Goldman Sachs promotes "poor CEO" story

Oh please. This story about the Goldman CEO's salary dropping 98% is incredibly misleading. The first thought that crossed my mind was "how much did he make in 2007" when he was still cashing in on selling worthless (to everyone except AIG) trash? One of the missing issues remains the past payments and no matter how much the businesses take off the books, the bonuses remain untouched. Somehow we're supposed to sympathize or be in awe that Goldman CEO Blankfein allowed his compensation to fall to a paltry $1.11 million. Stout fellow! Hang in there!

If the Andrew Cuomo investigation into AIG links to Goldman Sachs, what is Goldman going to do if they are suddenly faced with even greater write-downs? Goldman has been treated like royalty so far thanks to Paulson and now Geithner but this could change very quickly if Cuomo's investigation starts asking tough questions. One of these days Congress and the White House are going to wake up on this as well and then Blankfein will be thankful for anything above $1. Read the rest of this post...

AIG director named to Obama tax task force

Talk about a toxic asset...

One of the people named this week to President Obama's new Task Force on Tax Reform is a member of the AIG board of directors.

Martin Feldstein, a professor of economics at Harvard University, has been on the board of American International Group since 1988. He also was a prominent economic adviser to Presidents Ronald Reagan and George W. Bush.

Asked about the AIG connection, a senior administration official said Friday that the White House declined to comment on the story.

Like the others named to the tax reform task force, Feldstein also serves on Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board, which is headed by former Federal Reserve Chairman Paul Volcker.

Let me guess. Summers thought it was a great idea. Read the rest of this post...

Krugman makes the cover of Newsweek

Newsweek's new cover story. Read the rest of this post...

Earth Hour tonight

Don't forget to join the world tonight and power down for an hour starting at 8:30PM. It's a good excuse to have a romantic dinner with candlelight or no light at all.

At 8:30pm today the luminous face of Big Ben will go dark. Next door, the houses of parliament will switch off all its lights too, along with thousands of landmarks, buildings and people around the world in a global gesture of solidarity in the fight against climate change.

From the international dateline, Earth Hour starts in New Zealand's Chatham Islands and will conclude in Honolulu. Passed like a baton around the planet, cities including Sydney, Hong Kong, Singapore, Moscow, Istanbul, Dubai, Cape Town and Las Vegas will be darkened for an hour at 8:30pm local time to mark Earth Hour, the single biggest mass event to mark public concern over global warming.

More than 3,200 cities across 88 countries have signed up and the event has received support from international leaders including Archbishop Desmond Tutu and the United Nations secretary general, Ban Ki-moon. Environment campaign group WWF, which is co-ordinating the global event, expects hundreds of millions of people around the world to take part in turning out their lights for an hour, in the hope of sending a direct message to world leaders that their voters want urgent action to save the planet from rising temperatures.

Read the rest of this post...

This just in from the "Not News" department

Would someone tell me why this is news? And more importantly, why it's being sent me to by the House Majority Whip's office:

House Majority Whip James E. Clyburn last night received “Distinguished Community Health Leadership” award from The National Association of Community Health Centers (NACHC) for his leadership on issues that impact the more than 18 million people who rely on America’s Health Centers for their health care (see release below). Clyburn responded to the award and commented on the release of $338 million under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act for Community Health Centers.

Ooh, he gave a speech. How exciting. Stop the presses!

This is an idiotic way to reach out to the media. I get hundreds of emails a day. Far too many of them garbage like this from people who have added me to their email list without my permission. Then they send me crap. I'm not writing this to whine about my bad emails, I'm trying to make a larger point. Email is a critical part of the day to day work for many of us. The volume of email we are receiving keeps growing. And for many of us, it passed a tipping point, beyond which we are now losing emails from people, not even seeing them as they come in, because of the velocity of traffic hitting our in-box.

And crap like this isn't helping. Actually, crap like this is the problem. I already have a spam filter that catches all of my spam. This crap is what's ruining my in-box.

