I signed the petition but with a caveat, their proposed solution in my opinion was actually worse than allowing those executives to determine and fund their own future retirement lifestyles.
What is needed, of course, is a Constitutional solution that would protect the American people from such criminal activity again. Since most of the members of Congress, due to their own upper echelon incomes, have no real concept of "reasonableness" when it comes to financial matters (as with the ballooning amounts of this now pending spending package exhibit), their solution of having Congress institute legislation with respect to Congress then determining the amount of these severance packages was actually quite ludicrous.
Imagine if Speaker Pelosi or the Executive Office was to determine how much they are going to give to their corporate backers the next time some corporation seeks bankruptcy protection not through the Constitutional process, but by crying wolf on the steps of Capitol Hill? The mind boggles.
Better would be to institute legislation that calls for executive compensation, bonuses and severance packages for these publicly held corporations to be determined or affirmed by the actual owners of these corporate entities, the uninvolved citizen shareholders and stockholders themselves, not major corporate shareholders.
If I owned stock in any of those financial institutions or those automakers you can be darn sure that if they ran my investment into the ground so far as to have bankrupted the company itself, they should go away as empty handed as I potentially would under an actual federal bankruptcy action.
Actually, those executives should have to divest themselves of their own property in order to refund partially the losses and damages they have inflicted. There is no guarantee in the stock market, that is true, and everyone takes a risk for such an investment in the first place.
But if it is determined that it is blatant misuse of corporate assets and golden parachutes that have partially led to the crisis, than those responsible should also be held accountable for taking undue risks and profiting personally while the company's economic viability was in question or faltering. The owners and employees should be paid, and what is left over in such reorganizations or bankruptcies then be distributed for any salaries or benefits due and owing the executives at the time of any federal bankruptcy proceeding, or Congressional bailout.
Otherwise, it is becoming more profitable to rape company assets and take the money and run. This used to be called grand theft. But now in our politically correct society it is merely termed "bad business judgement," or "poor risk/loss assessment."
Taken in light of the S&L bailouts of the 80's and Big Oil bailouts, this is now becoming standard operating procedure for Congress to shift those costs now to the general public to assume those risks and losses, even those who were their customers and clientele and whose money was used for those corporate soirees.
Again, this has been the case in Congress betraying the Constitution and checks and balances included within it, as the founding fathers would never entertain using public sums to reward such breaches of the public trust for private commercial concerns especially public "institutions," instead every single one of those perpetrators would have been sent off to the local jail under criminal charges of "theft."
This would not have even occurred if Congress actually had been obeying the Constitution to begin with, as the banks in this country would never have been privatized in the first place, since one of the enumerated powers of Congress is to print, value and regulate U.S. coin and currency.
The dumbing down of America has simply been incredible, as there are screams now from the far right wing of "communism" if Congress (not the Executive Office) were to begin actually following the Constitution and nationalize the banking concerns once again (but without regulation also of the Fed, that action would be an exercise in futility also).
I am not nor was a shareholder or stockholder in AIG, yet it is I and my posterity and yours who will be assuming those risks. The new Rule of Law with these bailouts is now that every U.S. citizen, whether willingly or not, is an investor in all banks and major corporate industries in this nation and not as a matter of choice, but as a matter of Congressional and Executive unlawful directive. The President and Congress are now acting with a CEO mentality, rather than a Constitutional one.
It is the innocent Americans who are suffering with this mindset, which is nothing more than communism, pure and simple. Rather than the Communism as defined by some citizens and politicians on Capitol Hill with respect to nationalizing our banks, those Congressional members merely made the "community" of America suffer those losses while they were also losing their homes to these entities. If that isn't communism, I don't know what is. They even left Americans with a global communistic move as included in the September bailout was a London based insurer, AIG. The AIG bailout is the East India Tea Company all over again.
Corporations are "property" not citizens, and the owners of that property legally are the only ones who should determine just how much their administrator's are worth, while employed and thereafter. Period.
But with respect to those financial institutions and Congresss' fraud upon the public (since a good 2/3 of them accepted campaign donations from them for the 2008 elections), once those banks and the printing of our currency was privatized and given to the Federal Reserve and it's subsidiary private banks which it funds, Congress had the duty to be strictly overseeing their policies and practices and regulating them, not as co-conspirators in their fraud against the public and this now "secret" reorganization under the Executive Office, and out of public view and scrutiny.
