- Feb 26, 2001
- 13,593
- 164
- 63
doggie is such a lying piece of crap. I guess you have to give it to doggie. At least he found a career where lying is an asset. Imagine selling insurance for a career. No wonder he sounds like an old boring fuck.
How's that hope and change treatin you?
- Thread starter DOGS THAT BARK
- Start date
doggie is such a lying piece of crap. I guess you have to give it to doggie. At least he found a career where lying is an asset. Imagine selling insurance for a career. No wonder he sounds like an old boring fuck.
yep like GW didn't inheirit dot.com recession and immediately have it compounded by 9-11 fiasco --collapse of Enron-Tyco-Worldcom--cost of starting war on 2 fronts--greatest natural disater in U.S. history (Katrina) yet manage to keep employment at same levels as Clinton for 8 years--refer to "the numbers".
The diff is you had person with experience vs acorn organizer.
O's answer to everything has been not solving prob but throwing money at it-(temporary fix)
Pay em to buy car
pay em 2 years for unemployment
pay em to buy a house--
-bail out inept companies
Feed a man a fish and you fed him for a day---
There was nothing Bush could do about the dotcomm bubble. It was a necessary market correction; however, it was an economic speedbump compared to the giant economic sinkhole Bush left the country in.
9/11, Enron/Tyco/Worldcomm, Iraq, Afghanistan, Katrina response: The policies of the Bush administration were responsible for each of these "fiascos".
- Cash for Clunkers helped sales when the auto industry needed it the most.
- UE benefits helped millions of American families keep food on their tables and a roof over their heads and it's money that's immediately pumped right back into the economy (unlike tax cuts for the rich).
- You're confused. It was the policies under the Bush Administration that caused the housing bubble to explode.
- The GM/Chrysler bailouts were a huge success which also prevented Ford from going down with GM and Chrysler, as well as the entire domestic parts industry, 15,000 dealerships, transportation and logistics companies and scores of other service related companies.
I'd say the community organizer did pretty well on all counts.
Dogs, your problem is you're so blinded by your partisan views, you can't even see which Obama policies have been successful and which have not.
I always find it interesting, Wayne, that you hold up three companies in particular - Enron, Tyco and Worldcom - and try to pass them off as casualties of the DotCom collapse and reasons that Bush had economic trouble during his term(s). It is appropriate that you single these three big business corporations, considering that all three were fraudulent and were run by crooks that were conducting illegal business and accounting practices. Should we (again) examine the close ties those companies had with the Bush administration? Do you really want to hold these companies up as some kind of defense for Bush's economic performance and policies?
I'd suggest these three companies were run by exactly the kind of people that are making our current country and business scenario so bad these days. Corporate greed, donations to public officials (which is and will get much worse now), buying favor and influence, huge bonuses for execs when the company is doing poorly, moving money offshore and overseas to avoid tax responsibility, etc. I submit these are not valid reasons to support Bush in his economic performance - quite the contrary - it shows that continued worship and support of big business really only helps out big business that no longer cares about the middle and lower ranks of people that work for them, and perpetuates the control of our political process by people only concerned about controlling wealth and ultimately our government policies.
I'd suggest these three companies were run by exactly the kind of people that are making our current country and business scenario so bad these days. Corporate greed, donations to public officials (which is and will get much worse now), buying favor and influence, huge bonuses for execs when the company is doing poorly, moving money offshore and overseas to avoid tax responsibility, etc. I submit these are not valid reasons to support Bush in his economic performance - quite the contrary - it shows that continued worship and support of big business really only helps out big business that no longer cares about the middle and lower ranks of people that work for them, and perpetuates the control of our political process by people only concerned about controlling wealth and ultimately our government policies.
Cold Call
On Wall Street, Bob Rubin was brilliant at finessing risk. As Treasury secretary, his invisible hand saved the economy (not to speak of Clinton's presidency). So why'd he make that embarrassing Enron call?
undefined Comments Add Yours
.By Landon Thomas Jr. (Email)
It's been a few years since former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin has swept down from Mount Olympus and saved American capitalism. Since bowing out of government in 1999, Rubin has been ensconced in Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill's office of the chairman doing -- well, it's hard to say exactly what.
