I don’t like to encourage masochism, but if you were ever going to watch Keith Olbermann, tonight is probably the night. After all, given Olbermann’s tendency to quit his meds and start frothing at the mouth over corporate hypocrisy, he has a juicy target today. Who’s the latest fat-cat to get wealthy from taxpayer bailout money? Why, it’s the pride of Cownell - Keith Olbermann. If you feel inclined, go sign the petition.

While General Electric, the parent-company of your MSNBC network, was negotiating a $126 billion taxpayer-funded bailout, you signed a new contract raising your salary from $4 million to $7.5 million annually. You have used your show as a platform to call for the resignation of corporate executives accepting excessive bonuses on the backs of taxpayers who are picking up the tab for these atrocious bailouts, yet you yourself have no problem engaging in the same “class economic rape” that you accuse them of.

Please heed your own advice and stop accepting taxpayer money to subsidize your nightly diatribes. Resign or return the balance of your excessive raise to the U.S. Treasury.

To express this in terms even Olbermann might understand, how dare you sir!

Too bad for Olbermann - he can’t even use the defense that the AIG bonus recipients did. He can’t claim to have earned the money. Those bonuses were awarded pursuant to a prior contract; Olbermann’s was a new deal. And if you look at his track record, it’s hard to argue that Olbermann is doing anything right.

Olbermann has a lot of nerve taking taxpayer money while he rails against others for doing the same. If he has any integrity, he’ll follow the lesson set by the executives he has attacked. When the AIG bonuses approved by the Obama administration and the Democrats in Congress caused public outrage, those execs by and large returned the money. Olbermann has to do the same. He’ll still be a joke, but at least he won’t be a conspicuously hypocritical joke.

Chris Dodd Chairs the Senate Banking Committee - a position that made him important enough to become a Friend of Angelo, and allowed him to influence the porkulus conference committee to allow AIG to award bonuses to senior employees. It led AIG executives to strong arm employees into donating to Dodd. It also gave Dodd disproportionate influence in killing efforts to clean up Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac before they collapsed. In other words, Dodd’s position on the Banking Committee is largely responsible for making him an underdog for re-election next year.

So what’s Chris Dodd’s plan to save his lucrative government gig? Remind people of his spot on the Banking Committee:

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.), facing increasingly difficult odds in 2010, is spending the two-week recess barnstorming his home state to try to improve his political standing…

The appearances are part of a series dubbed “Banking for Change,” meant to highlight Dodd’s work on consumer protection issues as chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee.

Seriously?

Dodd thinks he’s helped by reminders of what he’s done with his Banking Committee spot? He might as well run television ads bragging about his Countrywide Mortgage and his wife’s former spot on the Board of an AIG company. Connecticut Republicans are being handed a golden opportunity to remind voters of Dodd’s ethical lapses, and his leadership role in the housing crash and current recession. They ought to attend Dodd’s events in state and ask him why he’s bragging about legislative malpractice and crony capitalism.

This Politico story has been making the rounds - see here and here and here and shoot, Memeorandum in general - and it’s mostly because of the passage below, in response over attempts to explain salary bonuses:

But President Barack Obama wasn’t in a mood to hear them out. He stopped the conversation and offered a blunt reminder of the public’s reaction to such explanations. “Be careful how you make those statements, gentlemen. The public isn’t buying that.”

“My administration,” the president added, “is the only thing between you and the pitchforks.”

Really?

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Let’s have Congress investigate itself:

While Congress has been flaying companies for giving out bonuses while on the government dole, lawmakers have a longstanding tradition of rewarding their own employees with extra cash — also courtesy of taxpayers.

Capitol Hill bonuses in 2008 were among the highest in years, according to LegiStorm, an organization that tracks payroll data. The average House aide earned 17% more in the fourth quarter of the year, when the bonuses were paid, than in previous quarters, according to the data. That was the highest jump in the eight years LegiStorm has compiled payroll information.

Total end-of-year bonuses paid to congressional staffers are tiny compared with the $165 million recently showered on executives of American International Group Inc., which is being propped up by billions of dollars of U.S. government subsidies. But Capitol Hill bonuses provide a notable counterpoint to the populist rhetoric and sound bites emanating from Washington these past weeks.

