Barack & Bank Bonuses

Get your PBO decoder rings ready for this one!

President Barack O-Doublespeak is now in support of bank bonuses....

From Bloomberg --

President Barack Obama said he doesn’t “begrudge” the $17 million bonus awarded to JPMorgan Chase & Co. Chief Executive Officer Jamie Dimon or the $9 million issued to Goldman Sachs Group Inc. CEO Lloyd Blankfein, noting that some athletes take home more pay.

The president, speaking in an interview, said in response to a question that while $17 million is “an extraordinary amount of money” for Main Street, “there are some baseball players who are making more than that and don’t get to the World Series either, so I’m shocked by that as well.”

“I know both those guys; they are very savvy businessmen,” Obama said in the interview yesterday in the Oval Office with Bloomberg BusinessWeek, which will appear on newsstands Friday. “I, like most of the American people, don’t begrudge people success or wealth. That is part of the free- market system.” More...

Even though these bonuses are stock options, PBO appears to be again forgetting what he read off the teleprompter in a previous pitch.....

US President Barack Obama on Thursday proposed Wall Street pay a fee of up to $117 billion to repay taxpayers for the financial bailout, as he slammed bankers for their “massive profits and obscene bonuses”. “My commitment is to recover every single dime the American people are owed,” Obama said in a statement. “And my determination to achieve this goal is only heightened when I see reports of massive profits and obscene bonuses at the very firms who owe their continued existence to the American people,” the president said.

Aiming to distance himself from Wall Street amid mounting public anger over big bonuses at the banks, Obama accused the bankers of being out of touch with hardship endured by ordinary Americans who are grappling with double-digit unemployment. (Economic Times)

The only person out of touch with ordinary Americans is the bloviating Barack himself!