He takes calls from billionaire Mexican financiers who want to sell their banks to Citigroup (Citigroup bought Banamex in 2001). He does the lecture circuit, lending his glow to dewy-eyed Citigroup clients all over the world. He even goes down to Washington every now and then to see his old pal Alan Greenspan and primly lecture the Bush administration about blowing the surplus.
For the most part, though, he stays above it all: sitting in his corner office right next next to Weill's with his stocking feet up on the desk while a clutch of Citigroup executives -- including vice-chairman Deryck Maughan, Salomon Smith Barney CEO Michael Carpenter, emerging-markets chairman Victor Menezes, and, most recently, the newly appointed president, Robert Willumstad -- sweat mightily to position themselves as the 68-year-old Weill's successor.
On November 8, though, Bob Rubin's invisible hand got that old itch. Enron's stock was in free fall, and though the energy-trading company was still far from a household name, he feared the company's bankruptcy would be a dire event. Citigroup, one of its longstanding bankers, had more than a billion dollars in loans outstanding to Enron. But Rubin had larger concerns. He had been told by his bankers working on the deal, Salomon's Carpenter and syndicated-loan head Chad Leat, that a rescue package was almost assembled. The night before, a group of the highest-level Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase bankers cobbled together a deal that would merge the fast-sinking Enron with its Houston competitor Dynegy.
But for the deal to go through, the credit-ratings agencies needed to be dissuaded from downgrading Enron's mountain of debt to junk status. With a downgrade, the deal would be off and Enron would most likely go bust. In Rubin's eyes, Enron's implosion would rock not only the energy markets but global markets as a whole -- just as the collapse first of the Mexican peso and then of Mexico's stock market in 1994 had wobbled markets worldwide.
So Bob Rubin did what Bob Rubin does. On his own, without consulting Weill or anyone else, he picked up the phone and made what he thought would be the most discreet of calls to Treasury Undersecretary Peter Fisher. Rubin and Fisher weren't strangers -- Rubin knew him from his Treasury days, when Fisher worked at the New York Fed.
"Hey, Peter," Rubin proposed, "this is probably not such a good idea, but what do you think about putting a call in to the ratings agencies? Maybe they could work with Enron's bankers to see if there might be an alternative to an immediate downgrade."
It was a cheeky proposal: Rubin was asking the federal government to meddle in the private business of the independent ratings agencies, Moody's and Standard and Poor's, on behalf of a company with manifold financial and spiritual links to the current administration. Not to mention the fact that he was a major shareholder and executive of one of the two banks that stood to lose the most if Enron went under. "Gee, Bob," Fisher smartly demurred, "I'm not sure if that's advisable at this point."
Consensus within Treasury at the time was that an Enron flameout, contrary to what Rubin was thinking, would not threaten the financial and energy markets. Rubin's intentions may well have been noble, and he had his own qualms about Treasury's getting involved with the ratings agencies. When he sensed Fisher's hesitation, though, he quickly backed off. He had tried to do his bit, and that would be that.
"He was putting on his ?minence grise hat," says Michael Holland of Holland and Co. "Rubin is an arbitrage trader; he makes decisions quickly. He viewed Enron as a financial-markets issue. In his mind, if a downgrade occurs, it's 'Katie, bar the door.' "
Nevertheless, splashed all over the front page of the Times, the gesture made it seem -- and perception is what always counts in the markets -- as if he were flacking for Citigroup's loan book.
The close-to-the-vest phone call has always been the hallmark of Rubin's style -- from his days as a Goldman Sachs arbitrageur to his celebrated stint as the White House's financial-markets shaman. But the secret to Rubin's phone calls, and Rubin himself, is that they remain secret. And they remain secret because the calls never cross that invisible line that keeps the interests of the second party best served by not revealing the call.
Rewind to the booming eighties: takeover fever was rampant, and the kings of Wall Street were not Internet analysts and technology bankers but risk arbitrageurs -- brass-balled traders who bet millions on when and for what price companies would be taken over. Ivan Boesky was a semi-legend, but the best arb man of them all was Goldman Sachs's Bob Rubin.
