Eshoo and Speier are dangerous clowns and deserve the boot. Why should anyone else have to pay for the failure of our local governments to properly invest their ill-gotten gains?

Mr Davis:

Those "dangerous clowns", as you refer to these two widely popular, elected representatives, are doing what they can to recover funds lost in the unregulated Wall Street fiasco of the last decade. To the benefit of local school districts.

Our local officials invested in funds that were generally highly rated, although unbeknown to most, sitting atop a house of cards due to little or no transparency or regulatory oversight. They were not alone.

Are you suggesting Wall Street should be a wild west, no oversight, buyer beware environment (again?)

And that serves the good folk of our country how, exactly?

Joseph,
In what way did the school districts do anything wrong in having the county hold their money? They have to do that by law. Most of that money had just ended up with the county for the following year's budget. Ill gotten gains? Please! That was our school's budgets!

The national government has bent over backwards to help corporations that also did poorly and in many cases lost money due to their own mistakes. This is a case of PUBLIC money that was lost. Why would it be wrong to replace those losses with public money since it was the federal government that decided that losing Lehman Brothers was acceptable? There should be many many people in jail for the losses that were created by all the poor decisions and outright lies that have been told. Instead, the fools who created this problem in many cases got bonuses. They created more grief than the engineers at Chernoble to the world economy, but don't try to hold them accountable. They have contracts! What they wrote down as legal documents for anyone else? Worthless.

But hey, if you want to continue to push the Californian education system into the trash can, go ahead.

I'm amazed that all the taxpayers in this area didn't push for this simple solution ages ago. This chunk of money should have been the first to be paid out in the relief effort. Instead, our schools are trying to get more taxes from us... which of course is NOT a great economic stimulus for any of us!

Our local recreation district also lost money, but we've at least learned that we don't have to have the county hold our "ill gotten gains"

Willy states:"Our local officials invested in funds that were generally highly rated, although unbeknown to most, sitting atop a house of cards due to little or no transparency or regulatory oversight"

Not all our local officials went down this road. The Fire District, thanks to a superb civil servant Michelle Braucht, pulled the Fire District's funds out of the San Mateo County investment pool because she believed that it was investing in a house of cards. Why didn't other agencies do the same? Why should we reward poor financial management? Shouldn't we expect our local officials to be smart enough to recognize a bad investment?

Peter:

"Why should we reward poor financial management?"

Oh, worthy adversary: you say tomAto, I say tomAHto...

Why should we penalize the school districts, or more to the point, the kids?

;-)

Everyone is sick and tired of Congress. Spier and Eshoo are part of the problem. It's the old story, everybody hates congress but loves their congressperson. We need to throw them all out and get some common sense in Congress. We know that Congress pushed the banks to make bad loans and that Fannie and Freddy aided and abetted the disaster...and are still doing so.

Did Jackie and Anna do anything to stop the financial crisis? Or are they just lapdogs for Nancy Pelosi.

If going after bailout for one set of investors, namely local governments, why not go after bailouts for individual investors like ourselves? Doesn't fairness demand this? In any case any arguments used for bailing out local government groups will surely be adopted by the rest of the investors to demand the same consideration.

time for change:

"We need to throw them all out ..." sorry, you only get to vote against one of them.

It's the law. ;-)

Nana,
Seems to me the Federal Government already decided to "bail out" anyone who invested in AIG and the other giants. Perhaps if an individual investor was forced by law to have someone else hold on to their operating cash, then I'd feel inclined to help that person out. This was PUBLIC money, it should have been first on the list of money that should have been "bailed out." Perhaps all Lehman Brother's investors should ask why Lehman was allowed to "fail" which thus saved the rest of the giants from their credit default swap debts. Why anyone was ever asked to make those swaps "good" when they were (and still are) insane is a better question. "Sure! We'll guarantee your billions, if you pay us a few million." (Never mind they never had the capital to support their claims. It's like printing money for them until someone points out that it's all rubbish) So YES... since the Feds allow this garbage, it becomes ALL of our responsibility. They can change all of that now. Regulation. Incarceration!

Peter Carpenter,
God loves your Fire District! Perhaps they should take on running more than just their current responsibilities. Perhaps they should run seminars on how to properly make all decisions.

The SCHOOLS do not have the option of holding on to their own cash when it comes from the state. I would not trust them to manage their bond money. Entities within the county didn't have to be invested in anything with the county. They divided the Lehman loses by percentages to all of those that had money with them. As far as I know the county doesn't show us their audits. Gee, maybe the ALMANAC should tell this WHOLE story so we have ALL the facts.

We know that you love putting "local official" down, but in this case the law determined where the money had to be. It's amazing that Michelle Braucht knew that Lehman was not going to be able honor what were rated as safe investments. It's a wonder she even knew that the county had invested anything that way. I'm very sure that money that was intended to be used within the next few months was NOT invested that way, so no reporting of the the county's investments would have helped warned school districts or other local officials of the peril of losing taxpayers' money.... AND bond money.

Has anything changed at the county to ensure that their investments are all totally secured?? Hey ALMANAC... how about some investigative reporting?