Who in their right mind would consider it news that James Clyburn got an award, other than his mother? I just can't fathom, for the life of me, why people on the Hill, who are experts in media, send this kind of garbage to people. Collectively, this kind of useless junk email is making email useless for all of us. It needs to stop. And if I have to publish a regular "Not News" post to embarrass someone into learning how to do their job, then so be it. I'm just really tired of getting crap from people who are paid a lot of money to know better.

And finally, let me reiterate something, in an effort to help everyone out there who uses email in their job or personal life. Here is a good rule to follow when trying to determine if you're sending someone "junk":

If you're sending the same email to fewer than five people, it's not junk.

If you're sending the same email to five or more people, it's probably junk.

So, to our readers, keep those tips and comments coming - we love hearing from you. Just don't put us on an email list without asking us first, and please don't send us any emails that you've cc'd to half of Alabama as well. If you're writing to us one-on-one, your email is ALWAYS welcome. Read the rest of this post...

CNBC had a great moment this week

In all seriousness, this was an interesting exchange which was talking about the work that Andrew Cuomo is doing. (Again, where the hell is Congress?) The CNBC reporter was daring to ask why the US taxpayer is giving Goldman Sachs and European banks 100 cents on the dollar for these obviously bad deals. Remember, Goldman is planning to repay the TARP money early to avoid pay restrictions. Letting Goldman and others get away with such a good deal while others are suffering makes no sense to anyone besides Hank Paulson, Republicans, Geithher and the Goldman Sachs team.

This is a really important exchange because it cuts to the heart of what is wrong both on Wall Street and in US politics. The US is being fleeced by Goldman (and AIG) who are getting an amazingly good deal for the trash that they had insured by AIG. No matter how you slice it, paying our $50 billion for absolute trash is only good for Goldman. Cuomo should not be the only one chasing this and if we had a real leader at Treasury, this would not be happening. If Obama wants to help the country move past this debacle, Geithner and Summers have to go now. There's no reason why taxpayers should cover full payments for this and let the likes of Goldman walk away unscathed for their past actions.

The sad news here is that the CNBC reporter who called out Goldman and those allowing it is no longer at CNBC. His contract expired or was not renewed. If only he tapped into the phony-baloney "tea party" outrage or stroked a few more Wall Street egos. Read the rest of this post...

Norm Coleman pay-off scandal grows

Ladies and gentleman, meet the man the Republicans want to be the next Senator from Minnesota! (By next, I mean, after Al Franken serves his term):

The former finance chief of a Texas company controlled by Nasser Kazeminy, a close friend of former Sen. Norm Coleman, said in a deposition last week that Kazeminy ordered $100,000 in fees be paid to a Minneapolis insurance agency where Coleman's wife was employed.

B.J. Thomas, who was chief financial officer of Deep Marine Technology Inc., said that $75,000 of that sum was paid to Hays Companies even though he saw no evidence of Deep Marine receiving any consulting services from Hays.

Thomas' deposition, taken under oath on March 19 and obtained by the Star Tribune, is the first corroboration from an official at Deep Marine of allegations made by company founder Paul McKim in a lawsuit filed last year against the company.

Read the rest of this post...

The weekly address directly from your President

Obama talks today about the floods in the upper Midwest -- and the value of service.


The White House did a very good job this past week of talking over the heads of the traditional media. The Tuesday night press conference and the online Town Hall were opportunities to speak directly to the American people without the message being filtered by the media "elite." If anything, the press conference demonstrated how completely how out of touch and inept the "Big Dogs" in the media are. Read the rest of this post...

Saturday Morning Open Thread

Good morning. It's a rainy day in DC, but we need the rain. We were on the verge of a drought.

For some Saturday morning fun, here are several of the week's best haikus courtesy of AMERICAblog reader and commenter extraordinaire, KarenMrsLloydRichards. On the cable news reaction to the GOP non-budget budget:

Info-babes lose it:
Where's the GOP numbers?
They want the beef NOW!

