Bail Out Oversights

This applies to Wall Street, the Banking Industry, The Big 3 Car companies and a lot of others out there.

When I was growing up I remember hearing about mergers and take-overs that were stopped by laws here in the US against monopoly organizations. Today as an adult there seem to be very few individually owned companies; most are subsidiaries of huge corporations based in far off locations. My dad and his fellow workers were treated as respected assets who were essential to the success of the company where they worked. Those companies were for the most part owned and operated by people who lived in the same communities where their businesses operated. They knew their employees and the people in the towns where they did business. Today’s worker is treated with disrespect, even contempt because their needs and needs of the municipalities where they operate cut into the corporate/shareholders profits.
What happened to those laws which were supposed to keep companies from getting so large that they would cause financial collapse on not only a national scale but a global one?

What happened to corporate responsibility? Today companies do what ever it takes to make the most profits with the least expense up to and including cutting all the corners they can get away with. Outsourcing has been a tremendous boon, especially to manufacturing companies that have moved to countries where oversights are lax or even nonexistent.

Before ANY company in ANY industry gets ANY kind of assistance from the government, which, by the way, represents the American People, they should be required to sign agreements limiting the salaries of CEO’s and dividends paid to investors. These CEO’s made the bad decisions which brought their companies to the brink of disaster. These investors backed those CEO decisions and therefore should also suffer the consequences of investing in questionable practices. Why, if the government agrees to fund an attempted recovery, should there not be some oversight and penalties for the people who created this mess?

OK I can hear people now saying that this is America and we can’t regulate companies like that…True, if these companies want to take responsibility for and pay the price of their bad policies they are free to do what they want, on their own. However, if they want government help to keep their companies from failing, they should be required to agree to take drastic cuts in profits and put that money back into their own companies. Further, if they want help from the American people they should be required to use American workers on American soil for any product or service sold or provided to the American people. If they don’t like that let them find private funding for their bailouts.