Cookie Jar Democrats

Here's a progression you want to avoid if you're the slightest bit hypertensive:

1) Ten years ago Democrats, in a fit of multi-culturalism, change the law to make home ownership a de facto entitlement for minorities, at least most of whom cannot afford and have no business incurring a mortgage, and forcing mortgage lenders to write an avalanche of essentially bad loans, which come to be collectively known as the "subprime" market.

2) Not content to rest on those dubious laurels, the Donk-infested Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac bundle these bad loans as backing for securities that spread this infection throughout the financial system, making it that much more difficult to roll back this financial panic in the making.

3) A huge, artificial "housing bubble" is created, which ranking banking committee Donks in both houses of Congress - Barney "My Boy Lollipop" Frank and Chris "Countrywide" Dodd - defend against a rising tide of criticism from both the Bush Administration and congressional Republicans like John McCain by rote, repetitious reassurances that amounted to a perverse hybrid of "hear no evil, see no evil, speak no evil" and whistling past the graveyard.

4) Like all economic "bubbles," the housing one burst just in time for the 2008 presidential campaign.  Even though [*AHEM] "men" like Frank and Dodd were the masterminds of this Democrat Financial Logic Bomb, and Republicans had made at least some degree of good faith effort to sound the alarm and try to take pre-emptive regulatory steps to head it off (which "men" like Frank and Dodd blocked at every turn), the GOP got blamed for the Wall Street meltdown (because it happened on Bush's watch, and because as everybody knows, all bankers are Republicans, even though most of them are really Democrats, as we'll soon see), and the Democrats reaped an electoral bonanza, a travesty of justice of stomach-turning proportions.

5) Since the Democrats have been in total power in Washington, they've done next to nothing about the financial side of the crisis other than to shovel hundreds of billions of dollars down the gaping maws of the financial institutions they themselves sent careening into (figurative) bankruptcy (which is massively unpopular, BTW) and otherwise bide their time until they can justify nationalizing (the rest of) them (as recently suggested by....Senator Chris Dodd)

6) The Democrats have instead spent their time spending scace taxpayer dollars as if they were hand grenades with the pins pulled.  Chief among these federal hemorrhages was, of course, Hogzilla.  And looky what provision got slipped into the final version in the entirely contrived rush to jam this roaringly misnamed "stimulus" atrocity down the public's throat, with that same Senate Banking Committee Chairman's hearty approval:

From page H1412 of the Final Stimulus Bill, “SEC. 111. EXECUTIVE COMPENSATION AND CORPORATE GOVERNANCE:

'(iii) The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009, as such valid employment contracts are determined by the Secretary or the designee of the Secretary.”

This clause didn't so much authorize financial executive bonuses per existing employment contracts as recognize that those contracts already existed and were legally valid, and thus not voidable by federal fiat - at least to the degree that the rule of law still exists in this country anymore.

Well, it just so happens that the 80%-nationalized American (literally) International Group dispensed $165 million in this type of bonus recently.  Which the public had been led to believe the Democrats weren't going to let happen anymore.

The short version is, "the shit has hit the fan":

Democratic Senator Christopher Dodd on Monday criticized the bonuses given to executives of American International Group Inc. and suggested that the government could tax the recipients to recoup some or all of the payouts.

But it was Dodd who inserted language — known as the Dodd amendment — in the $787 billion stimulus bill that allowed all bonuses awarded before February 11, 2009, to be paid to AIG executives. That very amendment, which is now law, is now the chief hurdle to government officials who want to recover that money.

The amendment was meant to restrict executive pay for bailed-out banks, but it also included the exception for "contractually obligated bonuses agreed on or before February 11, 2009."

Dodd is the largest single recipient of 2008 campaign donations from AIG, with $103,100, according to the Center for Responsive Politics. That was more than presidential candidates Barack Obama and John McCain got, and nearly three times the $35,965 Senator Hillary Clinton received. [emphasis added] 

It's getting to where one cannot comment on this financial mess without inserting the word "cluster" in it, just as it is increasingly difficult to determine which is more stupendous, the Democrats' corruption or their incompetence.

