Obama Administration Helps Firms Launder Money to Avoid Congressional Bailout Restrictions

It’s hard to believe. Only yesterday Americans were revolting against the AIG bonuses – the millions paid to managers who had contributed to the company’s failure. Today, the Washington Post reports:

The Obama administration is engineering its new bailout initiatives in a way that it believes will allow firms benefiting from the programs to avoid restrictions imposed by Congress, including limits on lavish executive pay, according to government officials.


Administration officials have concluded that this approach is vital for persuading firms to participate in programs funded by the $700 billion financial rescue package.

The administration believes it can sidestep the rules because, in many cases, it has decided not to provide federal aid directly to financial companies, the sources said. Instead, the government has set up special entities that act as middlemen, channeling the bailout funds to the firms and, via this two-step process, stripping away the requirement that the restrictions be imposed, according to officials.

Although some experts are questioning the legality of this strategy, the officials said it gives them latitude to determine whether firms should be subject to the congressional restrictions, which would require recipients to turn over ownership stakes to the government, as well as curb executive pay.


The administration has decided that the conditions should not apply in at least three of the five initiatives funded by the rescue package.

This strategy has so far attracted little scrutiny on Capitol Hill, and even some senior congressional aides dealing with the financial crisis said they were unaware of the administration's efforts. Just two weeks ago, Congress erupted in outrage over bonuses being paid at American International Group, with some lawmakers faulting the administration for failing to do more to safeguard taxpayers' interests.

Rep. Edolphus Towns (D-N.Y.), chairman of the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, said the congressional conditions should apply to any firm benefiting from bailout funds. He said he planned to review the administration's decisions and might seek to undo them. "We have to make certain that if they are using government money in any sort of way, there should be restrictions," he said.

A Treasury spokesman defended the approach. "These programs are designed to both comply with the law and ensure taxpayers' funds are used most effectively to bring about economic recovery," spokesman Andrew Williams said.

In one program, designed to restart small-business lending, President Obama's officials are planning to set up a middleman called a special-purpose vehicle -- a term made notorious during the Enron scandal -- or another type of entity to evade the congressional mandates, sources familiar with the matter said.

In another program, which seeks to restart consumer lending, a special entity was created largely for the separate purpose of getting around legal limits on the Federal Reserve, which is helping fund this initiative. The Fed does not ordinarily provide support for the markets that finance credit cards, auto loans and student loans but could channel the funds through a middleman.

At first, when the initiative was being developed last year, the Bush administration decided to apply executive-pay limits to firms participating in this program. But Obama officials reversed that decision days before it was unveiled on March 3 and lifted the curbs, according to sources who spoke on condition of anonymity because the discussions were private.

Obama's team is also planning to exempt financial firms that participate in a program designed to find private investors to buy the distressed assets on the books of banks. But Treasury officials are still examining the legal basis for doing so. Congress has exempted the Treasury from applying the restrictions in a fourth program, which aids lenders who modify mortgages for struggling homeowners.

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Inside Obama’s Economic Brain Trust: Geithner, Summers, et al

A budget session in the White House Roosevelt Room in February. From left, Gene Sperling confers with OMB director Peter Orszag as Tim Geithner talks with Larry Summers.

(Photo: The White House/Pete Souza)

John Heileman’s article in the New Yorker offers balanced in-depth insights on the Obama Administration’s economic brain trust. If you want to keep up with the gang in charge of the unabated financial crisis, it’s a must read.

Obama’s Katrina Moment: The Teleprompter President Hit From All Sides

Frank Rich was one of those big time pundits back in the Democratic primary who, failing to notice Barack Obama’s total lack of relevant experience for the office of president, repeatedly documented his school-boy infatuation with the One in his NY Times op ed while stooping to new lows in trashing Hillary Clinton.

Reading Rich’s column this morning feels like vindication: fewer than 100 days into the Obama Administration, and our media good old boy is asking the question, “Has a ‘Katrina moment’ arrived?”

Rich begins:

A CHARMING visit with Jay Leno won’t fix it. A 90 percent tax on bankers’ bonuses won’t fix it. Firing Timothy Geithner won’t fix it. Unless and until Barack Obama addresses the full depth of Americans’ anger with his full arsenal of policy smarts and political gifts, his presidency and, worse, our economy will be paralyzed. It would be foolish to dismiss as hyperbole the stark warning delivered by Paulette Altmaier of Cupertino, Calif., in a letter to the editor published by The Times last week: “President Obama may not realize it yet, but his Katrina moment has arrived.”

Rich continues:

Six weeks ago I wrote in this space that the country’s surge of populist rage could devour the president’s best-laid plans, including the essential Act II of the bank rescue, if he didn’t get in front of it. The occasion then was the Tom Daschle firestorm. The White House seemed utterly blindsided by the public’s revulsion at the moneyed insiders’ culture illuminated by Daschle’s post-Senate career. Yet last week’s events suggest that the administration learned nothing from that brush with disaster.

Otherwise it never would have used Lawrence Summers, the chief economic adviser, as a messenger just as the A.I.G. rage was reaching a full boil last weekend. Summers is so tone-deaf that he makes Geithner seem like Bobby Kennedy.

Bob Schieffer of CBS asked Summers the simple question that has haunted the American public since the bailouts began last fall: “Do you know, Dr. Summers, what the banks have done with all of this money that has been funneled to them through these bailouts?” What followed was a monologue of evasion that, translated into English, amounted to: Not really, but you little folk needn’t worry about it.
Yet even as Summers spoke, A.I.G. was belatedly confirming what he would not. It has, in essence, been laundering its $170 billion in taxpayers’ money by paying off its reckless partners in gambling and greed, from Goldman Sachs and Citigroup on Wall Street to Société Générale and Deutsche Bank abroad.

Summers was even more highhanded in addressing the “retention bonuses” handed to the very employees who brokered all those bad bets. After reciting the requisite outrage talking point, he delivered a patronizing lecture to viewers of ABC’s “This Week” on how our “tradition of upholding law” made it impossible to abrogate the bonus agreements. It never occurred to Summers that Americans might know that contracts are renegotiated all the time — most conspicuously of late by the United Automobile Workers, which consented to givebacks as its contribution to the Detroit bailout plan. Nor did he note, for all his supposed reverence for the law, that the A.I.G. unit being rewarded with these bonuses is now under legal investigation by British and American authorities.

Within 24 hours, Summers’s stand was discarded by Obama, who tardily (and impotently) vowed to “pursue every single legal avenue” to block the bonuses. The question is not just why the White House was the last to learn about bonuses that Democratic congressmen had sought hearings about back in December, but why it was so slow to realize that the public’s anger couldn’t be sated by Summers’s legalese or by constant reiteration of the word outrage. By the time Obama acted, even the G.O.P. leader Mitch McConnell was ahead of him in full (if hypocritical) fulmination.

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BTW, I wasn’t the only way who noticed that Rich has changed his tune about Obama. Here’s a reader’s response to this morning’s column:

It is nice to see that Mr. Rich has finally demanded some tough answers from his idol. The supposed change that Obama and others (including Deval in MA) promised us appears to have lost its sheen. We now see that Obama and his gang are no different (worse in fact) than the Wall street moghuls that ruled during the Bush years. All this talk of accountability and getting the bonus back is just that - talk. They will lay low for a few weeks until the next story comes along and then it will be business as usual, swindling our money in bucketloads. The super rich and their minions who control the strings in Wall street are just playing their frat poker games, but this time it is with our money, trillions of it! Meet the new "changed" administration, same as the old administration!

— BAY, Boston, MA

Recommended by 42 Readers

Obama “Chokes Back Anger” at AIG While Reading From his Teleprompter

The online media appears to be unanimous this morning in noting that President Obama managed to restrain his anger at AIG for using bailout money for bonuses to its incompetent execs until he was struck by a tsunami of public outrage.

Here’s Wapo’s Dana Millbank (emphasis mine):

As the crowd began to file into the East Room yesterday to hear President Obama's thoughts on the AIG bonuses, the pianist in the Grand Foyer of the White House struck up the tune "Killing Me Softly."

It was an apt selection.

AIG, the insurance giant at the core of the financial meltdown, struck again over the weekend, disclosing that it would use some of its $170 billion in federal bailout money to reward its employees with $165 million in bonuses. And Obama was left looking like a pitiful giant as his aides explained that there was absolutely nothing they could do to stop the obscene payouts -- even though the government owns 80 percent of AIG.

As the president read from his teleprompter yesterday about "this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat," he developed a tickle in his throat and tried to clear it. "Excuse me," he joked. "I'm choked up with anger here."

But not enough. As Obama appeals for patience, his plans to stabilize the economy are at risk of being overtaken by a populist fury over the greed at AIG and in the rest of the financial industry. The president and his aides, armed with little more than their jawbones, seem powerless to stop the outrage.

A Pew Research Center poll out yesterday found that 87 percent of Americans are bothered by the bank bailout -- and that was before word got out about the bonuses at AIG, which was rescued by an earlier federal bailout. The rising anger helps to explain why Obama's towering support has slipped to mere mortal levels. The Pew poll put the president's support at 59 percent, down from 64 percent last month, while a CNN poll found Obama down 12 points from early February.

Obama has complained about "shameful" bonuses -- billions of dollars' worth -- for Wall Street bankers. He has admonished companies receiving the federal bailout that "you can't go take a trip to Las Vegas or go down to the Super Bowl on the taxpayer's dime." And yesterday, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner used a podium at the White House to plead with banks: "You need -- you need -- you banks need to make the extra effort to make sure that good loans are getting to creditworthy small businesses, in order to serve the larger public good."

But the administration's bully-pulpit strategy isn't keeping pace with the spreading anger. Lawmakers erupted over the AIG news yesterday with demands for repayment and even a breakup of the insurance group. They were significantly more agitated than Obama's economic lieutenant, Larry Summers, who told ABC News on Sunday that the administration has "done everything it can do" to limit the AIG bonuses. Further, he told CBS, "we're not a country where contracts just get abrogated willy-nilly."

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