First he denied that he hadn't introduced the clause that protected those AIG bonuses and now he has had to admit to CNN that, yes, he was the one who put that language in the bill.Now he's blaming the Treasury Department for forcing him to amend his amendment to put in the date of February 11 which protected those who received bonuses before then. Hey, he's still responsible for what he did and "The Treasury made me do it" isn't much of a defense.
And are we ever going to get a straight answer from Timothy Geithner about why Treasury was pushing for such language? And perhaps he can answer why the Treasury Department learned of the AIG bonuses 10 days before Geithner says he learned about them. Did staffers just neglect to tell the Secretary of the memo from the New York Fed telling them about this issue and that it was a political hot potato? If that is the level of competence over there while Geithner labors on without any senior aides, should we trust other decisions coming out of the place?
This is what you get when you have one-party control and they all negotiate with themselves and then pass their emergency stimulus bill without input from the other party. The Republicans created messes when they had sole control and now the Democrats own this mess. They wrote the bill and they pushed it through without the debate and regular legislative procedure that might have brought such provisions to light ahead of the vote.
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4 comments:
I want to say something in defense of Dodd and Obama. It has been many years since they blamed the dog for their missing homework.
I don't know what can be done to Dodd, but Geithner needs to go. He claims he didn't know about it until last week. I doubt it. But even if he didn't, that indicates incompetence. It's a scenario that played out far too many times over the last year: Are they lying, incompetent or both. I wonder if Paul Krugman or Volker would be good for the job.
mark,
Geithner will be the sacrificial goat d'jour and while I think he should never have been nominated for his current job, his hands have been tied by his boss.
Spending the country out of a recession is a no win proposition. The way the spending is targeted suggests to me that it is being done to reward political allies in the near term and to make government more powerful in the long term.
Obama should take a cue from the Kennedy and Reagan administrations. When confronted with flagging economies both leaders chose to cut taxes on a massive scale. Obama can do this but I'm afraid his long term political objectives (make government more powerful) prevent him.
As for Dodd and Frank, the liberal media should have exposed them both years ago and it is their partisan nature that has contributed to the depth of corruption that we see with these two men...that and the lack of TERM LIMITS!
"This is what you get when you have one-party control and they all negotiate with themselves." Ummm, no. The rush to war in Iraq six (6!) years ago was a perfectly bipartisan affair (although, of course, the WH determined the 'information' on which the war was based).
Bonuses are just the icing on the cake. Neither party has the balls to do the corporate governance reform the country needs--namely, having salaries controlled by shareholders that own the company, rather than fatcat friends on the boards of directors.
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