Captured that perfectly. This one for GOP leader Eric Cantor:

Eric's like Britney--
He cracks his whip, then they trip;
Loves all eyes on him . . .

Cantor and Britney. We can have fun with that one for a long time. And, the traditional media get busted:

He's overexposed!
Failing "journalists" complain;
He's making them work . . .

KarenMrsLloydRichard's haikus appear daily in the comments of the morning open thread. I just try to compile a couple of the best, but they're all very good. Some real laugh-out-louders. She says so much with so few words.

Let's get the weekend rolling... Read the rest of this post...

Cramer gets it massively wrong, again

I was worried he might not squeeze in "pitchfork" into his latest rant but yeah, it's in there at the beginning. His rant on Friday asked why everyone was picking on AIG? Why pick on them because there were so many problems for years with executive pay, yet none of us populists ever argued against it. Um, what? That's of course completely wrong because many of us have been fuming about this for years and writing about it.

Now that the AIG bonus debacle has passed, Cramer has a bone to pick with the pitchfork-wielding insta-populists that so railed against the company: Where have you been for the last eight years?

Executives padded their paychecks for President George W. Bush’s entire term, Cramer said Friday, but these critics were silent the whole time. Plus, there were tax cuts for the rich, wholesale deregulation, unchecked short selling – how come there were no congressional hearings then?

Well, Congress is the epicenter of this class war now, Cramer said. Just look at that bonus-tax bill. Executives of TARP-participating companies who make more than $250,000 have to pay 90% of their bonuses to the government. Strange, though, that not a hearing took place prior to the financial crisis. There was little regulation during the run-up to the meltdown, and even less enforcement of what rules there were.

Uhhh, Cramer may not have noticed, but there was an election that resulted in a change of power. No? The GOP never wanted to bother with regulations and in fact, they cut them back. To be fair to Cramer, the Democrats have rarely been known to have much of a spine in these situations out of fear of being called a communist by the Republicans. Even now, the Democrats are only doing something (however little that may be) because voters are furious. It's less Washington and more the voters who are pushing this issue.

The problem with AIG that multi-multi-multi-millionaires like Cramer miss over cocktails in the Hamptons is that this was the last straw. People *have* had it with those other disgusting examples of too much pay for worthless CEOs and Republican tax policies that only benefit the elite. That's the point you f'ing idiot. AIG on it's own is just another example of too much pay but it happened during an economic meltdown and it's the taxpayers who are now footing the bill. The nation has had ridiculous CEO pay rammed down there throats for years and there was little that could be done in the past when these companies were receiving full support both from shareholders and the market. Now that the conditions have changed, everything has changed. Read the rest of this post...

UK data shows recession worse than previously thought

Not unlike the US who have also revised the numbers, the UK is looking even worse than expected and everyone already thought it was bad. Also like the US, if it wasn't so serious, it would be laughable to suggest a 2009 recovery. Not. Going. To. Happen. Even if these economies were hitting on all cylinders - and they're not - eating through years of insane spending would be a struggle.

Revised data from the Office for National Statistics (ONS) showed that gross domestic product shrank by 1.6% in the last three months of 2008, rather than the 1.5% previously reported. Worse than previously expected output in construction and services was blamed for the downward revision.

It is the worst performance since the second quarter of 1980 and confirms Britain is in the middle of a deep downturn following a contraction of 0.7% in the third quarter of last year and zero growth in the second.

The annual decline was also revised lower, to 2% from 1.9% previously, the worst since 1991.

It's impossible for Gordon Brown to run away from this recession. He was the economic brain of the Blair administration and when times were good, he looked like a genius. Now he just looks like, well, Gordon Brown. Read the rest of this post...

Toles - Small Enough to Fail

Tom Toles of the Washington Post. What part of this does AIG not understand? Do they really want to have a public debate about morals? Really? Read the rest of this post...