gekko13

The Case for Wiping Out Fannie and Freddie Shareholders

There are already enough morons running government agencies, and now you want to turn Freddie and Fannie over to them too? Government will always have a 9 to 1 CR (cretin ratio) because government deserves it. They pay paltry wages, promotion is usually tied directly to service time instead of ability, and due to minority favoritism and cronyism, the best person for the job usually doesn't GET the job. Why would anyone with any real talent or intelligence want to work for the government when they can do better financially in a much shorter time in the private sector? And I am speaking from experience. One year in the Social Security Administration is all it took for me to pack my bags.

I had a college degree, had a 98% efficiency rating in my unit, and took about 80 calls a day on average. Then one day, a career crony came up to me in the office and said, "Johnny, why do you work so hard?"

"Well, I'm just doing my job," the inner innocence of a 24 year-old compelled me to say.

"How many calls a day do you take?" he asked.

I replied, "About eighty."

"And HOW MUCH do you make a year?" he continued.

"Twenty-two thousand." (This was circa 1994.)

Crony thought for a moment and then said with a grin, "You have to be like me. I only take twenty-five calls a day and I make forty-five thousand."

I went home that night and thought about my conversation with the crony. It weighed on me for a few days.

One needs to look no further than the pending merger between XM and Sirius Satellite to see cronyism, corruption, and bureaucratic ignorance at its best. And the guilty party is the FCC and congress, who are being paid off by lobbyists who are against the merger. This, after the Department of Justice ruled back in March that the merger was not monopolistic and would benefit consumers. This after the DOJ gave the green light WITHOUT the companies having to give concessions. The proposed merger is a mouse compared to other mergers in history, with the combined market cap of the companies hovering near 5.6 billion dollars. Yet it is the longest running merger proposal in history, surpassing 400 days! Meanwhile, Exxon and Mobil, two oil behemoths were allowed to merge relatively smoothly, considering the monopolistic concerns involved in that one. (How do you like gas prices today?) And now Anheiser Busch is going to be gobbled up by a foreign entity in three shakes of a lamb's tail. The actions, or rather, INACTIONS by the FCC concerning XM/Sirius wreak of BLATANT POLITICAL CORRUPTION. And you want Freddie and Fannie to be run by the same filth? And people wonder why our country is so screwed up?

By the way, ten days after my conversation with Crony on the office floor of the Social Security Administration, I gave my boss my two-week notice.