Last year alone, more than 200 House lawmakers, both Republicans and Democrats, awarded bonuses totaling $9.1 million to more than 2,000 staff members, according to a Wall Street Journal analysis of office-disbursement forms. The money comes out of taxpayer-funded office budgets, and is surplus cash that would otherwise be forfeited if not spent.

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Promoted from diaries. - Moe Lane.

In today’s Washington Times there is a report about how a bunch of AIG Financial Services executives were “asked” by their CEO to donate to Chris Dodd’s campaign, and to encourage their subordinates to do the same. Read AIG chief executive Joseph Cassano’s email for yourself.

Was this more than just a suggestion? Well, the boss said he wanted copies of the checks they sent. And it seems pretty clear that the recipients of the email got the gist: in less than two months, Dodd received over $160,000 in donations from AIG employees and their spouses.

Did Chris Dodd have any part in this request? We may never know. And it’s not illegal. So what’s the big deal? Well, the email pretty explicitly calls for the donations with the understanding that they will have very real and practical effects in their favor:

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Beginning with his tax difficulties, and continuing through the puzzling narrative of when and what he knew about the AIG bonuses, Treasury Secretary Geithner has done little to inspire the confidence of the American people. Oddly, Secretary Geithner continued his bizarre and puzzling conduct this week, making flatly contradictory statements about the dollar in a span of only 24 hours. This weakens confidence not only in him, but in the currency he is entrusted to protect.

On Tuesday, Secretary Geithner testified before the House Financial Services Committee that he ‘categorically renounces,’ recent proposals from China and others to shift away from the dollar as the world’s reserve currency [see hearing transcript below]. The next morning in New York, speaking to the Council on Foreign Relations, he was asked about the same proposals and said he is ‘quite open,’ to them [see press report below].

Really, Mr. Secretary? Is it too much to ask that your position remain unchanged over a 24 hour period?

Excerpt from Secretary Geithner’s March 24th testimony before the Financial Services Committee at approximately 11:30am:

http://gop.gov/resources/library/members/az/03/World-Currency-Question-3-24.wmv

Representative Bachmann: We’ve seen both China, Russia, and Kazakhstan, make calls for an international monetary conversion to an international monetary standard as soon as the G20, and I’m wondering would you categorically renounce the United States moving away from the dollar and going to a global currency as suggested this morning by China and also by Russia, Mr. Secretary?

Secretary Geithner: I would, yes.

As reported in the Washington Times:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/mar/26/geithner-gaffe-on-dollar-roils-stock-bond-markets/

An unguarded comment by Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner on Wednesday set off a sudden drop in the dollar and contributed to a chain of market-rocking events that included a setback in the stock market and a sharp uptick in interest rates.

Mr. Geithner appeared to lend his support to a proposal by China’s central bank governor to replace the dollar as the world’s reserve currency with a basket of currencies that would be managed by the International Monetary Fund. In an appearance before the Council on Foreign Relations in New York on Wednesday morning, Mr. Geithner raised eyebrows by saying that ‘we’re actually quite open to that’…

Today, Rep. Barney Frank (D-MA) and Congressional Democrats have taken their false outrage over AIG bonuses a step farther by introducing a plan to limit pay for employees who work for TARP recipients. The entire controversy over executive pay demonstrates why the government has no business interjecting itself into the private sector. Washington has gleefully jumped at the opportunity to rack up political points over an episode that involves a small fraction of the total taxpayer money wasted during the bailout spree, but unfortunately has left the larger problem unaddressed.

As political outrage over bonuses continues to spawn more bad legislation, we can see the precise folly of mixing government intervention with the free market. Washington has done enough to damage the private sector by injecting itself into businesses with no discernible exit strategy. Now, Democrats are pushing legislation that would do irreparable harm to already-struggling recovery efforts by driving away the folks who are needed to repair our financial sector. Government bailouts have led us down the path of institutionalized tyranny. And, all signs out of the White House and the Speaker’s office point to more bailouts and more wasted taxpayer money.