In the spring of 1984, Rubin bet a chunk of Goldman's capital on a sleepy little company called Houston Natural Gas. It was the hot hostile-takeover stock of the moment: A rival energy concern called Coastal Corporation was buying up shares. Every arb worth his salt was long the stock. It seemed like a done deal, and Rubin bet big, taking on some leverage to spice up his return. But to the surprise of the street, Houston Natural Gas's board sent Coastal packing. In return for a $42 million greenmail payment, Coastal gave up on its merger aspirations. Guy Wyser-Pratte, then of Prudential-Bache Securities and a prominent arbitrage player at the time, remembers the moment well. "It was a terrible shock when news of the greenmail came across my ticker," he remembers. "You've just paid a huge premium for the stock, and all of a sudden the stock price collapses." So Rubin and the arb community dumped their positions for a big loss. Shortly after, HNG's board hired an ambitious, 40-year-old oilman named Kenneth Lay to run the company.
Lay had grand ambitions for the company, and within months it was in play again. This time, the bidder was a rival, an Omaha-based gas firm called InterNorth, and by the summer of 1985, InterNorth had paid $2.3 billion, in a friendly merger, for HNG. The next year, Lay, now CEO of the merged company, christened it Enron. This time, the arbs made out big. HNG's stock shot up from the low 50s to the $70 level, where the deal was priced.
Rubin by then had moved on to management, and leadership fell to Rubin prot?g? and fellow partner Robert Freeman. Freeman and his team stuck to the sidelines as the stock soared; Goldman Sachs was advising InterNorth on the deal.
But one of the risk arbitrageurs who did make a mint off HNG was Ivan Boesky. Since the mid-seventies, Boesky and Rubin had widely been recognized as the top arb men on the street. A Fortune article in 1977 had dubbed them, together with Wyser-Pratte and a fourth banker from Salomon Brothers, the four horsemen of Wall Street. Practically the same age, they had made millions for themselves and their firms by mastering the black arts of risk arbitrage, relentlessly working the phones, hoovering up information wherever they could find it and then trading on it. Loud, ostentatious, and a shameless epicure, Boesky was the antithesis of Rubin, who preferred his suits off the rack and a strictly light lunch at his desk. For Boesky, though, his information on InterNorth's designs for HNG proved to be too good. As would later be documented in James Stewart's Den of Thieves, Boesky had been buying his information from Martin Siegel, a takeover wizard at Kidder, Peabody, who, the government and more specifically U.S. District Attorney Rudolph Giuliani claimed, was sourcing much of his information from Goldman Sachs's arbitrage desk -- and Bob Freeman.
In February 1987, Giuliani ordered the arrest of Freeman on insider-trading charges. Rubin had been a mentor to Freeman; he had hired Freeman and taught him all that he knew. And Freeman was good, too -- he had made millions for the partnership, and his reputation on the street before his arrest had been impeccable. But as he finally admitted in 1989, when he pleaded guilty to having put a call in to Marty Siegel and selling stock on an inside tip, one thing Freeman had not learned from the master was when not to make that last, skating-too-close-to-the-edge phone call. Giuliani got his Goldman partner, though some said at the time that he was after bigger game -- Rubin himself.
To this day, Rubin resolutely defends Freeman ("Marty Siegel was lying through his teeth," he has been known to say), who was never formally charged with providing information to Siegel on HNG. And his acute dislike for the former mayor still retains its fresh edge. As for Giuliani, he could never make his larger case.
Rubin knew well enough from his days as a deal lawyer at Cleary, Gottleib in the sixties, when all the arbs would call him digging around for deal scoop, that the key to successful arbitrage was not just good information but knowing which information to use: knowing when a company will be taken over, placing your bets, riding the stock up, and, most important, knowing when to unload a position. He witnessed as well how his mentor, Gustave Levy -- a legendary Goldman arbitrageur and senior partner who helped invent and popularize the risk-arbitrage business in the forties and fifties, always seemed to know just enough to make big money on a deal but never enough to make it obvious.
Every morning at 8 a.m., Rubin would show up at his small desk on Goldman's trading floor. Spread out before him would be a slide rule, some yellow legal pads, and a telephone. And he would make his calls -- never shouting, never emoting, never breaking a sweat. With Goldman's monster balance sheet behind him, he could bet up to $50 million on a single position, and Goldman became the 800-pound gorilla in the arbitrage racket in the seventies and eighties.
"Rubin was leagues ahead of Boesky," says a rival arbitrage man from the period. "He had that steel-trap mind, and he always knew how far he could go, who he could talk to, and who he knew would shut up. He was always operating just underneath the radar. And he also had Gus Levy. Gus could call any CEO in the country and ask him: 'Is your deal safe?' That's what made Rubin so good. Goldman always seemed to have the information."
