Those Salary Reductions and Hypocrite RadioMouths

As Vox opined, we have "free market capitalists" on the radiowaves who don't exactly live up to their self-billing. And some of them have the gall to mutter, disdainfully, about the "populists" who "envy" Wall Street bloodsuckers.

Look very closely at any commentator, so-called conservative or otherwise, who complains about this action by the White House being somehow "anti-capitalist". If he was also a supporter of the bailouts last November, you should never, ever, consider taking him seriously again, because he's either an untrustoworthy hypocrite or he's too dumb to even realize his inconsistency. Once the government stepped in to socialize a corporation's losses, that corporation lost the right to privatize its profits or even manage itself independently. From an economic perspective, the only thing more disastrous than a pure socialist system where both profits and losses are public is a fascist system where profits are private and losses are public.

(There are some who are now managing taxpayer-owned Banks who were not complicit in the self-delusion and self-destruction of those insitutions, and they should not be subject to the haircut administered by Obama.)

But Limbaugh, Belling, and Weber are simply wrong when they first endorsed the "bailouts" of TARP, and then ran back to mama to cry "wolf" when the bill is presented for payment.

I might add that at least one of those commentators specifically wailed about the treatment afforded Ken Lewis of BofA. You'd think that he would at least have some knowledge of how underhanded Lewis & Co. actually WERE during that process--as pointed out by Ritholtz this morning:

Investigators also think the documents, combined with prior testimony and fresh interviews with a key executive, suggest that Bank of America chief executive Kenneth D. Lewis used the threat of backing out of the government-backed deal as leverage for billions more in taxpayer bailout money, the sources said.”

In other words, the lying sack of s*&^ Lewis increased the amount of taxpayer money he took because he over-bid (by a ton) for the rotting corpse that was Merrill. Not only did he fail to exercise due diligence--when he failed, he billed the taxpayer for it.

Shylock was a more sympathetic figure.

But hey! Some people can only mouth the Party Line. They're incapable of thought.