Headlines - Wednesday

 

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Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley suggested on Monday that AIG executives should take a Japanese approach toward accepting responsibility for the collapse of the insurance giant by resigning or killing themselves.

 

Booman: I think we all know what Sen. Grassley was getting at, and why. What's lacking is a sense of shame and a sense of honor. Who destroys the lives of millions and then accepts a million dollar bonus for their efforts?

But the AIG executives are very small potatoes compared to the elites that ran this country from 2001-2009. Whatever damage the AIG execs did to the world, George W. Bush and Dick Cheney did ten-fold...maybe a thousand-fold. That's why I find it so hard to understand why the press is defending Dick Cheney against slights against his dignity and character. It's okay for a sitting senator to suggest that some anonymous insurance executive slash his wrists in the bathtub, but let the president's press secretary dismiss the dignity of the former vice-president and suddenly protocol has been violated.

But Dick Cheney really should consider killing himself. If Senator Chuck Grassley had said as much, I wouldn't bat an eye. By any standard, including the Roman or the Japanese, a statesman that had presided over such a string of epic failures as Dick Cheney would feel duty-bound to plunge a sword into his abdomen and move the sword left to right in a slicing motion until he was dead. The man is guilty of war crimes. And even the legal decisions that he made ended in unmitigated disaster.

Maybe the country isn't ready to impose justice on the Bush administration for all the hardships they created, but that should not prevent members of the Bush administration from administering their own justice on themselves. Doesn't honor almost require it? To think that members of the press would take offense at the present administration's refusal to show deference and respect to the prior one!!

Okay, I understand that American culture frowns on suicide. We do not have the same culture as the Romans and the Samurai. That is probably a good thing. But can't we reserve some of the vitriol we're leveling at Wall Street for the people that we're actually in charge for the last eight years? Is that asking too much?

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Joe Cassano, former head of AIG's Financial Products

Division, made $280 million while bringing his company

to its knees. He was then fired, given a $34 million bonus,

and put on a $1 million a month salary as an AIG consultant.

Joe doesn't get out much these days, spending most of his

time somewhere underground, surrounded by bodyguards.

 

 

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As China continues its runaway pollution policies, it has come up with a proposal that has the world scratching its collective head. China is proposing that it should still not be held accountable for its massive pollution rate or that fact that it has overtaken the United States as the world's leading greenhouse gas producer. Instead, it insists that countries buying its goods should be charged for the carbon dioxide that it is producing.

http://jonathanturley.org/2009/03/17/china-proposes-that-other-nations-should-pay-for-its-pollution/#more-9058

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Judge Judy Sheindlin on Larry King Live:

"We've got a lot of trouble in this country. We've got a lot of trouble in the world. Why the state should be interested in proscribing the word marriage from two people who love each other, who are responsible, tax-paying, productive people, who have created a family … why the state would have an interest in proscribing that kind of conduct, I don't understand.

"I understand the anger about poverty. I understand the anger about AIG. I understand the problem about the banks. I understand the problem about Afghanistan and the Taliban and everything else. But I don't understand the preoccupation with gays being permitted to marry."

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New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo said Monday he has issued subpoenas for the names of AIG employees given millions of dollars in bonuses despite their possible roles in the insurance giant's near-collapse.

Cuomo said his office will investigate whether the $165 million in payments are fraudulent under state law because they were promised when the company knew it wouldn't have the money to cover them. - ap

Gerry Pasciucco, head of AIG's Financial Products Division, along with his wife, Kelly, want to thank you for the very nice retention bonus. To show where his political heart is, Gerry is wearing his favorite Che Guevara tee.

 

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Obama wants to charge injured veterans' 'private' health insurers to supply needed treatments to wounded vets. It would save hundreds of billions of dollars. Really.

 

No news on if Congress or the president will lose their benefits.

 

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The IRS is planning deductions for Madoff victims:  http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20090317/ap_on_bi_ge/madoff_scandal_taxes

 

How about us? Do we get to deduct our share of various corporate handouts, as well as our share of fraud in Iraq and elsewhere? 

