Today Show: Dylan Ratigan and Michael Moore on Wall Street Bonuses
By Heather Monday Oct 19, 2009 10:00am
From the Today Show Oct. 15, 2009. Dylan Ratigan and Michael Moore slam Wall Street for the latest round of bonuses being paid to their executives after being rescued by our tax dollars.
Lauer: Dylan, let me start with you. There are going to be a lot of confused people out here. The Dow is over 10,000 again. The bonuses are back, but on Main Street you’ve got money still tight, spending is tough, people can’t get mortgages, and unemployment is still a problem. Is it just the reality now that Wall Street and Main Street are completely disconnected?
Ratigan: Largely they were. Unfortunately the government has changed the rules on behalf of Wall St. to allow them access to trillions of our dollars as you and I have discussed, as Michael Moore has documented. When you have access to trillions of dollars of taxpayer money with no strings attached, it's very easy to make a few billion dollars. A billion is only 1/1000 of a trillion and because our government is allowing the indulgence of the risk taking of the trillions of our own money not only is it allowing Wall Street to make the billions, but it is also depriving the rest of our economy out of the use of those funds which is why you see the heart wrenching antidotes that Michael Moore is so good at portraying.
There is a direct connection between those who you see suffering in films that Michael documents and the abdication of duty by our government to allow all the taxpayer money we all work so hard to create to be the plaything, the gambling toy, of the financial industry as opposed to forcing the financial industry to get back to the business of being investors and becoming the next Warren Buffet, actually putting money into the economy as opposed to taking it out.
Lauer: Michael, let me make sure people understand this. The Wall Street Journal report says that firms are going to pay out about a $140 billion dollars in bonuses this year. The year before the economic meltdown, 2007, they paid out about $130 billion, so it’s gone up. How is this news going to go over with people like the ones in your home state Michigan that just found out unemployment is 15.3% in that state?
Moore: Well eventually people aren’t going to take it and I don’t know how many gated communities these people who are taking this $140 billion in bonuses, I don’t know how many castles with moats around them they can build, but I’ll tell you something—there’s an anger that’s building out there and I mean Matt, these people, they burned down our economy. They completely crashed it. And now they're getting rewarded for it. It would be like I burned down your house today and then tomorrow you send me a check for it thanking me. It's absolutely insane that we allow this to happen but not surprising because that’s our capitalist system. They can get away with it because it’s legal. They can get away with it because they can make whatever they want to make. They can take whatever they want to take. There’s no such thing as enough.
Lauer: Let me play devil’s advocate. This is for both of you. Michael why don’t you start with it. What about this axiom that in business you pay your best people more to keep them so they keep making you money and what about the argument that these bonuses are simply a way of rewarding the people who are making the most money for these institutions.
Moore: Okay, let’s see. Let’s pay the best people, these would be these people, who helped wreck and ruin our economy—let’s pay them for what they did. I mean this is absolutely crazy logic. There are 14,000 people every day that lose their health insurance. As you said in your report there’s 15 million out of work. There’s a person, there’s a home that’s foreclosed in this country every seven and a half seconds.
Now sooner or later people are going to say that’s it, that’s enough. My hope is that when the Congressional switch board opens in about an hour that everybody watching us just calls their member of Congress and say that they have had it, that they want to this to stop. You said that Bank of America is going to hand out $30 billion in bonuses. You know how much TARP money, our money they got? $30 billion—that’s our money. If people just sit by and let this happen, then we deserve everything we get.
Ratigan: Capitalism in its best form—the government strictly enforces rules of investment Matt on the financial side so the only way an investor can make money is by trying to be the next great venture capitalist, the next great Warren Buffet and picking winners among our best and brightest to support innovators. So you have innovators here investors here and workers that support both of those communities.
What Wall Street has done is they’ve taken the language of innovation and wrapped it around the business of investment and changed the government rules so innovating is a way to take money out as opposed to a way to put money in so when you say pay your best people you have to be clear about what you’re paying your best people to do. And if you’re paying your best people to extract as much money as possible from this economy, yes they are creating that “value” if you want to call it that.
Lauer: Right.
Ratigan: But they’re creating it at the expense of the totality of the system, which is why you see that. In an ideal world you me and Mr. Moore here are competing to invest money to be the next Warren Buffet with kids from colleges across the country with ideas as opposed to coming up with schemes where we change the rules and basically perpetrate insurance fraud.