Most arbitrageurs tend to be like Boesky and Levy. To be on the phone that much, to get access to the right kind of information, to keep your shirt dry when your bet goes south -- it all assumes a brashness of character, a largeness of ego.
But Rubin was different. His selflessness, the soft mutter of his voice, the self-deprecatory smirk, that worn, Waspy look -- he just stood out from the crowd. The players, the lawyers, the deal guys, came to him in droves, like moths to light. Some risk was fine -- risk is the very pith of arbitrage -- but knowing when to pull back was the true secret that the other guys could never understand.
In a way, Rubin's call to Fisher was akin to an arbitrage bet. A trade-off, if you will. He might well have scratched out a scenario or two on his yellow legal pad. The downside risk was essentially what happened: Fisher backed off, Enron collapsed, and Rubin's reputation lost a bit of its gloss. But weighed against the possible upside -- Fisher makes the call and a national tragedy is quite possibly averted (Bob saves the day again!) -- in Rubin's mind, that was a risk-reward relationship he could work with. If he had to do it today, friends say, he'd certainly do it again. He had saved Mexico in 1994, an entire country, by weighing similar pros and cons -- why not do the same for Enron?
But for once, Bob Rubin was pushing against a string. By inserting himself into the Enron mess so late in the game, he made his presence physical, not spectral. Which is not how Bob Rubin's power works. For such a famously self-denying man, the call was a rare act of hubris
On Wall Street, Bob Rubin was brilliant at finessing risk. As Treasury secretary, his invisible hand saved the economy (not to speak of Clinton's presidency). So why'd he make that embarrassing Enron call?
undefined Comments Add Yours
.By Landon Thomas Jr. (Email)
It's been a few years since former Treasury secretary Robert E. Rubin has swept down from Mount Olympus and saved American capitalism. Since bowing out of government in 1999, Rubin has been ensconced in Citigroup CEO Sandy Weill's office of the chairman doing -- well, it's hard to say exactly what.
He takes calls from billionaire Mexican financiers who want to sell their banks to Citigroup (Citigroup bought Banamex in 2001). He does the lecture circuit, lending his glow to dewy-eyed Citigroup clients all over the world. He even goes down to Washington every now and then to see his old pal Alan Greenspan and primly lecture the Bush administration about blowing the surplus.
For the most part, though, he stays above it all: sitting in his corner office right next next to Weill's with his stocking feet up on the desk while a clutch of Citigroup executives -- including vice-chairman Deryck Maughan, Salomon Smith Barney CEO Michael Carpenter, emerging-markets chairman Victor Menezes, and, most recently, the newly appointed president, Robert Willumstad -- sweat mightily to position themselves as the 68-year-old Weill's successor.
On November 8, though, Bob Rubin's invisible hand got that old itch. Enron's stock was in free fall, and though the energy-trading company was still far from a household name, he feared the company's bankruptcy would be a dire event. Citigroup, one of its longstanding bankers, had more than a billion dollars in loans outstanding to Enron. But Rubin had larger concerns. He had been told by his bankers working on the deal, Salomon's Carpenter and syndicated-loan head Chad Leat, that a rescue package was almost assembled. The night before, a group of the highest-level Citigroup and JP Morgan Chase bankers cobbled together a deal that would merge the fast-sinking Enron with its Houston competitor Dynegy.
But for the deal to go through, the credit-ratings agencies needed to be dissuaded from downgrading Enron's mountain of debt to junk status. With a downgrade, the deal would be off and Enron would most likely go bust. In Rubin's eyes, Enron's implosion would rock not only the energy markets but global markets as a whole -- just as the collapse first of the Mexican peso and then of Mexico's stock market in 1994 had wobbled markets worldwide.
So Bob Rubin did what Bob Rubin does. On his own, without consulting Weill or anyone else, he picked up the phone and made what he thought would be the most discreet of calls to Treasury Undersecretary Peter Fisher. Rubin and Fisher weren't strangers -- Rubin knew him from his Treasury days, when Fisher worked at the New York Fed.
"Hey, Peter," Rubin proposed, "this is probably not such a good idea, but what do you think about putting a call in to the ratings agencies? Maybe they could work with Enron's bankers to see if there might be an alternative to an immediate downgrade."