Which is another way of saying that Senator Countrywide is just the tip of the crapberg:

While $58 billion of your tax dollars — or more accurately, your children’s tax dollars — are being used to pay foreign banks, a substantial portion of that money ($43.5 billion) is being used to pay American banks, including Goldman Sachs, Merill Lynch, Bank of America, Citigroup, Wachovia, Morgan Stanley, AIG International, and JP Morgan.

The following recipients of President Obama’s trickle-down-to-my-donors bailout plan rank among his top twenty contributors to his 2008 presidential election campaign, according to Open Secrets:

Goldman Sachs: $955,473

Citigroup: $653,468

JP Morgan Chase & Co.: $646,058

Morgan Stanley: $485,823

Three other banks that were significant contributors to Obama received money through AIG:

Bank of America: $274,493

Wachovia: $214,151

AIG: $112,170

Lehman Brothers, which did not survive long enough to join the list of banks leaching off the work of the American taxpayer, also gave the Obama campaign $276,088.

Individuals identifying themselves as working for the banks above gave Barack Obama’s presidential campaign $3,617,724. In other words, more than 3.6 million reasons for the president to help focus the media’s glare on the relatively minuscule $165 million in AIG executive bonuses, and away from their $43.5 billion portion of $100 billion of taxpayer dollars the administration, by design or incompetence, filtered to other banks through AIG.

In receiving $43.5 billion for their investment of just over $3.3 million, it looks like the banks that gambled on Wall Street certainly got their money’s worth out of their investment in Barack Obama.

Those weren't contributions, they were protection money.  And yet it greased the quid pro quo AIG needed:

Dodd, the chair of the banking committee, agreed to this language because most all of the stakeholders — including the [Hussein] administration — wanted it. [emphasis added]

But let's say you want to give Red Barry the benefit of the doubt on being a crooked ha'Dlbah.  That just brings us back to HIS incompetence in elevating the hapless Tim Geithner to be a one-man-band at Treasury:

Firing Geithner is not an option, even if it's deserved. The problem is, to extend the basketball metaphor, it's not that Treasury has a weak bench; it has no bench. There's no deputy, no assistant secretaries, no undersecretaries. (Okay, they just brought in Citigroup's chief economist, position not yet clear.) If Geithner disappeared, there would be no clear successor. Obama has a fifteen-member Economic Advisory Board, but very few who have been willing to step in and take things off Geithner's overloaded plate. And for an administration that knew on Election Day that the economy and TARP management would be major issues — four and a half months ago! — not having more nominees ready to step in at Treasury is unforgivable.

The thing is, the Little President didn't "take his eye off the ball," as J-Ger concludes; he, and Senator Dodd, got caught with their hands in the proverbial cookie jar, dispensing favors to favored "contributors" in exchange for their 2008 campaign boodle after spending months insufferably demogoguing against it.  And their knee-jerk response after getting caught green-handed?  More fury-inducingly hypocritical demogoguery.

Including more blatant unconstitutionalism, this time from Missouri's Claire McCaskill:

There will be a letter sent to the CEO of AIG from most, if not all, of the Democratic Senators momentarily.  This letter will demand that any bonuses be withheld or repaid immediately.  The letter goes on to explain that we will proceed to recover the bonuses through taxation if AIG fails to recover this money for taxpayers. We state the obvious in the letter, bonuses should not be given for failure.

Legislation wil be introduced in the next forty-eight hours or so that will tax these companies and the bonus recipients. The tax will be aimed at executives at companies that have recieved significant taxpayer assistance through the TARP funds and will recover almost all of these funds for taxpayers.  The Finance Committee is drafting the legislation with the assistance of a number of Senators.

I feel better. We are taking action. It’s time we right this wrong on behalf of hard working Americans everywhere.

