Wed, 01 Apr 2009 13:28:30 +0000 – By Michael GoodwinColumnist, New York Daily News/FOX News Contributor
Here's free advice to top bankers: Don't buy any green tomatoes. My hunch is that President Obama is saving a place for you in the unemployment line behind GM ex-boss Rick Wagoner.
First AIG; then automakers; next, the banks. Big Government is on a Big Roll, using bailouts to turn busted-out companies into wards of Washington. Kind of like the mob, only it's legal.
Obama tipped his bank plan when he met with the bosses of 15 banks that took bailout money, some against their will. The former masters of the universe got a hint of their new status in the pecking order when they were offered only water at the White House. Geez, the pickings at Gitmo are better.
"Show some restraint," Obama told the heads of Wells Fargo, Bank of America, Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley. "Show that you get this is a crisis and everybody has to make sacrifices."
His point of reference, he later told CBS, was "the average single mom who is just barely struggling to pay her mortgage - or medical bills for her kid - who's paying her taxes, who's playing by the rules and then finds out that a taxpayer-assisted firm is paying out multimillion-dollar bonuses."
Putting aside the holy-cow notion that a "single mom" now represents Everyman in America, Obama is on a campaign to whack compensation, especially bonuses, and is ready to whack the bosses to get it done.
To read Michael Goodwin's entire column, click here.
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