 

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                              I Remember Dubya #15

There was something positively medieval about Dubya.

He not only derived pleasure from authorizing the torture

of enemies of the state, but he doubled his pleasure from

knowing he was anachronistic at the same time.

 

 

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Cheney asserts Jack Bauer's too soft on terrorists - By Don Davis

"Now, Bauer aparently needs a full 24 hours to break the bad guys; in the Bush administration, we finished our waterboarding even before our morning coffee."

 

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OMG. Media obsesses over Michelle's (supposedly) green St. Patrick's Day boots:  

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/03/17/michelle-obama-makes-st-p_n_175936.html

 

What? No photos of her fabulous arms?

 

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Rage on the Streets in Calgary as Bush Visits: http://www.commondreams.org/headline/2009/03/17-10

 

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Cheney can trash Obama; Obama can't defend himself

Other than Republican insiders and their corporate owners, there may be no lower forms of life in the U.S. than mainstream corporate media hacks. In what should be considered bizarre, but is only too typical of their pernicious snickering sniping, it somehow has become acceptable in their eyes for a newly former vice president to launch cynically divisive bromides at a popular and newly inaugurated president, while it is a veritable crime against humanity for that president's spokesman to retaliate in kind.

It took Dick Cheney mere weeks into Obama's term of office to accuse the new president of endangering America: http://www.theleftcoaster.com/archives/013911.php

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Cool! Dolphins at Sea World are making bubble rings and playing with them: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wuVgXJ55G6Y&eurl=http://www.americablog.com/

 

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IG chairman and CEO Edward Liddy does not want to defend his company's terrible bonus plan, but nobody else will do it for him. He will testify before the House Financial Services subcommittee at 10AM Eastern today. [CBS]

 

AIG awarded bonuses to 418 employees last week "and included $33.6 million for 52 people who have left the failed insurance conglomerate." AIG paid the bonuses, "including more than $1 million each to 73 people, to almost all of the employees…responsible for creating the exotic derivatives that caused AIG's near collapse." 

 

It's all a part of their "Corporate Responsibility" - from their website, h/t Adus:

Since our founding nearly a century ago, the AIG Companies (Collectively "AIG") have focused on being a leader in corporate social responsibility. As a global financial services organization, we have committed our resources to developing products and services that address the needs of our clients as well as promote a corporate culture that values integrity, diversity, innovation and excellence.

AIG recognizes that its investments in support of our customers, employees and the communities in which we operate are critical to our success. AIG's ongoing efforts to be an outstanding corporate citizen and promote responsible and sustainable business practices are essential to our long-term business objective of creating value for our shareholders and serving the interests of our clients.  

Update:

 

A new revelation in the scandal surrounding AIG's decision to pay multi-million dollar bonuses to executives - a provision that would have restricted companies receiving federal government bailout aid from paying bonuses was quietly stripped from a bill last month.

The measure, introduced by Sen. Ron Wyden (D-OR), was removed by negotiators in a late-night, close door meeting. In the negotiations, senators agreed to limit executive compensation but decided to forgo barring excessive bonuses - in fact, they specifically exempted it.

Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) (above right) dodged a question about the decision when asked by a reporter.

http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Senate_quietly_stripped_measure_restricting_bonuses_0318.html

 

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Really? What a shocker.

 

Diebold admits all machines delete ballots without notice:  http://www.bradblog.com/?p=6995

 

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Dick in his interview with John King:

 

"There is no prospect" that Iraq will return to producing weapons of mass destruction or supporting terrorists, Cheney asserted, "as long as it's a democratically governed country, as long as they have got the security forces they do now and a relationship with the United States."

