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"Under fire for his role in the near-collapse of Citigroup Inc., Robert Rubin said its problems were due to the buckling financial system, not its own mistakes"

I am so sick of the "heads I win, tails you lose" mentality of the gangster class that I could scream. Somehow a "buckling of the financial system" is beyond Bobby R's control and he is not responsible. But the literally 100's of millions of dollars that he and his fellow gangsters reaped riding the secular bull market from 1982 to 2000 was "pay for performance." This is galling! Shame on the WSJ for letting these thieves get away with this flim-flam.

How about this for a simple reform. Any company that compensates its executives with equity whether through options or restricted stock is forbidden to purchase its own stock. Then at least the shareholder's cash (which should be returned as dividends anyway) will not used to put the executives even further in the money.

Citigroup didn't hire Rubin to do risk management. They hired him because of his connections to Washington. That's what justified his salary. Most or all of the former Clintonistas got very rich after their careers in government for that very reason. It certainly wasn't for their competence or integrity, which are dubious, at best.

Anyway, most of Citigroup's current problems can be laid at the feet of Sanford Weill, not Robert Rubin or Vikram Pandit (not that they helped much).

I don’t view it quite so much as attributable to Clinton being in power, although I will admit, there will always be a deep fondness among Street types for the blatant marketing of pure BS that went on during the dot-com era. I’m saying, we associate those heady days with Clinton because he was prez, whether he had anything to do with it or not. In general, I just think Clinton had the most incredible string of uncanny good luck in the known universe; being president when the internet really exploded was only one example.

As to Rubin, really, who gives a crap what he says? There isn’t the slightest degree of accountability for anything at the levels he inhabits. There are no issues with the rapacious frauds like Barney Frank, Chris Dodd, Franklin Raines, Jamie Gorelick committed. None. All he and all these other leeches have to do is to keep spouting the party line over and over, look left, fake right, just keep stuttering some diversionary nonsense blaming somone, anyone but yourself until the interview’s over. Or for pity’s sake, they could take the blame for the entire debacle upon themselves and shed tears while writhing on the floor in a fetal position. It wouldn’t matter one iota. There’s simply no accountability whatsoever nor any possible consequence for these folks no matter how this all turns out, so they might as well just keep lying and looking good so their next $10+ million gig can be lined up.

All these genius banksters use the same justification as a pre-pubescent teenager on a vandalism spree “hey it seemed like a good idea at the time, everybody else was doing it”; only the teenager smashed some windows while the banksters of the world peddled fradulent paper all over the world and brought the financial system to the brink of implosion. For that, the rewards are in the multi-tens of millions. It’s a beautiful thing. For them.