links: Wall Street rage

[mindstalk]

* The rage of the privileged. Wall Street financiers who'd be unemployed sans government bailout cry at the reduction of their bonuses and looks at whether they've been paid for wrecking the economy.

* Growing unbelievers in America
* Conservatives out to repeal civil union benefits in Washington state. This is why marriage is needed: "separate but equal" can be attacked separately.
* The NDP and economic management in British Columbia

Some of these links from Randy.

Comments

[jordan179.livejournal.com]

Wall Street financiers who'd be unemployed sans government bailout cry at the reduction of their bonuses and looks at whether they've been paid for wrecking the economy.

Actually, they are anti-privileged. Laws were passed specifically to take their bonsues away. Also, most of those who received bonuses received them in LIEU of salaries for that year.

How would you feel if your employers asked you to forego your salary for a year, promised you a big bonus instead, and then the government imposed a special 90% tax on your bonus?

And how were these managers personally responsible for wrecking the economy? Sounds to me as if you want to shoot some messengers here.

[dogofjustice.livejournal.com]

The problem is that they made an absurd amount of money over the last several years, and claimed that they earned it due to their superior skill and work ethic w.r.t. capital allocation. Well, I'm not going to argue with the work ethic, but it is now clear that their "skill" failed to earn any positive long term return at all.

Now, the rule of law clearly takes precedence over any narrow-minded notion of economic justice that tries to claw back all the "unjustified" earnings. (There are many, many other people who were arguably overpaid, after all; investment bankers are just among the most spectacular examples.) Investors would be wise to insist on clawback-style provisions in the future, but it's too late to reasonably correct the mistakes they made in the past. But the party on Wall Street had better be over; else we're just sowing the seeds for the next crisis. The financial sector was clearly oversized, and driving talent away to other fields where it can create more actual value is a feature, not a bug.

[mindstalk.livejournal.com]

Rule of law seems ambiguous here, if the companies would be bankrupt and paying nothing without government bailout. "You're stealing our money!" "Whose money?"

[dogofjustice.livejournal.com]

Well, there's that constitutional clause about bills of attainder and ex post facto laws. I don't have a problem with reducing bonuses to nothing or next to nothing, but it's important to achieve that result in a proper manner.