A brilliant idea from Sen. Claire McCaskill - (D - MO)

This is what good governance ought to look like.

Claire McCaskill Lays Down Law On CEO Compensation

Sen. Claire McCaskill has delivered a sharp threat to the wallets of corporate executives who took large compensation packages even as their companies accepted government bailout funds. Things, she warned, are going to change.

"I've been mad for a while," said the Missouri Democrat. "When we passed the initial half of the TARP money, [there were] rumors about bonuses, the fact that too many of these guys were holding onto the jobs even though they were running these companies into the ground. Reality didn't seem to be the order of the day."

So McCaskill took to the Senate floor on Friday to put an end to the surrealism. In a bill that came to the surprise of reporters, her colleagues, and the White House alike -- there was no coordination with the Obama administration, she said -- the Missouri Democrat called for compensation for employees of bailout recipients to be capped at $400,000 a year.

"They don't get it," McCaskill said on the floor. "These people are idiots. You can't use taxpayer money to pay out $18-billion in bonuses... What planet are these people on?"

Courtesy of Sam Stein over at the Huffington Post.

I'm not kidding when I say that the payout of the TARP funds rammed through by the Bushies, and approved by the Democratically-controlled the Congress, has literally kept me up at night. Will it work? I don't know. What I do know, is that the entire thing has come to feel more and more like an armed robbery, and less and less like a program to help our so-called economy. Banks and the Fed have flatly refused to disclose where the money is actually going. And some of these banks have been paying massive bonuses to their executives, the greedy scum who brought us to this disaster. The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and it's cost us over $350,000,000,000.00, with the rest of the $700B to be dispersed soon.

So a headline like the one above is music to my ears. The executives at our largest banks are the ones most responsible for the current economic disaster, there is NO WAY they ought to be pocketing the obscene sums of money that the so-called "banking bailout" is throwing around. Sen. Claire McCaskill is right on the money - a maximum wage on executive pay is precisely what ought to be demanded. I'm a little jealous that I didn't think of it!

Incidentally, since her election back 2006, McCaskill has proven herself to be one of the smarter cookies in the US Senate. She was among the first to back Obama, and she has routinely been "right" on the issues that matter most.

YOU GO GIRL!!