Lauer: Michael just 30 seconds left. Take the last 30 seconds please.
Moore: We’re a year after the crash and not one single regulation has been passed—not one. There’s a bill right now before the Financial Services Committee in the Senate to have a consumer protection agency. The banking industry has fought this. You know they poured over $200 million in lobbying fees just this year alone to stop any single rule from being put on them. They are out of control. They will not stop unless they’re reigned in. But as long as you’ve got an economic system that encourages this kind of greed, that legalizes the greed, then you’re going to see not only this, you’re going to see other things happening in the future.
And you know what—if Goldman Sachs is so poor, you know maybe people should just—maybe everybody watching should just take a few pennies and drop them in an envelope and send them to them at 85 Broad Street, NY, NY today if they’re really hurting that bad.
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for you michael,
in this article,
from raw story.com:
http://rawstory.com/news/2008/Bush_Administra...
bush attorneys created a "loophole" to protect their "golden parachutes", after they left office.
pretty smart guys, dont you think?
The market is a ponzi scheme!
Get out as quick as you can.
Barney Frank needs to hear form you about how you feel about regulating the banking system and Wall Street. IT may be useless but it surely wont hurt. Please contact Barney Frank at least twice today. By phone and email. Contact the Financial Services Committee too.
Phone Barney Frank's office.
Here is his website.
Phone numbers (call them all --- often!):
(202) 225-5931
(617) 332-3920
(508) 999-6462
On his site it says:
"If you would like to ask Barney to support or oppose a bill, the best way to reach him is to send an email. Or you may also call the Washington office at (202) 225-5931. We discourage constituents from sending postal mail because House security procedures can delay delivery for up to several weeks.
"To express your opinion about legislation concerning mortgages, banking, executive compensation and other financial issues, you may address an email to the House Financial Services Committee."
To contact the "Financial Services Committee." Phone: (202) 225–4247 or email them using this form.
If you would like to send an email to Barney you can fill out this form. If you do not live in his district you can use 02740 as a zip code to get to his email form. the thing about email is that it is not as good as the phone. I have no idea how much it matters but calling and writing cannot hurt. I will give out this info during the week to remind everybody to contact these people. I hope that the C+L staff understands.
The link to the Financial Services Committee brings up a "page not found" error, as does the one for Barney's website.
I had to search at that website by typing Barney Frank into the textbox, but finally got to his e-mail form, and asked him to do something about these obscene bonuses.
Thanks for urging us to write!
Dudley Moore?
"Sir, I think you've had enough."
"I want more than enough!"
A little bit is good, a lot is better and too much is just right!
Of financial news - Sarah Palin's book has gone to the mark-down bin at Amazon - $9 down from $29.00 - watch it go to less than a dollar after Xmas!
I am literally ROFLMFAO!
The book isn't actually released until November 17th!
lololololo
haven't even cut down the trees yet!
And she can see the NYT's best-seller list from her porch!
Her followers aren't real bookish so I suspect Sarah will be spending a lot of time in high school gyms talking to the people who "are the backbone of this great country" (wink).
Her followers don't read, but it don't matter, as it will still go up the best seller list, as conservative groups will by 100,000s and given them away, as they always do for conservative books.
Sarahs book will make good firewood in a pinch for those who lose their gas supply this winter.
What a bummer for the women who actually wrote the book. And it ain't Sarah, of course.
absolutely makes my day!
The great Ponzi scheme of American style Crony Capitalism is alive and well.
The Pope of Hope (R-Government Sachs) may wag his finger at them…
But will that will teach them…
Know Your Enemies…
Hank Paulson, Tim Geithner, Ben Bernanke, Robert Rubin, Larry Summers, Alan Greenspan, Lloyd Blankfein, Jamie Dimon, John Mack, Vikram Pandit, John Thain, Hank Greenberg, Ken Lewis:
http://ampedstatus.com/the-wall-street-econom...
My bad luck. I had zero balance until I recently paid my son's college tuition by CC. Is Wall street attempting to take over the last vestige of Free Enterprise -- our local organized crime loan sharks? I'm following Moore's advice. I'm divesting of the big institutions and going to my local credit union to do all my banking.
I joined a credit union 2 weeks ago b/c I was soooo disgusted with the goddamn bank. They were ripping me off with so many fees I just said FUCK EM! BTW, isn't Obama's "change" just great?
rather than you electing to switch financial institutions?
