Naive?

From MicroSoft dictionary:

naive: extremely simple and trusting: having or showing an excessively simple and trusting view of the world and human nature, often as a result of youth and inexperience
Encarta ® World English Dictionary © & (P) 1998-2005 Microsoft Corporation. All rights reserved.

I don’t think of myself as naive.  It is just after eight years of of the worst presidential administration in my lifetime, I really do want to be able to believe in our president.  I want to believe that we, the public, are being told the truth.

But when I read Glenn Greenwald and he says this on 17 March

That is simply not what happened.  What actually happened is the opposite.  It was Dodd who did everything possible — including writing and advocating for an amendment — which would have applied the limitations on executive compensation to all bailout-receiving firms, including AIG, and applied it to all future bonus payments without regard to when those payments were promised.  But it was Tim Geithner and  Larry Summers who openly criticized Dodd’s proposal at the time and insisted that those limitations should apply only to future compensation contracts, not ones that already existed.  The exemption for already existing compensation agreements — the exact provision that is now protecting the AIG bonus payments — was inserted at the White House’s insistence and over Dodd’s objections.  But now that a political scandal has erupted over these payments, the White House is trying to deflect blame from itself and heap it all on Chris Dodd by claiming that it was Dodd who was responsible for that exemption.

Jane’s post documents this sequence of events without any possibility for doubt.  The debate that took place over limits on executive compensation for bailout-receiving companies only occurred six weeks ago, and it is all documented in the public press.  Dodd was the one fighting against the White House in order to apply the prohibition to all bonus payments, i.e., to make the compensation limits retroactive as well as prospective.  As but one crystal-clear example that proves this, here is a February 14 article from the Wall St. Journal on the debate over executive compensation limits:

The most stringent pay restriction bars any company receiving funds from paying top earners bonuses equal to more than one-third of their total annual compensation.  That could severely crimp pay packages at big banks, where top officials commonly get relatively modest salaries but often huge bonuses.

As word spread Friday about the new and retroactive limit — inserted by Democratic Sen. Christopher Dodd of Connecticut — so did consternation on Wall Street and in the Obama administration, which opposed it.

Can that be any clearer?  It was Obama officials, not Dodd, who demanded that already-vested bonus payments be exempted. And it was Dodd, not Obama officials, who wanted the prohibition applied to all compensation agreements, past and future.  The provision which shielded already-promised bonus payments from the executive compensation limits ended up being inserted at the insistence of Geithner.  A spokesperson for Dodd, who is now consumed by these completely unfair attacks, finally confirmed today that these provisions were inserted at the direction of Treasury officials:

Senator Dodd’s original executive compensation amendment adopted by the Senate did not include an exemption for existing contracts that provided for these types of bonuses. Because of negotiations with the Treasury Department and the bill Conferees, several modifications were made, including adding the exemption, to ensure that some bonus restrictions would be included in the final stimulus bill.

During the debate over these provisions, The Wall St. Journal article identified above reported explicitly that it was Geithner and Summers who were rejecting Dodd’s limits on executive compensation as too broad and demanding that already-vested payments be exempted:  exactly the exemption that protected the AIG bonuses and which they’re now trying to blame on Dodd:

The administration is concerned the rules will prompt a wave of banks to return the government’s money and forgo future assistance, undermining the aid program’s effectiveness. Both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and Lawrence Summers, who heads the National Economic Council, had called Sen. Dodd and asked him to reconsider, these people said

I am becoming more and more disenchanted with President Obama.  I was hoping that a big difference between President Obama and his predecessor, President Bush, would be President Obama’s willingness to fire those folks that screwed up.  Bush could not bring himself to do that because that would be a tacit admission that Bush had made a mistake.

I believe that Treasury Secretary Geithner has made too many mistakes and that President Obama needs to fire him.  Now.  Stat.

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