LaPopessa along with Buckarooskidoo have a blog Make it Stop! Make it Stop! that is purportedly “the ramblings of [some] dangerous minds”. I beg to differ. I find it fascinating for four reasons:
First, it takes on topics that from time to time the popular press needs to be coaxed into looking at in detail;
Second, it is gender neutral finding VP-candidate Sarah Palin as appalling as the idea of Hillary Clinton as Secretary of State may be appealing – there is still some doubt to be found in their assessment;
Third, despite a professed liberal point of view it has some remarkably conservative stripes;
Fourth, there is a distinctive Scents of Humor here.
Here is a sampler on the latter point:
“…a comment on John McCain’s erratic behavior of the last week:
Old CW on McCain: Crusty Old Bomber Pilot
New CW on McCain: Kamikaze
Now, can we get that kamikaze in hot pursuit of Putin, when he rears his head and flies into Alaskan air space? Isn’t this campaign beginning to resemble a Monty Python skit?“
And here is a sampler on the other 3 reasons:
“Trying Hard to Find Empathy Here And failing miserably. I want to feel badly for folks on Wall Street who are losing their jobs right and left during this (is there a term for this?) not a depression, but whatever the heck it is. I want to feel empathy for anybody who loses a job. But what pops into my mind isn’t a family struggling to survive with both parents working 2+ minimum wage jobs apiece. What pops into my mind are money-mad men and women who hopped onto a train heading for a shaky bridge. People who either couldn’t or wouldn’t see the shaky bridge and those who were on the train for whatever money they could before the crash. Either way, not a lot of sympathy here for these folks. The power lunch crowd, the folks who dropped $150 for a hamburger because it was Kobe beef.
Personally I think anyone who makes more than $100,000 a year is way overpaid. But I know I’m a minority here, and if someone can convince someone else to pay him or her many millions for doing … well less work than someone who cleans offices during the week, then that’s their problem. Except when they want to make it our problem. So Kudos to the Democrats for saying that in order to get their $700 billion bail out, Wall Street needs to agree to “meet appropriate standards for executive compensation.” I mean really, just how much do the men and women who helped engineer (pushing the train metaphor a bit further) this problem think they should be paid for their stupidity, recklessness and greed?“
It gets right to the point – liberal yet also conservative, Main street as well. For who stopped the bailout at its start but conservative Republican Congressmen who had the sympathy of a notable number of Democratic votes. However, alas, I had to publish this comment on the gals blog:
I am not so sanguine about Congress or any government agency reining in Financial Executives Compensation Gone Wild. True, it appears these two heavily ingrained precepts, like rotten teeth, have to be wrenched out of Wall Street behavior and/or DNA:
1)”we, the Masters of the Universe Financiers , can do ‘anything’ because even if its against some ‘law’; its a white collar crime and nobody gets convicted for ‘raiding the Commons’;
2)our compensation can be both stratospheric and never declining no matter how badly we frack-up- for 2 reasons.
i)Everybody wants the Brass Ring’ goal of making it supergargantuan lottery BIG TIME = a billion dollar pay packet taxed at less than half the Income Tax rate(we get our compensation in Capital Gains taxable packets) and often not even taxed at all as the pay packets are tax-sheltered in Caymans, Bermuda and other tax havens;
ii)who in government already beholden to us for our campaign contributions, expertise+needed co-operation on the complex financial markets, and our ability to mug-them through our Think Tanks declaring them as ‘class warfare extremists’- who is going to take us on? In sum, who is going to dare to try to trim our Pay Scales ????? Yeah right … as likely as our salaries going down when our companies fail to perform.”
But, sad to say, I have already heard Obama on Meet the Press backing away from repealing the Bush Tax Cuts for the Rich. And if that it so, who will have any stomach to take on the issue of Extraordinarily Outlandish Executive Compensation. Even the major business magazines like Fortune, Forbes, and Business Week have decried it for years – and nothing has happened. So join me in a 5th of your favorite blues booze on this one.