Oregon’s own Sen. Ron Wyden is at the center of the hurricane of populist outrage over the millions in bonuses raked off by executives of bailed-out AIG.
Republicans and Democrats in Congress are trying to outdo each other in reviling executives of American International Group, who paid themselves $165 million in bonuses after AIG got billions of bailout bucks through the federal Troubled Asset Relief Program.
Wyden told Arianna Huffington of The Huffington Post that he and Republican Sen. Olympia Snowe of Maine had written a provision in the stimulus bill that would have forced executives in bailed-out companies like AIG to cap their bonuses at $100,000; anything above that would have been taxed at 35%.
“According to Wyden, he ‘spent hours on the Senate floor,’ working to get the bipartisan amendment passed,” Huffington writes. “He succeeded – not a single Senator voted against the provision. ‘But,’ says Wyden, ‘it died in conference.’
“So who killed it? Wyden doesn’t know.”
But the DNA of the Obama administration has been found at the crime scene.
“I pulled out all the stops to convince the president’s economic team that this amendment was vital to the White House for two reasons: 1) the president had spoken out against bonuses; 2) fury about bonuses would kneecap confidence in the president’s entire economic policy,” Huffington quoted Wyden as saying.
But nobody on Obama’s economic team supported the bonus cap. “If the White House economic team had made it clear that this was important, this provision [that he and Snowe insterted] would never have been removed,” Wyden said. “I don’t believe the president has been well-served on the bonus issue by his economic team.”
The whole sleazy episode has left Huffington and Wyden – not to mention millions of Americans, including this blogger – disgusted.
Huffington: “We live in a country where one of the 100 most powerful people in government, the co-sponsor of the amendment in question, has no clue how it got removed in the Senate-House conference committee – or if it was taken out of the legislation even before it made it into conference.”
Wyden: “It is the ultimate indictment of what Washington has become. It’s a place where, again and again, the public interest is deep-sixed behind closed doors and without any fingerprints.”
The Eye: Is this “change we can believe in”? It sure as hell isn’t the kind of change we thought we were voting for last November.
This article appears in Mar 19-25, 2009.
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This congress has got to be the biggeest bunch of f*** ups in history. A trillion $, 1200 page “stimulous” (ie thanks for your vote bill) bill is passed without even reading it. Now they’re outraged over the bonuses. Now this bunch of f*** ups want to unconstitutionally tax the bonuses at 90%?
Meanwhile Obama is out west yucking it up with Jay Leno. Bend over, here’s your change.
This is definately not CHANGE! But if you voted for this percieved change, you helped this socialist change america for the worse. Of course there is no fingerprints on this thing, that way they can blame someone else. Thats what dem’s do, a la Barney Frank, Chris Dodds, etc, etc.
Jeff: I’m still an Obama supporter and I’m still convinced he’s 1,000% better than McCain (aka Bush III) would have been. My worry now is that he might not have the balls to bring about real reform. He’s too afraid of being labeled a “socialist” and too concerned with trying to be “bipartisan.” Screw that — the Republicans aren’t interested in bipartisanship; they’ve already said they want this administration to fail. Obama had a mandate for real progressive reform (you call it “socialism”; I call it “giving working Americans a fair deal”) and I fear he’s throwing it away.
It has been troubling to me that everybody painted Bush as a dictator that forced our country into dire straights with out the help of both houses. Now that we have a democrat who sounds like he is already campaigning for the next election in charge, everything is the congress and senates fault. Will the greed of the people at all earning levels living above there means through credit ever be blamed?