First of all, McCaskill voted FOR Hogzilla without reading one jot or tittle of it, so she has ZERO standing to mount her retroactive moral high horse at something being in it that she doesn't like.  If her party's leadership had run Hogzilla through the normal legislative process, with review and debate at subcommittee, committee, and floor levels, sweetheart provisions like this one might have been weeded out.  But then the entire "stimulus" boondoggle was a towering mound of sweetheart provisions in which every Donk had their fingers inserted up to their shoulder blades, a monument to big, and unspeakably bad, government that had not a blessed thing to do with "stimulating" anything except the national debt and Donk special interest bank accounts, so can Dodd's AIG surprise really be that, well, surprising?

Second, the federal government does not have the right to arbitrarily void those AIG bonus contract provisions.  And if that was in doubt before Hogzilla, it sure as hell wasn't after.  Still less is it empowered to impose retroactive stop payments after the fact.  The dough is gone, and Senator McCaskill voted to allow it.  Period.

Third, J-Ger does the annoyingly inconvenient public service of reminding the Show Me Senatrix of that venerable document sitting in its helium-filled display case at the National Archives:

I understand the urge to enact some special tax on the executives or the company over this, but does the term "bill of attainder" ring a bell? Go check out the Constitution, Article One, Section Nine, Clause Three.

Which states:

No bill of attainder or ex post facto Law shall be passed.

The purpose of this restriction on legislative power is to prohibit Congress from declaring a person or group of persons guilty of some crime and punishing them without benefit of a trial.  Trying to seize funds distributed in a lawful transaction would be a constructive fine imposed against the recipients.  It would be to declare the AIG execs de facto criminals, and thence to strip them of their most fundamental civil and constitutional rights.  It would be, at its basest essence, to treat them like the Democrats spent seven years accusing President Bush of treating captured jihadi terrorists.  Which is to say, it would treat the AIG execs far worse.  Maybe McCaskill would have them sent to Gitmo after Red Barry turns all the al Qaedastanis loose.

Paying AIG execs a collective nine-figure bonus ain't politic, and it's questionble at best in a business sense, but it most certainly ISN'T a crime.  What IS a crime is what the Democrats did to the American financial system and the larger American economy, how they politically benefited from it instead of being punished at the polls as they richly deserved to be, and how they're trying to exploit it to destroy capialism for good all the while personally plundering the very financial sector they victimized.

James Pethokoukis of U.S. News and World Report sums it up best:

Everywhere you turn in this mess, you can find government right there. To say this is a private-sector failure is ridiculous. It's like Forrest Gump, where he keeps showing up at historic moments. Everywhere you look in this mess, again and again, you see government.

Which is to say, you see DEMOCRATS.  And sooner or later, they're going to pay for what they've done - where it hurts them the most.

UPDATE: You know the old saying: "He who denied it, supplied it."

UPDATE II: Any Dem out there want to drop the Obamafilia and concede that this is hate speech?:

"When you've got big big banks — Citicorp or Bank of America or Wells Fargo — that control 70% of the banking system and all of them are weakening, you can't afford to have all those banks going under, even though the deposits might be guaranteed. We had to step in, it was the right thing to do, even though it's infuriating. . . ."

Well, OK, that all made sense, but then he compared AIG to a suicide bomber, and at that, we really perked up.

"Same thing with AIG," Obama said. "It was the right thing to do to step in. Like they've got a bomb strapped to them and they've got their hand on the trigger, you don't want them to blow up, but you've got to ease them off the trigger."

And the president held out his arm and pantomimed a hand on a trigger, and we were rapt, waiting for what would happen next.

This from the same president who wants to shut down Gitmo and turn its jihadi inmates loose inside the United States.

Says a J-Ger reader:

When the unhinged are talking about strangling kids w/ piano wire over a parent's bonus, the anti-corporate rhetoric has gone too far . . . It's time for the POTUS to walk people back from the cliff rather than gunning the gas and driving us over it.

Pal, we went over that cliff last November 4th.  Only questions now are how far we'll fall, how jagged the rocks on which we splatter, and what wine the Obamunists will choose with which to cannibalistically dine on our pulped, gory remains.