This ain't Hell, but you can see it from here

Category: Economy

  • The airport to No Where

    1stCavRVN11b sends us this article about the John Murtha-Johnstown-Cambria County Airport from the Washington Post;

    Inside the terminal on a recent weekday, four passengers lined up to board a flight, outnumbered by seven security staff members and supervisors, all suited up in gloves and uniforms to screen six pieces of luggage. For three hours that day, no commercial or private planes took off or landed. Three commercial flights leave the airport on weekdays, all bound for Dulles International Airport.

    The key to the airport’s gleaming facilities — and, indeed, its continued existence — is $200 million in federal funds in the past decade and the powerful patron who steered most of that money here. Rep. John P. Murtha (D-Pa.) is credited with securing at least $150 million for the airport. It was among the first in the country to win funding from this year’s stimulus package: $800,000 to repave a backup runway.

    Sweet work if you can get it, I suppose.

    Murtha spokesman Matt Mazonkey defended the public spending and said it is unfair to weigh the airport’s low volume of passengers against the federal dollars invested in the facility. He noted that several regional airports are confronting the same problem.

    “Would we like to have additional commercial flights and business? Absolutely. But you don’t attract additional business without having the infrastructure in place to do so,” Mazonkey said.

    Yeah, well, US taxpayers have been paying for the airport to no where for ten years. When can we expect to start seeing more passengers than employees? Well according to the WaPo article, not any time soon. In fact, Murtha just scored 800 grand to repave a back runway at the airport. I’m sure it needs a repaving with the voluminous traffic that uses it.

    Murtha wants to cut bonuses to the troops and cut defense spending, but these boondoggles of his don’t get any where near the budget axe.

  • Defending bonuses at lending institution

    TSO and I were just talking last night about the world having gone mad. This morning I find more evidence of it. It seems that Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae want to pay bonuses to the people who facilitated the biggest fraud on the American taxpayers since, well, the last time (Washington Times link);

    The federal regulator of bailed-out mortgage giants Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac defended plans Friday to give $210 million in retention bonuses to employees he said had lost years of savings when the companies’ stock collapsed in 2008.

    Bonuses, some as high as $1.5 million, will go to 7,600 employees at the two federally established home mortgage companies that lost more than $100 billion last year. They are needed to restrain the best talent from leaving in the midst of the economic crisis spawned when the housing bubble burst, said James B. Lockhart III of the Federal Housing Finance Agency in a letter to Sen. Charles E. Grassley of Iowa, the Senate Finance Committee’s ranking Republican.

    Mr. Lockhart argued that the companies’ previously strong stock prices, now worth less than a $1, were used to woo and pay talent that is now needed more than ever.

    Um, that’s a little like paying a bonus to the plumber who flooded your house fixing a leak so he won’t leave. If these goofballs are so damned talented, why are we in this mess? Why was it so wrong for AIG to pay their people bonuses, but not the Mae and Mac?

    But wait until you read how many of the crooks and liars will get bonuses from the Washington Post;

    The maximum bonus for any employee will be $1.5 million, the regulator said. Freddie’s bonuses are going to 80 percent of its employees, while Fannie’s are going to 61 percent of its employees.

    Ninety-two Freddie employees will receive $100,000 or more in 2009 and 121 Fannie employees will get bonuses of $100,000 or more. The FHFA declined to name the recipients, citing privacy concerns.

    How jacked up do you have to be to miss getting a bonus? But Senator Grassley is on the job;

    Grassley criticized the bonuses yesterday.

    “It’s hard to see any common sense in management decisions that award hundreds of millions in bonuses when their organizations lost more than $100 billion in a year. And, it’s an insult that the bonuses were made with an infusion of cash from taxpayers,” he said in a statement.

    And, oh, yeah, I lost a lot of money in the stock market, too. A. Lot. Of. Money. In fact, I lost so much, that I didn’t even both to check out how much until the other day. Instead of me getting a bonus to make up for my losses, I’m asked to pay for bonuses at Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae. Apparently, by a retarded imbecile.

    But how much of a retarded imbecile does that make me if those bonuses are paid?

  • AIG pressured to donate to Dodd

    Jennifer Haberkorn and Jerry Seper of The Washington Times write this morning that after the 2006, AIG execs were influenced by their chiefs to donate heavily to Senator Chris Dodd;

    The message in the Nov. 17, 2006, e-mail from Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products chief executive, was unmistakable: Mr. Dodd was “next in line” to be chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the insurance industry, and he would “have the opportunity to set the committee’s agenda on issues critical to the financial services industry.

    “Given his seniority in the Senate, he will also play a key role in the Democratic Majority’s leadership,” Mr. Cassano wrote in the message, obtained by The Washington Times.

    Mr. Dodd’s campaign quickly hit pay dirt, collecting more than $160,000 from employees and their spouses at the AIG Financial Products division (AIG-FP) in Wilton, Conn., in the days before he took over as the committee chairman in January 2007. Months later, the senator transferred the donations to jump-start his 2008 presidential bid, which later failed.

