The New Outcry: Give it Back

In this past week, we have witnessed the complete collapse of the financial markets in this country. Almost every mid-size and large bank and financial house is in deep trouble and is getting in line for a bailout. The stock market has gone down almost a thousand points over the past week and consumer confidence is in the toilet.

I acknowledge that Barack Obama will finally be the recipient of positive attention because he is the only candidate that is offering some concrete plans to turn this crisis around short-term and long, but he cannot let this moment go by without alerting the American people not only how he will be the president that this country needs to spur this new economy on, but that John McCain, as a long-term member of the Commerce Committee and working in cahoots with Senator Phil Gramm and other Republican leaders, caused oversight and regulation of financial institutions to evaporate and has made a dramatic negative impact on this country’s economic situation and has had a huge hand in what is happening at this moment.

Additionally, I do believe that the meltdown of the savings and loan industry and McCain’s involvement and complicity in that fiasco – called the Keating 5 -- is tremendously relevant to what is happening right at this moment, and I believe strongly that American consumers and current voters should be brought up-to-date on McCain’s history of intervening on behalf of these gigantic financial corporations and that he cannot be expected to suddenly provide oversight and regulatory power over companies that he has spent over twenty years protecting and making them more and more powerful and dominant over the American consumer.

I also recognize that it is not feasible or wise for Barack to suggest that he clamp down on salaries that CEOs and/or the hierarchy of these companies earn, but that shouldn’t stop him and all of us from stigmatizing large corporation CEOs like Carly Fiorina and others who have ridden their companies down and then walk away with a golden parachute or get huge supposed retirement packages from these huge failing companies that are now being bailed out while employees of these companies lose their jobs and most of the time their pensions.

Barack should be saying, “Give it back!” These CEOs can’t be required by law to forgo their millions. Most of these separation packages for “retiring” CEOs are predetermined or designated by the company’s shareholders, but any CEO who has the slightest bit of decency and honor should hear that the American people, starting with the future president, Obama want this obscene amount money or even a part of it that they are walking away with, sometimes in the tens of millions of dollars, given back to whatever fund which could be disseminated to the people within the company that are losing their jobs, livelihood and sometimes all the money they have saved in 401K plans, retirement plans and the like.

I think this would be a very good message, and I can’t imagine that anyone would support a CEO who did everything a greedy leader could do to destroy the company that they were supposed to be running positively be allowed to accept millions while the company they headed gets bailed out for billions by our government while the vast majority of the employees get laid off or while the company gets restructured as it gets swallowed up for pennies on the dollar by another corporation or by the government itself.