Senator McCaskill Speaks Her Truth, "These People Are Idiots!"

Missouri Democratic Senator Claire McCaskill is on the warpath against corporate greed.

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?"

If the checks and balances of the capitalist system were working properly, this should have been left to the company's investors to cap compensation and/or pressure execs. You can't tell me that if an institution like CalPERS hadn't demanded an end to it where they held huge stock positions, that it wouldn't have been handled. Unfortunately, the douches at CalPERS et. al. won't lose their jobs but the "ordinary person" will suffer since that's where their retirement monies are held.

If Senator McCaskill is willing to mop up the mess the investment institutions failed to do, I say, "Go get 'em!"