    Now, if the same type of message had been found among the emails of Enron in regards to a Republican candidate, can you imagine the outcry? So why, exactly, aren’t Democrats calling for Dodd to resign, or at least step down from his influential position among the decision makers in Congress involved in AIG at this point?

    If the reason that the media chases down Republicans for sex scandals is because of a supposed hypocrisy between their message and their personal behavior, why isn’t the media attacking the Democrats for their blatant hypocrisy in regards to dealing with lobbyists and donors (not to mention not paying their taxes)?

    Speaking of hypocrisy (as we often do here) if this had been the Bush girls, it would have been splashed across front page as a conclusion, not as “purports”.

  • What the Hell…?

    The Washington Post and the Washington Times are both reporting that the Obama Administration used federal bailout money to coherce the CEO of General Motors to resign. First the Post;

    The Obama administration has forced the longtime head of General Motors to resign and said yesterday that it would withhold additional federal aid to the auto industry unless the ailing companies undertake changes they so far have been unwilling or unable to make.

    The administration effectively rejected as untenable the business plans that GM and Chrysler had submitted to restructure their companies, saying that neither had fulfilled the terms of the federal loans the companies received in December.

    The president is expected to announce today that both companies may still win additional federal aid but under stricter terms.

    And the Times;

    The Obama administration has determined that neither Chrysler LLC nor General Motors Corp. can survive without dramatic changes in their businesses, and given them only weeks to completely restructure on a fast schedule that could involve a quick “dip” into bankruptcy, senior administration officials said Sunday.

    The restructuring began right away Sunday, the eve of Mr. Obama’s public layout of his plan for the U.S. auto industry, with the White House asking longtime GM Chief Executive Officer Rick Wagoner to step down and be replaced by Fritz Henderson, GM’s current chief operating officer.

    While Mr. Obama’s team has judged that GM could become viable with major sacrifices, it decided that Chrysler cannot survive as a stand-alone company, a senior administration official said.

    And the Administration arrived at these decisions how? From the same people who’ve brought us the US Postal Service – arguably a business run by the government that is currently hemorrhaging cash? How many people in the administration have even a modicum of experience running a car company? How many union bosses are they going to force from their positions for corruption and poor judgement?

    I’ll tell ya, if you weren’t worried about this administration before, ya hafta be worried now.

  • Economy turns around overnight

    Well not really, but you’d think so reading the news this morning.

    This is quite a bit different than what Obama was saying a few days ago, isn’t it?

    What’s changed? Well, he signed all of his bail outs and pay offs. He doesn’t need a crisis anymore. Well, until next year.

  • Here it comes

    My regular readers might remember that back in January, I wrote that the Democrats were coming for veterans’ earned benefits at this post;

    A new report from the Congressional Budget Office shows why some military retirees and veterans could face higher out-of-pocket costs if the Obama administration and Congress take bold moves to reform the U.S. health system and to make federal health programs more efficient.

    Among 115 “options” presented, though not endorsed, in the CBO report, several focus on raising Tricare out-of-pocket costs for retirees and one targets families. Others would tighten access to VA hospitals and clinics, or raise VA health fees, for veterans with no service-connected conditions.

    Well, making one of my countless daily stops at Blackfive, I see that they’ve started dropping hints that it’s coming. By “they” I mean General Black Beret himself;

    Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance, but was told by lawmakers that it would be “dead on arrival” if sent to Congress.

    No official proposal to create such a program has been announced publicly, but veterans groups wrote a pre-emptive letter last week to President Obama opposing the idea after hearing the plan was under consideration. The groups also noticed an increase in “third-party collections” estimated in the 2010 budget proposal—something they said could only be achieved if the VA started billing for service-related injuries.

    Personally, I’d like to see the list of veterans groups that wrote letters to Obama. In February I warned about more chatter from the CBO;

    J. Michael Gilmore, assistant director of the Congressional Budget Office, testified that by increasing fees for military health care and restructuring pay raises, the Pentagon could save about $111 billion between fiscal 2010 and fiscal 2026.

    The House Budget Committee’s ranking Republican, Paul D. Ryan of Wisconsin, agreed that personnel costs were a problem. “DoD’s health care spending is increasing at an unsustainable rate,” he said.

    And back in December, John Murtha was making noise about cutting health care expenses, too;

    But he said the military could find savings by reforming its healthcare system, addressing military compensation, and reducing operations and maintenance costs.

    But it’s inevitable at this point – they can’t afford to provide health care they promised to veterans but they want to give health care to everyone. Democrats know that national health care is futile, yet they’re going to force the square peg into the round hole any-damn-way. And guess who gets to take it in the ass first.

    Veterans and the military always take it in the ass for the Democrats – and then a Republican comes along, tries to rebuild the system, and the liberals cry about “massive defense spending”. And then when the clowns get back in charge, they begin dismantling the military again. Those goofballs who voted for Obama are going to begin to wish for Bush to be back. Well, not the ones who didn’t get the benefits any way.

