Greenwald: "The dishonest "Blame Dodd" scheme from Treasury officials"

[BlooInBloo]

Apologies if this is a dupe.

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/17/dodd/index.html

There is a major push underway -- engineered by Obama's Treasury officials, enabled by a mindless media, and amplified by the right-wing press -- to blame Chris Dodd for the AIG bonus payments. That would be perfectly fine if it were true. But it's completely false, and the scheme to heap the blame on him for the AIG bonus payments is based on demonstrable falsehoods.

Jane Hamsher has written the definitive post narrating and indisputably documenting what actually took place. The attempt to blame Dodd is based on a patently false claim that was first fed to The New York Times on Saturday by an "administration official" granted anonymity by Times reporters Edmund Andrew and Peter Baker (in violation, as usual, of the NYT anonymity policy, since all the official was doing was disseminating pro-administration spin). The accusation against Dodd is that there is nothing the Obama administration can do about the AIG bonus payments because Dodd inserted a clause into the stimulus bill which exempted executive compensation agreements entered into before February, 2009 from the compensation limits imposed on firms receiving bailout funds. Thus, this accusation asserts, it was Dodd's amendment which explicitly allowed firms like AIG to make bonus payments that were promised before the stimulus bill was enacted.

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.
...

No matter how much DUers wanna rip on Dodd for this, it just ain't true.

[Captain Hilts]

1. Snowe just said on MSNBC that the Admin wanted it out. Whichever Sen. it was...

was acting on their behalf.

That's what Snowe's suggesting.

[BlooInBloo]

2. Reid would be the one to know.

[Captain Hilts]

3. If what Snowe is saying is true, then it doesn't really matter which exact senator did the Admin's

bidding on this bill.

[BlooInBloo]

5. Um, yes it does.

[atreides1]

4. Now all we need is the name.

There were 3 Democrats and 2 Republicans that were part of the conference that worked out the final kinks with 5 members of the House.

Inouye, Baucus, Reid.

Cochran, Grassley.

Now which of these 5 are the closest to companies like AIG?

[ErinBerin84]

6. I thought that his characterization

of Gibbs' references to Dodd yesterday was misleading, at least to me. And I didn't get that until someone posted the actual transcript of WHAT Gibbs said about Dodd. That's what I took issue with in the article, but at the same time, I don't exactly trust the treasury officials either not to do this. I'm waiting to see how this one unfolds.

[jsamuel]

7. Doesn't anyone remember the news stories talking about how Obama and his Treas. Sec. wanted to

take out some of the restrictions on companies that take bailout money? They said it would discourage them from taking the bailout money.

[BlooInBloo]

8. I do. It's just DUers slavishly repeating whatever they hear from the media.

[tom_paine]

9. DU is not immune from the crazy media environment in which we all swim.

That is almost as impossible as being apart from the air we breathe, considering the ubiquitous nature of media saturation as delivery system for corporate Bushiganda.