He can't. And I'm surprised corporate America has moved so slowly on this front. After they're completely done busting the unions, then they can lobby for tax-paid health care and squeal that they need their pension obligations covered by the government (us, again) so they can "remain competitive".

Then they'll give their execs multi-million dollar bonuses and assemble their shitty cars outside the U.S.

Pardon my cynicism; I'm a post-war baby and I've seen how big labor worked when the U.S. was the world's dominant manufacturing power, and how management operates since we are no longer. A pox on both houses.

_{"What we've got here is, failure to communicate"}

from one performance artist to another: "we know musicians (except vanilla ice) can't sell BS a crowd!"

Obama does it and folks eat it up.

if you've seen the infomercial, did you choke up when Biden (if my memory serves me right) claimed that Obama fixed the money corruption problems of congress by reaching across the isle? This was the same Biden that said Obama wasn't fit to lead!

so, for us musicians who are looking for congruence in the tempo, we're left shaking our heads...

I was in fact out performing. Much better use of my time.

_{"What we've got here is, failure to communicate"}

Leo W. Gerard, president of the United Steelworkers, raised these explosive questions in a stinging letter sent to Paulson this week. The union did what any private investor would do. Its finance experts vetted the terms of the bailout investment and calculated the real value of what Treasury bought with the public's money. In the case of Goldman Sachs, the analysis could conveniently rely on a comparable sale twenty days earlier. Billionaire Warren Buffett invested $5 billion in Goldman Sachs and bought the same types of securities--preferred stock and warrants to purchase common stock in the future. Only Buffett's preferred shares pay a 10 percent dividend, while the public gets only 5 percent. Dollar for dollar, Buffett "received at least seven and perhaps up to 14 times more warrants than Treasury did and his warrants have more favorable terms," Gerard pointed out.

"I am sure that someone at Treasury saw the terms of Buffett's investment," the union president wrote. "In fact, my suspicion is that you studied it pretty closely and knew exactly what you were doing. The 50-50 deal--50 percent invested and 50 percent as a gift--is quite consistent with the Republican version of spread-the-wealth-around philosophy."

The Steelworkers' close analysis was done by Ron W. Bloom, director of the union's corporate research and a Wall Street veteran himself who worked at Larzard Freres, the investment house. Bloom applied standard valuation techniques to establish the market price Buffett paid per share compared to Treasury's price. "The analysis is based on the assumption that Warren Buffett is an intelligent third party investor who paid no more for his investment than he had to," Bloom's report explained. "It also assumes that Gold Sachs' job is to protect its existing shareholders so that it extracted from Mr. Buffett the most that it could.... Further, it is assumed that Henry Paulson is likewise an intelligent man and that if he paid any more than Mr. Buffett--if he paid $1 for something for which Mr. Buffett would have paid 50 cents--that the difference is a gift from the taxpayers of the United States to the shareholders of Goldman Sachs."
The Nation

[emphasis added]

The article goes on to ask whether the same 50/50 split is being used in divvying up the rest of the 700 billion "rescue" package.

I'm afraid that 50/50 might turn out to be a good deal for the taxpayers in the end.