    Yeah, if Bush had made noises about cutting the VA they’d be screaming from the rooftops – but this gets a little blurb in the back water pages of CNN. I wonder how some of those VSOs who were “excited” about Shinseki are feeling now. But those of us with memories beyond last week know it was inevitable that Shinseki was going to screw us to the wall.

  • So whose spending bill is it anyway?

    My latest email from my newest BFFs at Organizing for America tells me to gird my loins for battle against…well…someone. I don’t don’t who I’m fighting, but I need to be ready to fight;

    Maybe it’s the oligarchy…no wait that’s Chavez – oh, yeah, the “the special interests and old ways of Washington”. I wonder which special interest I should whup up on first…ACORN or the lawyers.

    But wait. Obama is claiming this budget as his own? That’s what the email says. What did Peter Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget tell CNN yesterday?

    He argued that the White House had little choice but to support the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, which it inherited from the previous administration. The bill would keep the government running through 2009.

    “This is like your relief pitcher coming into the ninth inning and wanting to redo the whole game,” Orszag said. “Next year we’re going to be the starting pitcher, and the game’s going to be completely different.”

    Are we supposed to be supporting a Bush spending bill? Really? It’s not Obama’s like they told me in the email? I don’t thin I want to fight anymore until I find who I’m fighting for. Geez, ya know maybe I ought to screen capture that CNN story in case it disappears;

    So in order to come down on both sides of this issue, Obama alternately blames Bush for the spending bill and tells his mindless drones to get ready to fight for Obama’s bill.

  • Dems: Earmarks are good now, trust us

    With their willing accomplices in the press running interference for them, the Democrats are trying their hand at changing the public’s perception of earmarks. Last year, campaigning Senator Obama said earmarks are bad (CNN link);

    “We can no longer accept a process that doles out earmarks based on a member of Congress’ seniority, rather than the merit of the project,” Obama’s statement said.

    “The entire earmark process needs to be re-examined and reformed. For that reason, I will be supporting Sen. DeMint’s amendment and will not be requesting earmarks this year for Illinois,” the statement added.

    But the Democrats in the Senate this year, are doing their best to convince voters that earmarks are good. Senator Dick Durbin (The Washington Times link);

    “That there is something inherently evil, wicked or criminal or wrong with [earmarks], it’s just not the case,” said Senate Majority Whip Richard J. Durbin, Illinois Democrat, noting that he earmarked millions of dollars in the pending omnibus spending bill for what he said were worthy projects in his home state.

    Mr. Durbin said lawmakers’ pet projects are listed in the bill and exposed to public scrutiny, and that members of Congress know how to best spend taxpayer dollars in their districts and states.

    “Otherwise, what happens? We give the money to the agency downtown and they decide where to spend it,” Mr. Durbin said on the Senate floor. “It isn’t as if the money won’t be spent. Oh, it will be spent. But it may not be spent as effectively or for projects that are as valuable.”

    See? You legislators know best how to spend your tax money (or, more accurately, the money from some other taxpayer across the country from you). Even government bureaucrats don’t know how to spend your money like a Senator knows how to spend your money. That’s why he’s your Senator.

    But Durbin isn’t the only Senator who thinks earmarks are necessary – Steny Hoyer and Harry Reid think so, too;

    The refrain has been the same from other top Democrats, whether from Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid of Nevada or House Majority Leader Steny H. Hoyer of Maryland. Besides touting the merits of earmarks, these Democrats balked at Mr. Obama’s announcement last week of a plan to reel in pork-barrel spending.

    Both Mr. Reid and Mr. Hoyer made clear that they thought it was out of Mr. Obama’s constitutional jurisdiction.

    What does Nancy Pelosi think of earmarks?

    House Speaker Nancy Pelosi, California Democrat, last week defended earmarks as an “appropriate function” of Congress, even as she pledged to work with the White House to cut the number and increase transparency – but only after passage of the omnibus bill.

    “The idea is lower number, more transparency, total accountability,” Mrs. Pelosi said.

    We’ll lower the number of earmarks – well, after this year. In other words, they’re hoping (and planning on) the media forgets that they said that next year. The Obama Administration is taking the same position – wait’ll next year (CNN link);

    [Peter Orszag, director of the White House Office of Management and Budget] argued that the White House had little choice but to support the $410 billion omnibus spending bill, which it inherited from the previous administration. The bill would keep the government running through 2009.

    “This is like your relief pitcher coming into the ninth inning and wanting to redo the whole game,” Orszag said. “Next year we’re going to be the starting pitcher, and the game’s going to be completely different.”

    Obama argues that he was saddled with this spending bill because the Bush Administration didn’t get a spending bill through Congress last year – that’s because Democrats wouldn’t take it up and put it off until this year. Sounds like he needs to sit down and talk with the children in his party. Unless, of course, he enjoys breaking a new campaign promise every week.