Factcheck.org: 'Blame Dodd' Attacks Ignore Facts

[Serenitynow]

Some Republicans have been quick to blame Democratic Sen. Chris Dodd of Connecticut for allowing big bonus payments to AIG executives. They get the facts backward.

The public record shows Dodd authored an amendment that would have prevented "any bonus" being paid to top executives of firms getting bailout money. It was the White House and the Treasury Department that insisted Dodd's amendment be watered down to apply only to bonuses paid under agreements signed in the past five weeks. Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has taken public responsibility for that.

<...>

WSJ, Feb. 14: The administration is concerned the (Dodd( 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.

After public outrage erupted over payment of the AIG bonuses, some reports seemed to blame Dodd for inserting the Feb. 11 cut-off that eviscerated his own bonus ban. But Dodd told CNN March 18 he had nothing to do with the change. That's true enough; he was not even a member of the Senate-House conference that wrote the final compromise. The conference committee's report is signed by Democratic Sens. Daniel Inouye of Hawaii, Max Baucus of Montana and Harry Reid of Nevada, and Democratic House members David Obey of Wisconsin, Charles Rangel of New York and Henry Waxman of California. No Republican lawmakers were among the conferees.

Later Dodd conceded that he had agreed to the Feb. 11 date, but Dodd told CNN that he went along only reluctantly and under pressure, in order to preserve any sort of bonus ban at all.

<...>

Similarly, the following day the Hill newspaper reported that Dodd and the president were "at odds" over the bonus ban.
The Hill, Feb. 15: Administration officials worry the strict compensation limits will impede lending because smaller banks won't want to take the bailout money, or won’t keep it for long.

More: http://www.factcheck.org/politics/blame_dodd_attacks_ignore_facts.html

[FrenchieCat]

1. Factcheck.org is a piece of shit......

first mentioned to a wide audience, by none other than Dick Piece of dogshit Cheney!

The American people aren't looking for a witchhunt,
only the unpopular Republican Party and their Corporate media minions.

The American people wants this shit not to ever happen again,
and want to know that the future will be brighter.

Other than that, the outrage has died, as it wasn't organic, but rather manufactured.

[Serenitynow]

2. Huh? The site is defending Dodd from Republican attacks

Shouldn't you be happy?

Granted, in defending Dodd it had to be said that Geithner and Summers talked him into changing the terms of the bonus ban. But truth needs to be told.

And here's the site defending Pelosi against smears from Republicans as well: http://www.factcheck.org/politics/sliming_pelosi.html

They criticize whoever is lying or smearing another politician regardless of party.

What do you think about the article in question--the one this thread refers to?

[democracy1st]

4. checkout this piece

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=12278

[FrenchieCat]

5. You don't get it, do you?

Good! Means it will backfire bigtime.
The outrage really isn't there in the way that the GOP had hoped.
Our problems as a nation are too great for the silliness which you are pushing.
When trillions and billions are what's wrong, mere millions and/or investigations
ain't gonna quite do the trick in distracting this administration and the people
who voted for it.

In otherwords, overplaying an obvious hand may become deadly to the player.

[Serenitynow]

6. No outrage huh?

And I wouldn't be that angry over an article that pushes back against an email/TV campaign done by Republicans.

[FrenchieCat]

10. I'm yawning!

Really, I am.

I'm not angry.
I'm just tired.

George Bush just took us through the wringer.
Do we have to get hung up to dry as well? :shrug:

[Lasher]

13. Why don't you give it a rest, Frenchie?

Here a new member puts up a pretty good OP and it looks like you're trying to run them off for no good reason.

[FrenchieCat]

15. That smells like a cup of STFU to me.

New members?
Yeah, they are everywhere.....
an infiltration of sorts.

I have no use for
Folks who push Democrat against Democrats
at a Democratic forum while pretending that it is something else.

BUSH AND HIS MAINLY GOP CONGRESS IS RESPONSIBLE FOR THE OVERWHELMING LOOTING OF OUR
OUR TREASURER, AND I'M NOT GOING TO WASTE MY TIME CHASING BULLSHIT,
JUST CAUSE IT IS FUN TO YOU.

Capiche?

[Lasher]

17. If you don't want to 'waste your time' on this thread, why didn't you move on without comment?

But no, you just have to stink up an otherwise decent thread with the nothing you have to say. Except for the part where you announced to the world that you were actually yawning. I don't know how I might have struggled through the rest of my life without having been enriched by that revelation. Not like that was a time waster or anything.

Maybe by chance today you might find a thread today that is worthy of your level of supreme enlightenment. Meanwhile I hope you won't mind if some of the rest of us learn how to better defend Senator Dodd against slurs from his detractors.

[Name removed]

16. Deleted message

Message removed by moderator. Click here to review the message board rules.

