The Senator who received the largest “bonus”, AKA campaign contribution from AIG, after Chris Dodd of course? Answer – Barack Obama, who received $101,332 from AIG.
Still not a single deputy secretary or undersecretary or Senate confirmable position has been filled at Treasury. But yesterdayday, Treasury announced that Lewis Alexander, chief economist at Citigroup, will become a “counselor” to Timothy Geithner. Being a “counselor” is Obama-speak for “not confirmable” or “tax cheat”. I mean, really, the chief economist at the worst performing major bank in America, losing a total of $37B?
In a 2007 interview on PBS, Mr. Alexander said, "I think that's not going to spill over more broadly into the economy, and so I think we're going to have a normal kind of housing cycle that's going to last through the middle of this year."
Sounds like he is one of the reasons Citigroup lost $37B. But he is now an important cog in the Obama machine.
Vivek Kundra, Obama’s choice for the administration’s CIO was reinstated yesterday after the FBI confirmed he was not a target of their investigation. However a bribery, billing fraud and kickback scheme was going on right under Kundra’s nose in a small IT shop of about $50 million as the CTO of the District of Columbia. Now Kundra will go on to be the government’s Chief Information Officer, directing the federal government’s $71 billion in IT spending. Yeah, he sounds qualified.
What does everyone think is the “over/under” on Geithner being fired? He personally architected the AIG bailout. He knew about the bonuses. He was directly asked at a congressional hearing last week about the subject, and did not come clean.
Senator Chuck Schumer made a speech in support of the so-called stimulus bill saying that Americans should not care about the “porky” spending. The Democrat’s talking points in support of the “stimulus” bill was that the mean Republicans were critical of was only a tiny percent of the bill. That is actually not true, the GOP opposed about 80% of the bill, and offered an alternative that spent half as much but created twice as many jobs. Regardless, let’s apply that same math to the AIG bonuses. The bonuses represent 1/10th of one percent of the taxpayer money received, to fulfill contractual obligations.
The head of Homeland Security Janet Napolitano said yesterday that she will no longer use the term “terrorists”. Instead, she will use the term “man-caused disasters”! This continues the Obama administration’s renaming program, recently disavowing the term “enemy combatant” who I guess are now just bad guys we will hold indefinitely somewhere not called Gitmo, as soon as there is a plan.
Vice President Biden said yesterday that Obama’s job is harder than FDR’s. Yes, harder than the Great Depression.
There is a mob-mentality in Washington right now that is really scary. I’ll bet no more than 10-15 guys at AIG are culpable for the business model that brought AIG down. Go after them, not everybody.
In the middle of a global economic crisis, the Obama administration has triggered a trade dispute with our 2nd largest trading partner, Mexico (after Canada). Mexico is implementing tariffs on 90 some American products. The reason? The Obama administration is scuttling a program that allows Mexican trucks to transport goods from Mexico to their final destinations within the U.S. Now there are 10’s of thousands of transport trucks operating in the U.S. We make almost all of Mexico’s trucks stop at the border and transfer their cargo to U.S. trucks. This program was meant to open the borders to the free flow of commerce. The offending Mexican trucks – 98. Yes, Obama is triggering a trade war with Mexico over 98 trucks. Obama is so beholden to the Teamster union that he will risk a trade war with our 2nd largest trading partner over 98 trucks. It is deeply disappointing.