It was a cheeky proposal: Rubin was asking the federal government to meddle in the private business of the independent ratings agencies, Moody's and Standard and Poor's, on behalf of a company with manifold financial and spiritual links to the current administration. Not to mention the fact that he was a major shareholder and executive of one of the two banks that stood to lose the most if Enron went under. "Gee, Bob," Fisher smartly demurred, "I'm not sure if that's advisable at this point."
Consensus within Treasury at the time was that an Enron flameout, contrary to what Rubin was thinking, would not threaten the financial and energy markets. Rubin's intentions may well have been noble, and he had his own qualms about Treasury's getting involved with the ratings agencies. When he sensed Fisher's hesitation, though, he quickly backed off. He had tried to do his bit, and that would be that.
"He was putting on his ?minence grise hat," says Michael Holland of Holland and Co. "Rubin is an arbitrage trader; he makes decisions quickly. He viewed Enron as a financial-markets issue. In his mind, if a downgrade occurs, it's 'Katie, bar the door.' "
Nevertheless, splashed all over the front page of the Times, the gesture made it seem -- and perception is what always counts in the markets -- as if he were flacking for Citigroup's loan book.
The close-to-the-vest phone call has always been the hallmark of Rubin's style -- from his days as a Goldman Sachs arbitrageur to his celebrated stint as the White House's financial-markets shaman. But the secret to Rubin's phone calls, and Rubin himself, is that they remain secret. And they remain secret because the calls never cross that invisible line that keeps the interests of the second party best served by not revealing the call.
Rewind to the booming eighties: takeover fever was rampant, and the kings of Wall Street were not Internet analysts and technology bankers but risk arbitrageurs -- brass-balled traders who bet millions on when and for what price companies would be taken over. Ivan Boesky was a semi-legend, but the best arb man of them all was Goldman Sachs's Bob Rubin.
In the spring of 1984, Rubin bet a chunk of Goldman's capital on a sleepy little company called Houston Natural Gas. It was the hot hostile-takeover stock of the moment: A rival energy concern called Coastal Corporation was buying up shares. Every arb worth his salt was long the stock. It seemed like a done deal, and Rubin bet big, taking on some leverage to spice up his return. But to the surprise of the street, Houston Natural Gas's board sent Coastal packing. In return for a $42 million greenmail payment, Coastal gave up on its merger aspirations. Guy Wyser-Pratte, then of Prudential-Bache Securities and a prominent arbitrage player at the time, remembers the moment well. "It was a terrible shock when news of the greenmail came across my ticker," he remembers. "You've just paid a huge premium for the stock, and all of a sudden the stock price collapses." So Rubin and the arb community dumped their positions for a big loss. Shortly after, HNG's board hired an ambitious, 40-year-old oilman named Kenneth Lay to run the company.
Lay had grand ambitions for the company, and within months it was in play again. This time, the bidder was a rival, an Omaha-based gas firm called InterNorth, and by the summer of 1985, InterNorth had paid $2.3 billion, in a friendly merger, for HNG. The next year, Lay, now CEO of the merged company, christened it Enron. This time, the arbs made out big. HNG's stock shot up from the low 50s to the $70 level, where the deal was priced.
Rubin by then had moved on to management, and leadership fell to Rubin prot?g? and fellow partner Robert Freeman. Freeman and his team stuck to the sidelines as the stock soared; Goldman Sachs was advising InterNorth on the deal.
But one of the risk arbitrageurs who did make a mint off HNG was Ivan Boesky. Since the mid-seventies, Boesky and Rubin had widely been recognized as the top arb men on the street. A Fortune article in 1977 had dubbed them, together with Wyser-Pratte and a fourth banker from Salomon Brothers, the four horsemen of Wall Street. Practically the same age, they had made millions for themselves and their firms by mastering the black arts of risk arbitrage, relentlessly working the phones, hoovering up information wherever they could find it and then trading on it. Loud, ostentatious, and a shameless epicure, Boesky was the antithesis of Rubin, who preferred his suits off the rack and a strictly light lunch at his desk. For Boesky, though, his information on InterNorth's designs for HNG proved to be too good. As would later be documented in James Stewart's Den of Thieves, Boesky had been buying his information from Martin Siegel, a takeover wizard at Kidder, Peabody, who, the government and more specifically U.S. District Attorney Rudolph Giuliani claimed, was sourcing much of his information from Goldman Sachs's arbitrage desk -- and Bob Freeman.
