Breaking Down the Vote

7Comments

1. 1.

   jeffreyw

   December 12, 2009 at 10:56 am

   I wish the senate could pass it.

2. 2.

   scav

   December 12, 2009 at 11:08 am

   or this, via CR

   Financial Times turns Onion-esque

   FT.com / Comment / Opinion – Outside Edge: Yakuza solutions for errant bankers
   What is needed is a more robust approach to inflicting misery on aberrant bankers – in short, a behavioural remedy.
   Naming and shaming will not do. If the people at Goldman Sachs have a shame gene, it is capable only of inducing a sense of pain when their bonuses are less than those of their peers. As for bringing back the medieval stocks, this would be satisfyingly populist, but no great deterrent if multi-million bonuses are not clawed back. Tempting though it might be to require bankers to carry placards on their backs saying “I am a contingent liability on the public sector”, that somehow lacks the resonance of the leper’s cry of “unclean”.
   The time has come instead to learn from the Japanese experience with yakuza gangsters, those charming folk with head-to-toe tattoos who run the country’s pachinko gaming parlours, brothels and debt collection businesses. As long as they kept their violent ways in the family, the yakuza were tolerated in postwar Japan. But they became unpleasantly uppity during the 1980s bubble. The policy response was the 1991 Law To Prevent Unjust Action By Violent Organisations. This required gangs to register members annually with the police. What really upset the Yakuza, though, was that the police were legally empowered to deny gangsters access to golf clubs. No more extreme form of ostracism could have been invented in golf-crazy Japan.
   The logic would work impeccably in finance: the US and UK could have a Law To Prevent Unjust Action By Financially Violent Organisations. As well as excluding these dangerous people from golf clubs, they could be denied access to Royal Ascot, the Four Seasons in New York, the City’s annual Mansion House bash, all grouse moors, the Metropolitan Opera, the Chelsea Flower Show and goodness knows what else. British bankers could even be denied peerages, knighthoods and other gongs.

3. 3.

   In Gold We Trust

   December 12, 2009 at 12:18 pm

   Look for Republican campaign officials and challengers to criticize the 30 Democrats from McCain-voting districts who did vote for the measure, which the GOP leadership said would amount to “permanent bailouts of Wall Street Firms and a government takeover of financial services.”

   And of course we know the last sentence is so far from ANYTHING a Republican would have anything to do with.

   Please – Government of the Gold, By the Gold, For the Gold shall not perish. It’s supposed to be “people”? Please, that’s SO old school. You must have gone to a public school.

4. 4.

   sbjules

   December 12, 2009 at 12:34 pm

   Why did Kucinich vote against it?

5. 5.

   Cram Down

   December 12, 2009 at 12:49 pm

   When I first heard the phrase “Cram Down Legislation” I thought it sounded a lot like something from in the beltway, but I didn’t have high hopes it would ever fly. Alas, it was not meant to be.

   http://wonkette.com/tag/pt-yayyy-freedom/

6. 6.

   Davis X. Machina

   December 12, 2009 at 1:22 pm

   Why did Kucinich vote against it?

   Because he’s better than you. Come to think of it, he’s better than just about everyone not named Dennis Kucinich.

   Leader of the Immaculately Conceived Caucus, our boy Dennis.

7. 7.

   liberal

   December 12, 2009 at 2:18 pm

   @Davis X. Machina:

   Because he’s better than you.

   Is it really that obvious? Some versions of this stuff were not very good.

   That said, my impression having read Grayson’s statement on why he voted for it is that this is a rather good version, but the devil’s in the details…