[democracy1st]

7. Its not about the GOP its about Geithner coming out of a sector he's now suppose to regulate!

Geithner and Summers have philosophical views that will not allow them to properly regulate the financial sector.

[FrenchieCat]

11. The Executive Branch doesn't regulate the Federal reserve.

and Geithner never worked on Wall Street.

[chimpymustgo]

19. Why should anyone defend either Dodd or Geithner? There'll all looking out for the fat cats -

and trying to lie to the public about it. Lies. The outrage is REAL - and only you seem to be missing it.

Geithner may not have worked on Wall Street. But Henry Kissinger is the lead-off hitter on his effing resume

-snip-

After completing his studies, Geithner worked for Kissinger and Associates in Washington, D.C., for three years and then joined the International Affairs division of the U.S. Treasury Department in 1988. He went on to serve as an attache at the US Embassy in Tokyo. He was deputy assistant secretary for international monetary and financial policy (1995–1996), senior deputy assistant secretary for international affairs (1996-1997), assistant secretary for international affairs (1997–1998).<7>

He was Under Secretary of the Treasury for International Affairs (1998–2001) under Treasury Secretaries Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers.<7> Summers was his mentor,<9><10> but other sources call him a Rubin protégé.<10><11><12>
Treasury Secretary designee Geithner meets Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus on November 25, 2008

In 2002 he left the Treasury to join the Council on Foreign Relations as a Senior Fellow in the International Economics department.<13> He was director of the Policy Development and Review Department (2001-2003) at the International Monetary Fund.<7>

In October 2003, he was named president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York.<14> His salary in 2007 was $398,200.<15> Once at the New York Fed, he became Vice Chairman of the Federal Open Market Committee component. His somewhat caustic and arbitrary management style was often evidenced during his tenure with the Federal Reserve. In 2006, he also became a member of the Washington-based financial advisory body, the Group of Thirty.<16>
-snip-

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Timothy_Geithner

[Lasher]

24. No, they're not all looking out for the fat cats.

Obama isn't. Dodd isn't either.

[democracy1st]

3. Factcheck maybe just that but Chris Bowers and Jane Hamsher are legit!

White House Official Throws Chris Dodd Under Bus To Protect Geithner and Summers

Via Jane Hamsher) Back in mid-February during the fight over the stimulus package, Senator Chris Dodd was pushing for retroactive restrictions on bonuses paid to employees of financial companies receiving bailout money. This measure, which would have applied to AIG bonuses, was opposed by both Wall Street and the Obama administration:

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.
Both Larry Summers and Tim Geithner personally asked Senator Dodd to remove the retroactive provision, because they thought it meant banks would give the government its money back:


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.
While Dodd refused to back down, at the request of the administration the retroactive language was stripped from the final bill during the conference report anyway. Now, a source deep inside the Obama administration is telling the press that the bonuses are Dodd's fault, and that Geithner is the one who is outraged:


Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said.(...)

The administration official said the Treasury Department did its own legal analysis and concluded that those contracts could not be broken. The official noted that even a provision recently pushed through Congress by Senator Christopher J. Dodd, a Connecticut Democrat, had an exemption for such bonus agreements already in place.

Don't forget that Chris Dodd is the most endangered Democratic Senate incumbent in 2010, as he currently trails his Republican challenger Robert Simmons. Hard to imagine how Dodd's re-election chances will be helped by a senior White House source telling the New York Times that Dodd is to blame for the AIG bonuses.

http://www.openleft.com/showDiary.do?diaryId=12278

[FrenchieCat]

9. You were never one to get it either.

It ain't about who is the best sherlock Holmes!
it is about health care, education and Energy,
and a real budget for the first time in 8 years, and then some.
It is about working towards peace and winding down war.
It is about pulling together to make this country
what it was once known as; a land of opportunity.

If you think for one minute that this "whodunit" distraction that you are participating in
is even remotely entertaining to anyone other than a few bloggers,
some grandstanding politicians, and the fucked up corporate media,
then you have a poor understanding as to what is going throughout this land.

It ain't about petty recrimination, finger pointing, pitchfork brandying,
and shell game playing that is going to occupy the American people at this time.

You cannot drag a people through two wars costing a trillion,
and set them up for the ultimate robbery of the century,
and actually believe that what they want to see now, after a hard fought election,
is the same ass "gotcha" bullshit that has been peddled so many times before.

When this country voted for change, they knew the transition to getting there,
considering our state, wouldn't be easy.
They will be hanging on, and not picking the low hanging fruit.

[democracy1st]

12. Frenchie you trust Geithner and Summers that much ? These guys are not change they're trying to make

sure the financial sector doesn't get hit by hardcore regulations.



