New Orleans The meeting between a dozen big bankers and President Obama was just for show anyway, but three of the big dawgs were too trifling to make it from New York to DC for cryeye because of fog. The three scofflaws were Goldman Sachs, the poster child for banking excess, Citigroup, the face of a crippled institution, and Morgan Stanley, another “new” bank reincorporated to get to the pig trough for billions. They were call-ins from New York not Iraq or Afghanistan or somewhere really hard to manage travel.
Even more embarrassing to these three has to be the fact that the head of PNC drove himself from Pittsburgh to DC on Sunday night to make sure there were no problems. Another “new” bank, incorporated just for the billions, American Express, joined hoi polloi with the rest of the commuters and took Amtrak. Richard Parsons (Citi), John Mack (Morgan Stanley), and Lloyd Blankfein (Goldman Sachs profiteers) clearly just couldn’t be bothered to either plan ahead and check into the weather or ride government transportation on the train with the little folk.
Having traveled for a living for decades, I just don’t buy any of their excuses. They are so lame they are not worth repeating.
All of which pretty clearly communicates their disrespect for the President, the White House (where a lot of people would love to be invited to a meeting about the financial condition and future of the country!), and their thanks to the American people for the big bailout. Shame!
The President was begging with a little stick for them to tell their lobbyists to get on program which was pretty pathetic anyway. Once again he asked them to figure out a way to loan to small businesses and homeowners, but this is a “beg” that he knows they will ignore and that he will not enforce. The lobbyist plea is mainly about not being embarrassed by having bank lobbyists, who have been virtually government “contract” employees not so publicly give the government lobbyists the red ass on Capitol Hill, where some of these ironies have not been forgotten or forgiven for different reasons on either side of the aisle.
The meeting was so unimportant it didn’t even make the headline or the front page of the Wall Street Journal. Rupert Murdoch, the WSJ and Fox News magnate, seems to think if the other fellas didn’t even need to both to attend, then he sure didn’t need to pretend this meeting was even news.
This whole bank bailout thing is starting to have a disgusting aftertaste when even the welfare recipients can’t grub for billions without showing any class at all.