Oops, the Bushbailers seem to have fucked up that attempt at limiting executive pay! Oh well, it was probably an accident -- stuff happens

by Ken

It's a pretty state of affairs when you're left wondering whether your government's latest fuckup is the result of inattention (we can't expect that nice Secretary Paulson to dot absolutely every "i" and cross every single "t," now can we?), incompetence, or careful sabotage.

Let the Washington Post's Amit R. Paley tell the basic story:

Executive Pay Limits May Prove Toothless
Loophole in Bailout Provision Leaves Enforcement in Doubt

Congress wanted to guarantee that the $700 billion financial bailout would limit the eye-popping pay of Wall Street executives, so lawmakers included a mechanism for reviewing executive compensation and penalizing firms that break the rules.

But at the last minute, the Bush administration insisted on a one-sentence change to the provision, congressional aides said. The change stipulated that the penalty would apply only to firms that received bailout funds by selling troubled assets to the government in an auction, which was the way the Treasury Department had said it planned to use the money.

Now, however, the small change looks more like a giant loophole, according to lawmakers and legal experts. In a reversal, the Bush administration has not used auctions for any of the $335 billion committed so far from the rescue package, nor does it plan to use them in the future. Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.

"The flimsy executive-compensation restrictions in the original bill are now all but gone," said Sen. Charles E. Grassley (Iowa), ranking Republican on of the Senate Finance Committee.

Oops!

It gets rather complicated from here, having to do with what enforcement mechanisms the Treasury Dept. has, and perhaps more pertinent how much will the Treasury has to enforce any restrictions -- the Bush regime was pretty strenuously opposed to putting any in the bailout law. Of course it's also possible that none of this matters now.

I think it's only fair that, after causing those execs who got that $335B such anxiety over the possibility that they couldn't boost their pay, they should be encouraged to toss an extra $100K or so into their pay envelopes, just to compensate them for the stress.


AND SPEAKING OF WHO GOT THAT $335B . . .

Say, are we just supposed to accept that we're not allowed to know who they are, and how much they got, and get get over it? While the Bushbailers were planning the giant dish-out to their Wall Street cronies, were they so busy fucking up the executive-pay-compensation thing that they somehow forgot to make it mandatory that such a list be made public?

I mean, somebody knows, don't they? The Bushbailers didn't just, like, stand out on a corner handing out hundreds of thousands of dollars, did they? Didn't the recipients at least have to, you know, sign something? Surely somebody somewhere has a shoebox filled with the receipts? Someone on the gov't payroll could make a list of all those scraps of paper, wouldn't you think?

Unless of course we're not supposed to know?

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