The Glass-Steagall Act of 1933 established the Federal Deposit Insurance Corporation (FDIC) in the United States and included banking reforms, some of which were designed to control speculation.<1> Some provisions such as Regulation Q, which allowed the Federal Reserve to regulate interest rates in savings accounts, were repealed by the Depository Institutions Deregulation and Monetary Control Act of 1980. Provisions that prohibit a bank holding company from owning other financial companies were repealed on November 12, 1999, by the Gramm-Leach-Bliley Act.

[FrenchieCat]

14. As you already may know, I trust Barack Obama as my President.

He's in charge, and the buck stops with him.
After 60 days, no....I'm not "concerned".

[chimpymustgo]

23. Frenchie, please read this: "The Big Takeover: the global economic crisis isn't about money - it's

about power."

It's long, exhaustively researched, incredibly informative - and if you're not angry now - you will be.


http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the ...

The Big Takeover

The global economic crisis isn't about money - it's about power. How Wall Street insiders are using the bailout to stage a revolution (added bold)

MATT TAIBBI Posted Mar 19, 2009 12:49 PM

It's over — we're officially, royally fucked. no empire can survive being rendered a permanent laughingstock, which is what happened as of a few weeks ago, when the buffoons who have been running things in this country finally went one step too far. It happened when Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was forced to admit that he was once again going to have to stuff billions of taxpayer dollars into a dying insurance giant called AIG, itself a profound symbol of our national decline — a corporation that got rich insuring the concrete and steel of American industry in the country's heyday, only to destroy itself chasing phantom fortunes at the Wall Street card tables, like a dissolute nobleman gambling away the family estate in the waning days of the British Empire.

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

So it's time to admit it: We're fools, protagonists in a kind of gruesome comedy about the marriage of greed and stupidity. And the worst part about it is that we're still in denial — we still think this is some kind of unfortunate accident, not something that was created by the group of psychopaths on Wall Street whom we allowed to gang-rape the American Dream. When Geithner announced the new $30 billion bailout, the party line was that poor AIG was just a victim of a lot of shitty luck — bad year for business, you know, what with the financial crisis and all. Edward Liddy, the company's CEO, actually compared it to catching a cold: "The marketplace is a pretty crummy place to be right now," he said. "When the world catches pneumonia, we get it too." In a pathetic attempt at name-dropping, he even whined that AIG was being "consumed by the same issues that are driving house prices down and 401K statements down and Warren Buffet's investment portfolio down."

-snip-

[Lasher]

8. Excellent, thanks for sharing.

FactCheck.org did a good job on this, and just in time for the wingnut emails on the subject that are sure to come. FactCheck.org is one of my two favorite debunking websites, Snopes being the other.

I don't think this guy Geithneris going to work out. And FWIW, he's an Independent. But the jackass Summers is a Democrat.

[Roland99]

18. Thanks for this. There's plenty of stink on the Dem side of things.

And ignore those that bow down and worship their "Messiah"....those that think Obama's shit don't stink. He's only a man.

[Captain Hilts]

20. Dodd's being thrown under the bus. nt

[certainot]

21. fact won't matter again in the US until the talk radio monopoly is gone

with its GOP coordinated UNCONTESTED repetition from 1000 stations

[certainot]

22. straw man, red herring, GOP bullshit--dems are getting played

into whether to dump dodd or geithner and summers and we should be dumping the bush admin and the GOP for taking the china on the way out, hamstringing obama from the start, and deregulating us into disaster.

below is something from dailykos about dodd's part

"There was no "secret provision" to allow AIG bonuses
by Jed Lewison
Thu Mar 19, 2009 at 02:22:03 PM MDT

A storyline is emerging in Republican circles and throughout media land that Chris Dodd and the Treasury Department secretly inserted a provision into the stimulus bill that allowed AIG to pay its failure bonuses.

There's only one problem with this narrative: it is completely false.

With or without the stimulus bill, AIG would have been allowed to pay its failure bonuses. In fact, at no point in time was there ever a law barring the bonuses.

Given that the bonuses were never illegal, there was never any need to create a new loophole to allow them. They were allowed all along.

What actually happened was that the stimulus bill put new restrictions on bonuses, but only applied those restrictions on bonuses that were given out after the legislation passed.

Early drafts of those new restrictions were retroactive, and would have applied to the AIG failure bonuses, but by the time the final legislation was passed, the retroactive provisions had been eliminated. Chris Dodd, who wrote the restrictions, says he agreed to limit their scope at the request of Treasury.

Figuring out why the new restrictions didn't go far enough is a valuable exercise, but it's also important to get the basic story right, and so far, far too many people are getting the simplest of facts wrong.

Before they go wagging their finger in outrage, they ought to get the story right."

[medeak]

25. welcome to DU!

and fact check was a real asset to me replying to freeper hate emails