Recently I received a plea from a liberal left wing group and organization asking me if I would join in their fight to protest the fact that over 18 billion dollars from the last Congressional bailout of the banking industry went to the major executives of these supposedly failed banking institutions for their own severance packages and group therapy sessions at top resorts throughout the country.
I signed the petition but with a caveat, their proposed solution was actually worse than allowing those executives to determine and fund their own future retirement lifestyles.
What definitely is needed, of course, is a Constitutional solution that would protect the American people from such criminal activity again.
Since most of the members of Congress, due to their own upper echelon incomes, have no real concept of "reasonableness" when it comes to financial matters (as with the ballooning amounts of this now recently legislated spending package and stimulus exhibit), their solution of having Congress institute legislation with respect to Congress determining the amount of these severance packages was actually quite ludicrous.
Do you want Speaker Pelosi or the Executive Office to determine how much they are going to give to their corporate backers the next time some corporation seeks bankruptcy protection not through the Constitutional process, but by crying wolf on the steps of Capitol Hill? I think most Americans of sound mind after the past several administrations would clearly say, "No thanks."
Better would be to institute legislation that calls for executive compensation, bonuses and severance packages for these publicly held corporations to be determined or affirmed by the actual owners of these corportate entities, the disinterested shareholders and stockholders themselves.
If I owned stock in any of those banking institutions or those automakers you can be darn sure that if they ran my investment into the ground so far as to have bankrupted the company itself, they should go away as empty handed as I potentially would under an actual federal bankruptcy action.
Actually, those executives should have to divest themselves of their own property in order to refund partially the losses and damages they have inflicted.
There is no guarantee in the stock market, that is true, and everyone takes a risk for such an investment in the first place. But if it is determined that it is blatant misuse of corporate assets and golden parachutes that have partially led to the crisis, than those responsible should also be held accountable for taking undue risks and profiting personally while the company’s economic viability was in faltering.
The owners and employees should be paid, and what is left over in such reorganizations or bankruptcies then be distributed for any salaries or benefits due and owing the executives at the time of any federal bankruptcy proceeding, or Congressional bailout.
Otherwise, it is becoming more profitable to ruin company assets and take the money and run. This formerly was prosecuted as fraud and grand theft. But now in our politically correct society it is merely termed "bad business judgement," or poor "risk/loss assessment."
However, it is now becoming standard operating procedure for Congress to shift those costs now to the general public to assume those risks and losses, even those who were their customers and clientele and whose money was used for those corporate soirees. Again, this practice has been encouraged and supported in Congress by betraying the Constitution and the checks and balances included within it so that such an occurrence would never even have been entertained by Madison, Adams, Jefferson and old Ben.
I am not nor was a shareholder or stockholder in AIG, yet it is I and my children who will be assuming those risks. The new Rule of Law with these bailouts is now that every U.S. citizen, whether willingly or not, is an investor in all banks and major corporate entities in this nation and not as a matter of choice, but as a matter of Congressional and Executive directive.
The President and Congress are now acting with a CEO mentality, rather than a Constitutional one.
And it is the innocent Americans who are suffering at the hands of what is nothing more than communism, pure and simple. Not simply spreading the wealth or redistributing it, but now globally redistributing it even for overseas corporate entities giving a London based corporation a "share" now in U.S.A., Inc. AIG is the East India Tea Company all over again.
Corporations are "property" not citizens, and the owners of that property legally are the only ones who should determine just how much their administrator’s are worth while employed and thereafter. Period.
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