In February 1987, Giuliani ordered the arrest of Freeman on insider-trading charges. Rubin had been a mentor to Freeman; he had hired Freeman and taught him all that he knew. And Freeman was good, too -- he had made millions for the partnership, and his reputation on the street before his arrest had been impeccable. But as he finally admitted in 1989, when he pleaded guilty to having put a call in to Marty Siegel and selling stock on an inside tip, one thing Freeman had not learned from the master was when not to make that last, skating-too-close-to-the-edge phone call. Giuliani got his Goldman partner, though some said at the time that he was after bigger game -- Rubin himself.
To this day, Rubin resolutely defends Freeman ("Marty Siegel was lying through his teeth," he has been known to say), who was never formally charged with providing information to Siegel on HNG. And his acute dislike for the former mayor still retains its fresh edge. As for Giuliani, he could never make his larger case.
Rubin knew well enough from his days as a deal lawyer at Cleary, Gottleib in the sixties, when all the arbs would call him digging around for deal scoop, that the key to successful arbitrage was not just good information but knowing which information to use: knowing when a company will be taken over, placing your bets, riding the stock up, and, most important, knowing when to unload a position. He witnessed as well how his mentor, Gustave Levy -- a legendary Goldman arbitrageur and senior partner who helped invent and popularize the risk-arbitrage business in the forties and fifties, always seemed to know just enough to make big money on a deal but never enough to make it obvious.
Every morning at 8 a.m., Rubin would show up at his small desk on Goldman's trading floor. Spread out before him would be a slide rule, some yellow legal pads, and a telephone. And he would make his calls -- never shouting, never emoting, never breaking a sweat. With Goldman's monster balance sheet behind him, he could bet up to $50 million on a single position, and Goldman became the 800-pound gorilla in the arbitrage racket in the seventies and eighties.
"Rubin was leagues ahead of Boesky," says a rival arbitrage man from the period. "He had that steel-trap mind, and he always knew how far he could go, who he could talk to, and who he knew would shut up. He was always operating just underneath the radar. And he also had Gus Levy. Gus could call any CEO in the country and ask him: 'Is your deal safe?' That's what made Rubin so good. Goldman always seemed to have the information."
Most arbitrageurs tend to be like Boesky and Levy. To be on the phone that much, to get access to the right kind of information, to keep your shirt dry when your bet goes south -- it all assumes a brashness of character, a largeness of ego.
But Rubin was different. His selflessness, the soft mutter of his voice, the self-deprecatory smirk, that worn, Waspy look -- he just stood out from the crowd. The players, the lawyers, the deal guys, came to him in droves, like moths to light. Some risk was fine -- risk is the very pith of arbitrage -- but knowing when to pull back was the true secret that the other guys could never understand.
In a way, Rubin's call to Fisher was akin to an arbitrage bet. A trade-off, if you will. He might well have scratched out a scenario or two on his yellow legal pad. The downside risk was essentially what happened: Fisher backed off, Enron collapsed, and Rubin's reputation lost a bit of its gloss. But weighed against the possible upside -- Fisher makes the call and a national tragedy is quite possibly averted (Bob saves the day again!) -- in Rubin's mind, that was a risk-reward relationship he could work with. If he had to do it today, friends say, he'd certainly do it again. He had saved Mexico in 1994, an entire country, by weighing similar pros and cons -- why not do the same for Enron?
But for once, Bob Rubin was pushing against a string. By inserting himself into the Enron mess so late in the game, he made his presence physical, not spectral. Which is not how Bob Rubin's power works. For such a famously self-denying man, the call was a rare act of hubris
Obama quoting the comission he appointed that he IGNORED, you can't make this shit up.
:shrug: :nono:
:shrug: :nono:
The reason I mention them Chad is you and I and rest of tax payers didn't have to bail them out because of their incompetence.
They were allowed to fail--
If GW hadn't been responsible for implementing part D rx entitlement--he would have had pretty good scorecard--or I should his admin moreso than him. That 8 years had lots of adversities.
