Why reading your own law before signing it is important.

[rsteachout]

Tip o' the hat to foolscap001This is a clause inserted by Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) into the "stimulus" bill that Pres. Obama insisted had to be passed to stop the crisis from becoming a catastrophe

Comments

[n0onz]

Hey, I’m just a random reader.
Hope you don’t mind, I love your writing!
All the best <3
xox

[shadowlynn]

looks like they are gonna try and take it back anyway. They can pay the bonus' but not from the stimulus.

[rsteachout]

Which, other than making AIG file a huge accounting report, does nothing since money is fungible.

[acroyear70]

I basically said something similar on FB.

Congress may be "up in arms" and filing bills and yada but i don't expect anything to to clear committees. nevermind the fact even if they pass that and get to the floor, by the time the bills get attached as riders to different bills, the house-senate committees likely will have to reconcile different bills and all of that time later, people will have forgotten about it and simply moved on.

the president *may* just be joining in the feigned outrage as a populist thing, by knowing that in a month's time, 3 more "imminent crises" will have hit the public newsroom and the public and media will all have forgotten this. one good round of layoffs at an auto company and this will just disappear in an instant.

the media invented this news crises that should have just been brushed off. they'll invent another one. we're cursed by the media's creation and milking of our short attention span.

[rsteachout]

Check the edit. Turns out Dodd received the most in campaign donations from AIG during the last election cycle.

[acroyear70]

you know, given how blunt it all is (a similar example exists between the funding one chap has received from publishing companies and the bill he's been pushing for years to disallow publicly funded scientific research from being published through anybody but the expensive journal publishing industry), i wonder why the hell there are even laws on the books trying to stop "pay for play" in politics.

the lobbying industry is and always has been legalized bribery, no matter what laws have been written to try to stop that. i would rather we just open up and admit to that fact, because as long as we *think* there are laws against this sort of thing, we (the general public) will just brush off ethical issues like this.

ethics != the law, and ethics certainly != the law as it is or can be enforced.