WASHINGTON — The Obama administration’s pay czar is planning to clamp down on compensation at firms receiving large sums of government aid by cutting annual cash salaries for many of the top employees under his authority, according to people familiar with the matter.
Instead of awarding large cash salaries, Kenneth Feinberg is planning to shift a chunk of an employee’s annual salary into stock that cannot be accessed for several years, these people said. Such a move, the most intrusive yet into corporate compensation, would mark the government’s first effort to curb the take-home pay of everyone from auto executives to financial traders.
Feinberg is expected to issue by mid-October his determination on compensation packages for 175 of the most-highly compensated executives and employees at the seven firms he oversees. The companies are: American International Group Inc., Bank of America Corp., Citigroup Inc., General Motors Co., GMAC Financial Services Inc., Chrysler LLC and Chrysler Financial.
This is why every company that took bailout dollars is doomed. Every. Single. One.
The Federal government (and Obama’s gang in particular) are licking their chops like wolves in a henhouse right now, because they are prepared to launch a full-scale assault on every single one of these firms. If they have taken Federal money, the Federal government owns them. It’s Chicago politics; these companies shouldn’t be surprised that the government is not only demanding a seat at the table but claiming they own the table, the office and the everything else down to the water cooler and Dilbert calendar in the break room.
What’s unfortunate is pretty soon the White House is going to get bored regulating salaries JUST at the companies that took bailout money.
For an administration obsessed with using poll numbers to guide decisions, I find it pretty ironic they are so gung-ho on nationalizing GM when most Americans want nothing to do with it.
Only 21% of voters nationwide support a plan for the government to bail out General Motors as part of a structured bankruptcy plan to keep the troubled auto giant in business.
The latest Rasmussen Reports national telephone survey finds that 67% are opposed to a plan that would provide GM with $50 billion in funding and give the government a 70% ownership interest in the company.
Even when presented with the stark choice between providing government funding or letting GM go out of business, only 32% of voters support the bailout. Most voters (56%) say it would be better to let GM go out of business.
That last part is even more telling. Better than half, a clear majority of voters, would rather GM go out of business than it become another leg of the already bloated Federal government.
Obama’s seemingly impenetrable ice floe of public support is starting to show some cracks…and I’m loving every second of it.
I have this feeling though that we’re going to miss the good old days; you know, the days where if a company failed, it failed…it didn’t get bailouts, it didn’t get czars, it didn’t get an “auto task force.” It went out of business because its business model (or execution thereof) was lacking.
Those days are what created the robust economy that pushed the United States from a colony of Great Britain to THE world superpower in 200 years. For all of Obama’s hatred of capitalism, it is that very ideology that created the country he now seeks to destroy.
The economy is fundamentally sound despite the temporary “mess” it’s in, the White House said Sunday in the kind of upbeat assessment that Barack Obama had mocked as a presidential candidate.
Obama’s Democratic allies pleaded for patience with an administration hitting the two-month mark this week, while Republicans said the White House’s plans ignore small business and the immediate need to fix what ails the economy. After weeks projecting a dismal outlook on the economy, administration officials — led by the president himself in recent days — swung their rhetoric toward optimism in what became Wall Street’s best stretch since November.
During the fall campaign, Obama relentlessly criticized his Republican opponent, Sen. John McCain, for declaring, “The fundamentals of our economy are strong.” Obama’s team painted the veteran senator as out of touch and failing to grasp the challenges facing the country.
But on Sunday, that optimistic message came from economic adviser Christina Romer. When asked during an appearance on NBC’s “Meet the Press” if the fundamentals of the economy were sound, she replied: “Of course they are sound.”
“The fundamentals are sound in the sense that the American workers are sound, we have a good capital stock, we have good technology,” she said. “We know that — that temporarily we’re in a mess, right? We’ve seen huge job loss, we’ve seen very large falls in GDP. So certainly in the short run we’re in a — in a bad situation.”
The economy is good. No, it’s bad. No, it’s good again. Wait…nope, still good. Ok, now it’s bad. Yep, still bad. Ok, now it’s good again.
The only constant coming out the White House is pure incompetence.
Glenn Beck illustrates in perfect fashion (while making fun of AlGore) why leaving the gold standard and letting the government simply print money has created an extremely dangerous situation.
A Democratic spending plan just wouldn’t be a spending plan without a bunch of money for special interest groups and idiotic government subsidies.
When Congress opens up a gusher of money, every special interest in the country reaches for a bucket. And as lawmakers negotiate an economic stimulus bill that so far is expected to cost more than $800 billion, the scenario is no different.
The House passed its version of the bill Wednesday evening, and a host of oddball recipients from ATV riders to TV viewers preparing for the digital conversion stand to benefit.
But critics question why such narrowly tailored add-ons — which have little, if any, prospect of creating large numbers of new jobs — are in an emergency bill aimed at stimulating the economy and creating jobs.
“The stimulus bill delivers on a lot of promises that Democrats have made over the past decade to special interest groups,” said William Beach, director of the Heritage Foundation’s Center for Data Analysis. “This is their time to kind of bring home the bacon.”
Bingo. This bill has nothing to do with economic stimulus. It has to do with cronyism and kickbacks, as the liberals try to spread the wealth out to all corners of the progressive liberal movement.
