It ain't in any way power-freaky to demand the GM CEO's head on a platter; he was there for eight years, and according to my latest Consumer Reports, GM is at the bottom of the quality list, ahead only of Chrysler.
As for the banks, these guys evaporated trillions of dollars of wealth, something even GM would struggle to do. None of them deserve to be paid a thin dime; they should be glad they aren't being prosecuted for fraud, which they would be under any other Democrat besides Obama, who seems not to be able to work up a temper tantrum for any reason.
These guys sold on CDO's of mortgages that were so bad that even if we'd had one year of flat house prices, most of them would have fallen apart. They did it knowing this.
It's fraud by any reasonable definition. For them to sit there and say they're competing for talent and therefore need to pay folks the big bucks, when the only reason most of them are sitting there is because of the TARP, is just outrageous in the extreme.
BOA and C without the TARP would be gone. We all know that. As for the others, it's more debatable, but not by much; at the very least, most of them would be in much worse shape than they are, because most of them were rescued both directly and indirectly by the TARP and all of the other actions taken by the Treasury and, especially, the Fed in response to this craziness.
So, for all practical purposes, they're all alive only because of the government. They are, therefore, property of the government, to be dealt with as such.
If they didn't want to be in this position, they should have dealt honestly with their customers. They didn't. Now that they've failed, they need to shut up.
:eek: