Congress Screws Up Its Oversight Role Yet Again
This is not a promising proof of the ability of Congressional Democrats to oversee the massive financial market bailout plan, like they said they could.
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 Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.
If the cagy Bush administration can fool the Congressional majority by changing one section of a law that they were supposed to have read before they passed it, how in the world are they going to be able to effectively safeguard our money against much less scrupulous people who want to swipe big chunks of it for God alone knows what purpose?
This is probably time to remind you that one of the big reasons we’re in this mess in the first place is because Congress proved itself incompetent to oversee Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac. somehow they managed to convince us to let them oversee a much larger pile of money. It should come as no surprise that they’ve failed yet again.
(via memeorandum)
Other Posts of Interest:
- Yeah, We’re Idiots for Listening to Them
- Don’t Let Congress Build Our Cars, Please?
- The Bailout is Now A Trillion Dollars More Expensive than World War II. The Madness Must Stop
Category: Our New Democratic Overlords, President George Bush, The Economy and Your Money
You know, I don't recall being convinced of that. As a matter of fact, I'm pretty sure I was against the idea all along…so I'd rather not be included in the "us" above, thank you. Unless you'd like to change that verb to "coerce," that is.
I use "convince" in the loosest possible way, of course.