Among the funding measures included in the proposal are $25 million for new ATV trails; $400 million for the National Endowment for the Arts; $400 million for global warming research; $335 million for the Centers for Disease Control to combat sexually-transmitted diseases; and $650 million coupons to subsidize TV viewers for digital television conversion.
New. ATV. Trails.
Endowment for the Arts.
Global….warming…research.
No wonder the GOP plan would have made more jobs. You could feed the entire population of the world for a year with the amount of pork in here.
The House of Representatives approved an $819 billion economic stimulus package Wednesday that President Obama has said is necessary to revive the economy.
The final vote was 244-188, mostly along party lines as expected.
The legislation includes an estimated $544 billion in federal spending and $275 billion in tax cuts for individuals and businesses. It includes money for highway construction and mass transit.
The Senate is working on a costlier version of the bill.
Democratic congressional leaders practically declared victory Wednesday afternoon — ahead of the vote.
The massive recovery package has stirred consternation among Republicans who say their ideas are not being adequately considered. But Democrats have a comfortable majority in the House and stressed that fact in a talk with reporters.
The GOP tried quite hard to get their plan in, but the Democratic stranglehold prevented them from doing much, despite the fact that it was a far better bill.
Meanwhile, House Republican leaders were standing firm in their opposition to the stimulus plan. Just ahead of the House vote, they insisted that their own plan, focusing on tax relief, would create twice as many new jobs — 6.2 million — as the plan Obama is pushing, while costing about half as much.
But the House defeated their plan Wednesday with a vote of 286-170.
House Minority Leader John Boehner said Republicans remain “disappointed” in the stimulus plan coming to a vote. He says it includes a “lot of wasteful spending that won’t create jobs.”
He says the GOP plan for “fast-acting tax relief” would “create jobs and preserve jobs in America.”
Our children’s children will be paying for this bill. As Mike Pence (R-IN) said, “The only thing this bill will stimulate is more government and more debt.”
Far from rolling over, House Republican leaders are trying to win concessions from President Obama over the massive economic stimulus package and have proffered a bill of their own to put on the negotiating table.
The counter-package would shift focus entirely from spending to tax relief. Though a full House vote on the Democratic package is expected in a matter of hours and President Obama said he’s confident it will pass, GOP lawmakers are hoping their substitute proposal at least influences the final product.
The last time we had such a huge government intervention into the country, it was FDR and the Raw Deal. People try to cite that as a success, but the only reason the country pulled itself out of the depression was not the governmental programs…it was WWII.
The massive call for manufacturing of armor and airplanes dragged our country out of a depression. If we drive the country back into a depression with these bailouts, how, in 2009, do we get out? WWIII?
The bailout is bad enough, ladies and gentlemen. The government getting involved in private enterprise is communism, but the idiots in Washington went through with it anyway.
WASHINGTON — It’s something any bank would demand to know before handing out a loan: Where’s the money going?
But after receiving billions in aid from U.S. taxpayers, the nation’s largest banks say they either can’t track exactly how they’re spending the money or they simply refuse to discuss it.
“We’ve lent some of it. We’ve not lent some of it. We’ve not given any accounting of, ‘Here’s how we’re doing it,”‘ said Thomas Kelly, a spokesman for JPMorgan Chase, which received $25 billion in emergency bailout money. “We have not disclosed that to the public. We’re declining to.”
The Associated Press contacted 21 banks that received at least $1 billion in government money and asked four questions: How much has been spent? What was it spent on? How much is being held in savings, and what’s the plan for the rest?
None of the banks provided specific answers.
“We’re not providing dollar-in, dollar-out tracking,” said Barry Koling, a spokesman for Atlanta, Georgia-based SunTrust Banks Inc., which got $3.5 billion in taxpayer dollars.
Some banks said they simply didn’t know where the money was going.
“We manage our capital in its aggregate,” said Regions Financial Corp. spokesman Tim Deighton, who said the Birmingham, Alabama-based company is not tracking how it is spending the $3.5 billion it received as part of the financial bailout.
The answers highlight the secrecy surrounding the Troubled Assets Relief Program, which earmarked $700 billion — about the size of the Netherlands’ economy — to help rescue the financial industry. The Treasury Department has been using the money to buy stock in U.S. banks, hoping that the sudden inflow of cash will get banks to start lending money.
Good call, Washington. Let’s fork over $700 billion and then not demand any sort of accounting as to what it was used on. I’m sure the taxpayers are very grateful to you for throwing more good money after bad and not even keeping so much as an IOU slip to figure out where it is going.
The president of the United Auto Workers, distraught that the socialist bailout bill failed last night, has set his sights on the GOP, claiming that they “thwarted” the plan.
Well…yeah…that was sort of the point. He says that like it’s a bad thing.
The head of the United Auto Workers union lashed out Friday at Senate Republicans — Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker, in particular — blaming them for scuttling the $14 billion auto bailout package approved earlier in the week by the House.
GOP objections stalled the measure in the Senate Thursday night. Republicans put pressure on the powerful autoworkers union as they tried to squeeze out concessions in exchange for their support.
“This was just simply subterfuge on the part of the minority in the Republican Party who wanted to tear down any agreement that we came up with,” UAW President Ron Gettelfinger said at a press conference, declaring “the auto industry around the world is in peril.”