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Senator Dodd, there’s been a lot of attention recently to your relationship with AIG. You’re the top Congressional recipient of their political donations, they have a major presence in your state, and you sponsored a provision that allowed them to deliver bonuses to many of your constituents. And yet even as you’ve sworn up and down that you never wanted to protect AIG, and you have no reason to wish to do so, we learn that your wife served on the board of - and was compensated by - an AIG subsidiary?

From 2001-2004, Jackie Clegg Dodd served as an “outside” director of IPC Holdings, Ltd., a Bermuda-based company controlled by AIG. IPC, which provides property casualty catastrophe insurance coverage, was formed in 1993 and currently has a market cap of $1.4 billion and trades on the NASDAQ under the ticker symbol IPCR. In 2001, in addition to a public offering of 15 million shares of stock that raised $380 million, IPC raised more than $109 million through a simultaneous private placement sale of 5.6 million shares of stock to AIG - giving AIG a 20% stake in IPC. (AIG sold its 13.397 million shares in IPC in August, 2006.)

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They may call it “delay,” but they mean “eliminate” - and the Washington Post is happy to assist with putting this story on the seventh page.

Senate Will Delay Action on Punitive Tax on Bonuses

Jarred by a cool reception from the White House and fears of unintended consequences across the financial world, Senate leaders are likely to delay until late next month legislation to punitively tax bonuses at banks and investment firms that receive federal aid.

Senate Majority Leader Harry M. Reid (D-Nev.) announced last week that the Senate would move ahead with the legislation as soon as possible, and he attempted to bring the bill to the floor Thursday night. But he revised that timetable yesterday, saying that the chamber will spend this week debating a national-service bill before turning to a long-scheduled showdown over the budget for fiscal 2010. With just two weeks to go until Congress departs for a spring recess, action on the tax measure would be unlikely before late April.

That will effectively kill the bill, because everyone in Washington is betting that a month should be enough time for the populace to have something else besides the Democrat-inspired and Democrat-encouraged AIG bonus PR fiasco to focus upon; which is not a bad bet, actually. Already people are starting to notice that the Democrats’ House bill has a good deal of faux-populist outrage associated with it; and as Glenn Reynolds over in Forbes is pointing out, the Democrats are going to be soon having to hit up the very people that they’re currently demonizing for campaign contributions. Time to let this story die, and that’s why there’s a Senate in the first place.

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Good thing that he cleared that up:

AIG’s $100G donation to Democrats was unknown to Gov. Paterson, he says

Gov. Paterson stuck to his guns Saturday, insisting he knew nothing about a $100,000 donation from AIG to the state Democratic Party days before his office helped save the insurance giant.

State Republicans charged the Democrats with stonewalling an investigation into the Aug. 29 donation, uncovered last week by The Associated Press.

In the first week of September, Paterson launched negotiations to save the financially strapped company. GOP officials questioned whether there was a quid pro quo.

Otherwise suspicious individuals might ask whether September’s relief efforts were perhaps lubricated by such a transaction. Paterson’s intervention stopped the company’s financial free-fall back then, and it took place two weeks after AIG made a donation to the state Democratic party that was ten times higher than previous contributions. But Paterson, the Democrats, and AIG are all swearing that there was no quid pro quo. Or pay-for-play.

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We at Red State have pointed out several times that while Chris Dodd agreed to insert an amendment into the stimulus bill to protect AIG bonuses, he was not in position to do so. Chris Dodd was not a Member of the conference committee that drafted the final version of the bill - the only one that had protection for AIG. The Democrats on the conference committee locked the Republicans out of the process and wrote the bill themselves. No Republican supported the conference report; no Republican signed it (look on the final page of the conference report here).

The Democrat conferees were Daniel Inouye, Max Baucus, Harry Reid, Dave Obey, Charlie Rangel, and Henry Waxman. One (or more) of them allowed Dodd to make the change.

So who was it?

Harry Reid needs to talk about his role in this. And so should Daniel Inouye, Max Baucus, Dave Obey, Charlie Rangel, and Henry Waxman. Each was responsible for the contents of the bill that the six of them drafted together.

