The Dems have to stop trusting these people.
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 Lawmakers and legal experts say the change has effectively repealed the only enforcement mechanism in the law dealing with lavish pay for top executives.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.
(emphasis added)
This is getting old. That pro-corporate manipulation by the Bushies continues to slide past the Dems unnoticed until it's too late to do anything about it is disappointing when it's not disgraceful. It isn't like they haven't seen this sort of maneuver before but they refuse to parse Bush no matter how many times he skins them.
Not that there was ever much chance of legislating against executive greed after 30 years of success draining the trough through pipes that went straight into their pockets, or any chance at all that the Democrat party, almost as reluctant to annoy their corporate masters as the Pubs, would pass anything that might actually hurt the oligarchs in control, but the attempt was worth something, PR-wise.
Look, if you refuse to dump the Dems because you don't believe they're as autocratic and corporate-stooged as they continue to look, then why not dump them because they're hopelessly incompetent and stunningly gullible? Either works for me.
The Greens await.
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