- Feb 26, 2001
- 13,593
- 164
- 63
I daresay that there would have been no way any agency, president or legislator would have been able to sell a bailout of those companies due to their illegal, corrupt business practices - no comparison to American automakers. And, I would also mention the Bush stimulus, which I believe was larger than Obama's, so to say Bush didn't participate in any bailout activities is kind of disingenuous, IMO. There certainly was benefits to companies due to Bush in his round of stimulus, which is routinely dismissed here and elsewhere. And there certainly were plenty of conservatives and experts that maintained we had to engage in stimulus and agreed (and voted) for it to prevent total financial collapse.
i wish it all would have collapsed in 2008. Now, after the trillions wasted, all they bought was a few years.
Now, the result will be exponentially worse.
Now, the result will be exponentially worse.
30,000 college students kicked out of food aid program in Michigan
State's new eligibility rules to save $75M; more students got aid than thought
Lansing ? Michigan has removed about 30,000 college students from its food stamp program ? close to double the initial estimate ? saving about $75 million a year, says Human Services Director Maura Corrigan.
Federal rules don't allow most college students to collect food stamps, but Michigan had created its own rules that made nearly all students eligible, said Brian Rooney, Corrigan's deputy director. As a result, the number of Michigan college students on this form of welfare made the state a national leader. For example, Michigan had 10 times the number of students on food stamps as either Illinois or California, Rooney said.
Cutting off the students is part of what Corrigan says is an effort to change the culture of the state's welfare department and slash tens of millions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse.
"Maybe (students) could go get a part-time job ? that's what I did," said Corrigan, a former justice of the Michigan Supreme Court who attended Detroit's Marygrove College and University of Detroit Mercy School of Law.
"We want to encourage people to be self-sufficient, not to be dependent on the government," she said in an interview with The Detroit News.
But critics say state funding has shrunk and tuition has skyrocketed since Corrigan attended college in the late '60s and early '70s. They cite Michigan's still-battered economy and say the suffering the cuts will create won't be apparent until after cash-strapped students return to campuses this fall.
Corrigan, appointed by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder in January to head the $6.9 billion Department of Human Services, has also ordered administrators to start looking at applicants' assets, not just their income. That move follows an uproar after it was revealed Leroy Fick of Auburn remained eligible for food stamps and continued using them after he won $2 million in the state lottery TV show "Make Me Rich!" in June 2010.
.................................................................
If DTBlackgumby would only talk about this kind of shit about welfare reciepents then I would understand and agree.
There is so much fraud and corruption in Medicare and Food stamps that America could balance the budget if we could root it all out.
But instead he has to just make the goverment tit statements.
pity the fool really.......
State's new eligibility rules to save $75M; more students got aid than thought
Lansing ? Michigan has removed about 30,000 college students from its food stamp program ? close to double the initial estimate ? saving about $75 million a year, says Human Services Director Maura Corrigan.
Federal rules don't allow most college students to collect food stamps, but Michigan had created its own rules that made nearly all students eligible, said Brian Rooney, Corrigan's deputy director. As a result, the number of Michigan college students on this form of welfare made the state a national leader. For example, Michigan had 10 times the number of students on food stamps as either Illinois or California, Rooney said.
Cutting off the students is part of what Corrigan says is an effort to change the culture of the state's welfare department and slash tens of millions of dollars of waste, fraud and abuse.
"Maybe (students) could go get a part-time job ? that's what I did," said Corrigan, a former justice of the Michigan Supreme Court who attended Detroit's Marygrove College and University of Detroit Mercy School of Law.
"We want to encourage people to be self-sufficient, not to be dependent on the government," she said in an interview with The Detroit News.
But critics say state funding has shrunk and tuition has skyrocketed since Corrigan attended college in the late '60s and early '70s. They cite Michigan's still-battered economy and say the suffering the cuts will create won't be apparent until after cash-strapped students return to campuses this fall.
Corrigan, appointed by Republican Gov. Rick Snyder in January to head the $6.9 billion Department of Human Services, has also ordered administrators to start looking at applicants' assets, not just their income. That move follows an uproar after it was revealed Leroy Fick of Auburn remained eligible for food stamps and continued using them after he won $2 million in the state lottery TV show "Make Me Rich!" in June 2010.
.................................................................
If DTBlackgumby would only talk about this kind of shit about welfare reciepents then I would understand and agree.
There is so much fraud and corruption in Medicare and Food stamps that America could balance the budget if we could root it all out.
But instead he has to just make the goverment tit statements.
pity the fool really.......
Weird. I coulda swore you mentioned them because when it came to the economy, Bush was...