Oh, please, please contact your local TV station(s) and get one of their reporters to do a segment on this as part of their ongoing coverage of how the economy is affecting ordinary people.
Not only will it help raise awareness, but I bet the bad publicity will get them to lower your rate.
any time they feel like. Don't ever ever use a credit card. Especially from a major bank. Never have anything to do with a major bank. You are too small to be a customer to them. All you are to them is a sucker.
Are the BONUSES!
I mean - if THAT doesn't beat all. . .
send us taxpayers a thankyou note.
They are ripping the stockholders off.
Well it's something.
Bravo to the Ratigan guy. He hits the nail right on the head. Micheal is great because he drums up the anger and the drama, which needs to be done, but Ratigan nails aways at it. These people actually use language like "it's time to take profit." I made 200% on an investment because I was smarter than the Wall Street guys, as soon as those words start circling in the print, though, "it's time to take the profit." You'll see the stock inflate and deflate in a matter of a week. Now I'm not saying that said company didn't make off like a bandit with this product, because they did, but THESE PEOPLE CONTRIBUTE NOTHING. They're glorified gamblers and most of them have a herd mentality anyways. Then they love to think of themselves as Ayn Rand's hero, smarter than everybody else because they're greedier than everybody else. It's sickening, and we need to stop worshiping Wall Street like it even matters at all.
Nevermind
nevermind
that the bonuses Wall St are getting would totally fund a single payer plan plus?
y
What does "t y" mean, please?
(t)hank (y)ou
Jeez, I thought "thx" was as brief as one could be saying "thank you"! Though, come to think of it, the Brits just say "ta" -- I love that about the English language.
(:>)
"The real owners are the big wealthy business interests that control things and make all the important decisions. Forget the politicians, the politicians are put there to give you the idea that you have freedom of choice. You don’t. You have no choice. You have owners.
They own you. They own everything. They own all the important land. They own and control the corporations. They’ve long since bought and paid for the Senate, the Congress, the statehouses, the city halls. They’ve got the judges in their back pockets. And they own all the big media companies, so that they control just about all of the news and information you get to hear. They’ve got you by the balls. They spend billions of dollars every year lobbying - lobbying to get what they want. Well, we know what they want; they want more for themselves and less for everybody else.
But I’ll tell you what they don’t want, they don’t want a population of citizens capable of critical thinking. They don’t want well-informed, well-educated people capable of critical thinking. They’re not interested in that. That doesn’t help them. That’s against their interests. They don’t want people who are smart enough to sit around the kitchen table and figure out how badly they’re getting fucked by a system that threw them overboard 30 fucking years ago. They don’t want that! You know what they want? Obedient workers - people who are just smart enough to run the machines and do the paperwork, and just dumb enough to passively accept all these increasingly shittier jobs with the lower pay, the longer hours, reduced benefits, the end of overtime and the vanishing pension that disappears the minute you go to collect it. And now, they’re coming for your Social Security money. They want your fucking retirement money. They want it back, so they can give it to their criminal friends on Wall Street. And you know something? They’ll get it.
They’ll get it all, sooner or later, because they own this fucking place. It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it. You and I are not in the big club.
The owners of this country know the truth: It’s called the American dream ’cause you have to be asleep to believe it."
-- George Carlin
Truer words have rarely been spoken.
Hey Michael:
What's with the hat?
the story that Obama's administration has put the plan to retrieve taxes from offshore accounts, albeit with huge discounts on the imposed fees, on hold - is now old news.
GD, every fucking part of this system is shattered.
I won't give Goldman Sachs one red cent.
that exaggerate the passing of democracy, capitalism and access to government is the phenomena that downward trends in public confidence tend to feed themselves like fire.
you spill red
on my cloudy carpet
I recall the urgency of the act to "sure" up our troubled Banking system. The timing was akin to revenge for putting the first black president in the White House.
There was a silent developing concern going on in my head as I watched Obama get closer and closer to the top job. John McCain backed off after appearing to go into the crisis as Sir Military Man who has been given the noble job of fixing our problem.
As the campaign came to an end, the first thing Obama had to address was a major depression. I bet he did not know anything he did would be the cartelist for blaming this whole thing on his "in coming” administration.
Today, it appears Obama did something to turn their mistake around, yet he is being set up for the next round of things wrong with this administration. No, "Barack Obama did not do this."
Joseph
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