then using that money to stop workers from improving their lives.”

Maybe the CEOs of this world need to reevaluate what is important. If they had ceased with their greed and selfishness, or at least cut back on it, we would’ve probably be in a better place financially. It’s the perfect example of the classic soldier’s dilemma (at least that’s what I think it’s called). If we work together, we will all survive, however, if we choose only to protect our own self interests and leave others out to dry, we will all perish. It’s time for corporate America to decide. Do we all live or all die.

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