The federal government, which has amassed large ownership interests in private companies, would be forced to sell those interests by July 1, 2010, under a bill introduced Thursday by Sen. John Thune.
Thune said Thursday that the government’s equity stakes have made President Obama a “de facto CEO” and Congress a “board of directors.” The relationship between government and private industry, he said, has “created a dangerous conflict of interest.”
Blah, Blah, Blah, Fart, Fart Fart.
John, when are you going to start talking like an adult instead of a HS Cheerleader? Let’s talk ‘dangerous’ conflicts of interest. Like when we let Enron and the energy companies have a private meeting with Dick-Dick Cheney and right the Bush energy policy. Or when we let Haliburton and Blackwater run operations in Iraq. You are worried about ‘dangerous’ conflicts of interest now?
Thune voted for the $700 billion TARP program last fall, but he said the purpose of that program was to remove troubled assets from bank balance sheets, not to buy equity stakes in private companies.
Yeah, just like authorizing the President to go to war in Iraq, wouldn’t mean he would go to war in Iraq. How did that turn out?
Thune’s bill will be popular with the Republican Party base, said Larry Sabato, the director of the Center for Politics at the University of Virginia. But with their depleted numbers in the Senate, Sabato thinks the bill has little chance of passing.
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“The Democrats aren’t going to permit Thune and the Republicans to tie Obama’s hands in that way,”
Thune. Go do something constructive, like retire.