Friday, January 27, 2012

Forget About Wallstreet Execs, What About Lawyers Pay?

How many people have had to declare bankruptcy, or seen their savings seriously depleted, because they had to pay a lawyer $300 an hour or more to do their divorce work?

How many defendants at trial have had to sell everything they own in order to pay their legal costs to defend themselves? I'm thinking of that Korean couple who owned two dry cleaning stores. Then they lost some loon's $200 pair of pants, and instead of just being reimbursed for $200, the guy sues them for $2 mil - and the case is accepted, and by the time the case is thrown out as specious six months later, the dry cleaners have had to sell one of their two stores to pay their legal bills. How sick is that?

I say cap lawyer's pay at $25 an hour.

Regime Approves Paydays for TARP Firm Execs
RUSH: Other items in the news, from the New York Daily News: "Treasury Department Approves Huge Paydays for Execs at Firms Who Received TARP Bailout Money." Folks, do you remember how Obama put a "cap" on CEO salaries of guys who took TARP money? He capped CEO salaries at TARP firms at 500 grand. If your company took TARP bailout money, then your CEO is limited to a salary of $500,000. You remember when he said that his compensation czar, his pay czar (a guy named Kenneth Feinberg) was gonna rein in all those crazy Wall Street salaries and that we had to get rid of all of these bonuses? Well, it turns out that during the height of the recession, the pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg, approved pay packages for the bailed out companies that gave 49 executives more than $5 million each.

In fact, AIG's CEO alone got $10.5 million for two years in a row. Now Obama tells this guy Feinberg, "You go out there and we're gonna cap these people's earnings at $500,000. If they're getting bailout money, their salaries are capped at $500,000," and everybody says, "Well, how can you do that?" "We can do it because we're keeping them afloat. We bailed them out, so we're telling them." But under the table while nobody's looking: "The Treasury Department approved pay packages worth $5 million or more for 49 executives at a handful of firms that received the biggest taxpayer bailouts between 2009 and 2011.

"A scathing new audit this week by the inspector general for the Troubled Asset Relief Program blasted those payments, all of which occurred despite a $500,000 salary cap that President Obama and Congress established in 2009 at firms receiving 'exceptional assistance' under TARP." Now, we know Obama never really meant to put a cap on the salary of his donors -- uh, friends. It was all a show! It turns out that wasn't true. Obama said, "You know what? Not only are these bonuses too high, and I'm the only one separating you from the peasants with the pitchforks, but from now on, you can't earn more than $500,000," and they're earning $5 million bonuses.

One of them is an AIG guy! Remember how you were told to hate AIG? Remember how you were told the SEIU goes to the AIG exec's front lawn up in Connecticut and protests? You were told these people are rotten to the core. You should hate 'em and you should despise 'em? And then you were told Obama's gonna get even with them by limiting their pay to 500 grand a year? They're getting ten million. They're getting $10 million, ladies and gentlemen, all under the table while nobody was noticing.

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