When the House passed the Obama-Reid-Pelosi debt spending plan - and the carveout for AIG bonuses - Democrats allowed a scant few hours for review of the 1,000 page bill before the vote. Some honest Members of Congress admitted they had not read the bill. Nevada’s Dina Titus however, claimed to have done so:

House Democrats voted on the ’stimulus’ bill just a few hours after they drafted the text (without input from Republicans). Did Representative Titus really go over the entire text as she claimed, or was she simply too embarrassed to acknowledge that she was voting on something she hadn’t read? In either case, she clearly felt she knew enough to vote for the bill, since the House had been talking about it ‘for a long time’ - about 3 or 4 weeks, actually.

Did Titus really know what she was voting on, or was she shirking the first and most basic part of her job? It’s time for all the Democrats who voted for this bill to answer that question.

Today Treasury Secretary Geithner gave an interview to CNN in an attempt to head off further inquiries into the Democrats’ handling of the AIG mess. What he admits is stunning:

Velshi: One of the issues CNN and other news organizations have reported since late January, that AIG was going to pay about $450 million to about 400 employees of the AIG financial productions unit, which is really at the heart of AIG’s problems, an otherwise healthy company.

There is some dispute as to who knew when what. AIG’s CEO said that you might have known about this earlier than you did. When did you learn about this, and what did you learn?

Geithner: I was informed by my staff of the full scale of these specific things on Tuesday, March 10th. And as soon as I heard about the full scale of these things, we moved very actively to explore every possible avenue — legal avenue — to address this problem, to make sure that, again, the assistance we were providing was not going to unduly benefit these people.

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Jim Tedisco reminds us that Murphy may have an inclination towards giving bonuses to companies losing money…

…although that may not be an entirely fair comparison. After all, back then Murphy’s bonus scheme didn’t involve your money. I wonder if he’s still for passing that miscalled “stimulus” bill - Tedisco is on the record as opposing it, mind you - and I wonder if Murphy is going to comment on his stance on the AIG payoffs further. Or at all, really.

<a href=”http://www.jimtedisco.com/donate/”>contribute:

Moe Lane

Crossposted to Moe Lane.

If you only see one video on the internet today, or if you only want to listen to one sound bite on the internet, this is the one you must play.

Republicans in Congress today pushed to the floor of the House of Representatives legislation that would stop AIG from using taxpayer money to pay out its executives’ bonuses. The Democrats killed the legislation.

Outraged, Congresswoman Foxx (R-NC) took to the floor to demand that Congresswoman Kilroy (D-OH) explain why Kilroy and the Democrats would not stop AIG from paying out the bonuses.

Kilroy flat out could not offer up any answer. Making it more delightful, Foxx refused to back down until she had an answer. Hilarity ensued.

The Republicans are in a fighting mood:

[UPDATE] Yeah, let me fix this.
[UPDATE the second.] Not much to fix at all, really. Just a state and a readjustment of how much money he took off of PMA. Whew!

You’re ever-so-angry about this, to be sure:

…but you voted for the debt bill that your fellow-Democrat Senator Dodd loaded down with a loophole permitting these payments. If you’re so concerned, why didn’t you actually do something about it at the time? After all, you voted against the first stimulus bill, which I believe didn’t have this provision in it; so wouldn’t it be more accurate to say that the version of the debt bill that did have AIG exemptions was more attractive to you?

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A friend informs me that all but 8 House Democrats just voted against a measure to require the Obama administration to do everything legally possible to compel AIG to return to the taxpayers the controversial bonuses approved by Secretary Geithner. The bill is described here by its sponsor, Congressman Paulsen:

This is the text of the bill:

Section 1: The Secretary of the Treasury shall, notwithstanding any other provision of law, implement a plan within the next two weeks to recoup or stay the payment of AIG bonuses.

Section 2: No additional funds may be provided to AIG until the bonuses are returned.

Section 3: Any future bonus payments, of any kind, by TARP fund recipients who have not within two weeks of enactment of the bill repaid the government in full, must be approved in advance by Treasury.

Section 4: Any future contractual obligations to make bonus payments of any kind entered into by TARP fund recipients who have not within two weeks of enactment of the bill repaid the government in full must be approved in advance by Treasury.

House GOP Whip Cantor has a list of the Democrats who voted to protect AIG here. Why would they block a bill that requires the Treasury to do precisely what they claim to want?