 

That's right, there is no prospect because there was no prospect before the invasion either. Iraq wasn't building WMD, and Saddam wasn't supporting al Qaeda. Why did King let him get away with this? Why did AP? It's not like it was some curveball that Cheney's never used before. He always lies about Saddam's supposed WMD and supposed ties to Al Qaeda. Why wasn't King prepared to challenge Cheney on this, and why didn't AP put anything in their story pointing out that this quote was untrue?

 

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And speaking of the Dick, here's something from Juan Cole ...

Cheney's Mission Accomplished

Dick Cheney: "I guess my general sense of where we are with respect to Iraq and at the end of now, what, nearly six years, is that we've accomplished nearly everything we set out to do...."

What has Dick Cheney really accomplished in Iraq?

An estimated 4 million Iraqis, out of 27 million, have been displaced from their homes, that is, made homeless. Some 2.7 million are internally displaced inside Iraq. A couple hundred thousand are cooling their heels in Jordan. And perhaps a million are quickly running out of money and often living in squalid conditions in Syria. Cheney's war has left about 15% of Iraqis homeless inside the country or abroad. That would be like 45 million American thrown out of their homes.

It is controversial how many Iraqis died as a result of the 2003 invasion and its aftermath. But it seems to me that a million extra dead, beyond what you would have expected from a year 2000 baseline, is entirely plausible. The toll is certainly in the hundreds of thousands. Cheney did not kill them all. The Lancet study suggested that the US was directly responsible for a third of all violent deaths since 2003. That would be as much as 300,000 that we killed. The rest, we only set in train their deaths by our invasion.

Baghdad has been turned from a mixed city, about half of its population Shiite and the other half Sunni in 2003, into a Shiite city where the Sunni population may be as little as ten to fifteen percent. From a Sunni point of view, Cheney's war has resulted in a Shiite (and Iranian) take-over of the Iraqi capital, long a symbol of pan-Arabism and anti-imperialism.

In the Iraqi elections, Shiite fundamentalist parties closely allied with Iran came to power. The Islamic Supreme Council of Iraq, the leading party in parliament, was formed by Iraqi expatriates at the behest of Ayatollah Khomeini in 1982 in Tehran. The Islamic Mission (Da'wa) Party is the oldest ideological Shiite party working for an Islamic state. It helped form Hizbullah in Beirut in the early 1980s. It has supplied both prime ministers elected since 2005. Fundamentalist Shiites shaped the constitution, which forbids the civil legislature to pass legislation that contravenes Islamic law. Dissidents have accused the new Iraqi government of being an Iranian puppet.

Arab-Kurdish violence is spiking in the north, endangering the Obama withdrawal plan and, indeed, the whole of Iraq, not to mention Syria, Turkey and Iran.

Hundreds of thousands of Iraqi women have been widowed by the war and its effects, leaving most without a means of support. Iraqi widows often lack access to clean water and electricity. Aljazeera English has video.

$32 billion were wasted on Iraq reconstruction, and most of it cannot even be traced. I repeat, Cheney gave away $32 bn. to anonymous cronies in such a way that we can't even be sure who stole it, exactly. And you are angry at AIG about $400 mn. in bonuses! We are talking about $32 billion given out in brown paper bags.

Political power is being fragmented in Iraq with big spikes in the murder rate in some provinces that may reflect faction-fighting and vendettas in which the Iraqi military is loathe to get involved.

The Iraqi economy is devastated, and the new government's bureaucracy and infighting

have made it difficult to attract investors.

The Bush-Cheney invasion helped further destabilize the Eastern Mediterranean, setting in play Kurdish nationalism and terrifying Turkey.

Cheney avoids mentioning all the human suffering he has caused, on a cosmic scale, and focuses on procedural matters like elections (which he confuses with democracy-- given 2000 in this country, you can understand why). Or he lies, as when he says that Iran's influence in Iraq has been blocked. Another lie is that there was that the US was fighting "al-Qaeda" in Iraq as opposed to just Iraqis. He and Bush even claim that they made Iraqi womens' lives better.

The real question is whether anyone will have the gumption to put Cheney on trial for treason and crimes against humanity.