Charlie Rose

tartufe  11/24/2008 10:23 PM Report

Excerpt from WSJ dated 11/26/08: "But the Citigroup rescue has fueled the criticism that the Bush administration is willing to do anything to bail out the biggest banks, while letting smaller ones, consumers, and small companies, fail.

"It's criminal what Paulson and his team are doing," said California Republican Rep. Darrell Issa in an interview Monday. Mr. Issa is a member of the House Oversight Committee and was one of 171 members of the House to vote against the $700 billion financial-rescue package in October. He said the Treasury was in effect picking winners and losers in the banking industry."

Couldn't have said it better. Well maybe with some invectives for spice. Citigroup is an institution of superlative scumbags, predators, exploiters of little old women, the infirm, the unemployed and they top it off with millions in compensation, offshore tax havens, gated communities and an arrogant sense of entitlement. The gods of equity are trying to right the wrongs but alas Paulson, Bernanke, Bush are intervening. The abject misery these wise-guys keep meting out is unconscionable. They duly need a winter 'under-the-bridge' with their victims. If only there were a hell for them to rot in!!!!

tartufe  11/23/2008 10:41 PM Report

The Feds are once again venturing into la-la land by weighing how (not whether) to bailout Citigroup, the most egregious scumbags of the financial wise-guy community. Robert Rubin, an Obama advisor, one of the main villains of their collapse. See below from NY Times 11/22/08:

"The bank’s downfall was years in the making and involved many in its hierarchy, particularly Mr. Prince and Robert E. Rubin, an influential director and senior adviser.

"Citigroup insiders and analysts say that Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin played pivotal roles in the bank’s current woes, by drafting and blessing a strategy that involved taking greater trading risks to expand its business and reap higher profits. Mr. Prince and Mr. Rubin both declined to comment for this article.

"When he was Treasury secretary during the Clinton administration, Mr. Rubin helped loosen Depression-era banking regulations that made the creation of Citigroup possible by allowing banks to expand far beyond their traditional role as lenders and permitting them to profit from a variety of financial activities. During the same period he helped beat back tighter oversight of exotic financial products, a development he had previously said he was helpless to prevent.

"And since joining Citigroup in 1999 as a trusted adviser to the bank’s senior executives, Mr. Rubin, who is an economic adviser on the transition team of President-elect Barack Obama, has sat atop a bank that has been roiled by one financial miscue after another."

Citigroup is a scumbag, puppy-kicking, exploiter-of-human-frailty that has duly earned and justly deserves to dissolve into ignominy and their most current 3-5 CEOs put under FBI, SEC, FRB and Congressional oversight investigations. All compensations, bonuses, golden parachutes recouped.

The too-big-to-fail dogma is baseless. It was their insatiable desire for growth and 'bigness' that created their and countless others the misery that abounds.

The crises is not abating with the bailouts to date and there is no evidence that more of the same (insanity) will succeed. In fact it may work through even faster if the carnage fell where it should rather than keeping such putrescent corruption going with a strengthened sense of god-given entitlement.

And why not? If you can spread that much misery around and be rewarded by the fools like Paulson, Bernanke and Pelosi and Bush and on and on, it's only natural. It's also a moral perversion that kicks the can down the road for a repeat. Buy stock in money printing presses. GM, Ford, Chrysler, AIG, Citigroup, et al --- We're toast. But alas, instead of incarceration they'll give them huge bonuses and put them in charge of us wiping their arses.

Oligarchic Capitalism cum Socialism cum Anarchy!