[Video Update] The Cover-Up By “All The President’s Men” (and Sen. Dodd)
By SusanUnPC on March 20, 2009 at 6:00 PM in AIG, Current Affairs, President Barack Obama
UPDATE: Here’s a just-available video from today’s “Special Report With Bret Baier,” Fox News:
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“What did he know and when did he know it?,” asked Senator Howard Baker.
“Follow the money,” said Deep Throat.
“It’s not the crime, it’s the cover-up,” a saying used thousands of times since Watergate.
Was I ever impressed. Hannity, who is not famous for high-level discourse, scored as his guest the top-flight attorney David Boies to comment on the confiscatory retribution law passed by the House on Thursday. Remember that word confiscatory. Listen to Boies describe, below, what Congress should have done. I know Congress operates like we live in a third-world country (ever try to find a video or 
transcript on their confusing, inconsistently formatted, 1995-era-styled committee Web sites?). But aren’t a great number of them attorneys who also have, on staff, a number of attorneys they can consult? Can’t they call up, oh, let’s say the Attorney General’s office, for help? Well, yes. So watch the sensible, knowledgeable David Boies in the video below. And weep.
Actually, I suspect something far more insidious. God, I loathe conspiracy theorists and their theories, but. … We know that Dodd tried to cover his own ass and that of the Fed and Geithner, who has borrowed Obama’s line in saying he accepts “full responsibility,” as if ownership of the problem means it’s solved.
The clever (they assume) words on the White House Web site (above left) have been eating at me: I found it somewhat astonishing that, in a play on the title of a great, historic book and film about the devastating self-destruction of a president and his administration, Obama’s Web master and communications staff used the phrase “All The President’s Picks” to describe his unpresidential emphasis on selecting NCAA March Madness picks as the #1 image on the official White House Web site.
We know that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner lied when he said he learned about the bonuses only last week because he was the lead person in building the 2008 Bush-era AIG bail-out. (“The A.I.G. tempest has been especially explosive for Mr. Geithner because, as president of the New York Fed, he was the one administration official who had been involved in the Bush-era bailouts.” – “A.I.G.: A Defining Moment for Geithner,” March 19, 2009, New York Times blog, “Dealbook.”)
We know that Fed chair Ben Bernanke and other Fed officials knew about the contracts offering bonuses, as long ago as last year. So, who else knew?
Was it indeed ALL the President’s men? Might the President himself have known, even while he feigns outrage for his campaign rallies town hall discussions?
Yes, best we know, Senator Dodd and/or his senior staff secretly rewrote the Wyden/Snowe amendment that capped executive bonuses. We know that Senator Ron Wyden talked to every official at the Fed and to the White House, because Senator Wyden said so in a television interview. But, at whose behest did everyone at the Fed and White House tell Wyden that his amendment was VERY unwelcome? Who else besides Geithner and/or Bernanke was behind the message to Wyden that his and Olympia Snowe’s amendment made them ALL very unhappy?
Was Rahm Emanuel, the President’s Chief of Staff, involved — he who is surely highly aware of AIG’s past beneficience to the campaign chests of Mssrs. Obama, Dodd, et al.?
We now know that David Axelrod was aware, which speaks volumes about the levels reached in this discussion about the pesky bonuses — so necessary to ensure the continued beneficience of the rich whilst also being so potentially enraging to the growing number of poor. (“The next morning, Mr. Geithner informed White House advisers. Later that day a senior adviser, David Axelrod, informed the president.” – “A.I.G.: A Defining Moment for Geithner,” March 19, 2009, New York Times blog, “Dealbook.”)
Wouldn’t this touchy issue have been discussed in the Oval Office? And far earlier than last Wednesday (March 11, 2009) when Mr. Axelrod supposedly informed President Obama — for the first time? Come on. Of course it was because it was a “hot potato,” and the White House just hoped that Dodd’s sneaky shift of language wouldn’t get detected and cause such a furor.
Wouldn’t those handsomely compensated AIG execs — grateful as they must be for that secretly amended amendment — have donated in 2010 and 2012? Wouldn’t every donation possible be sought after even at this early date, given the sure-to-fade appeal of “The One” and and his faux presidency, especially given how tired he is already of the work, oh the actual work required (!), of that job. He who’s never worked 40+ hours a week, except when it was to win?
I am just asking some questions. Necessary questions.
Why? Because we know, from Obama’s, Axelrod’s and Emanuel’s histories in Illinois and during the 2007-2008 campaigns — as well as Emanuel’s strong-armed leadership of the DCCC — that those donations matter above all else to the two top executives in the White House, for whom life is a campaign and for whom work is only tedious, torturous toil that fills the hours between the ever-present, perpetual campaigning and becoming the hit on the joint, why the very powder pressed into the pierced artery sweet-talking its way straight to the hearts and brains of the cheering, thunderous crowds with tens of thousands of adulatory fans. Not citizens. No. FANS! As meekly, mindlessly flattering as possible. With as many fainting women as the paramedics can handle, called upon as they are by the mentally masturbating Obama to seduce care for those swooning mistresses of the aphroditous Man In Chief. The Commander. In Command. The One. The One With It All.
And all that work is just a bother. The only thing that matters is the really big prize for winning the campaign. The name. Especially the Commander name. The plane. Oh that plane. Air Force One. The Force One for “The One.” With which to escape. Escape that toilsome job. Escape the inevitable hand cramps from all that bill signing. Escape those stuporific, stiff, and bothersome, boring meetings with foreign leaders who don’t even speak English.
But winning and holding onto that prize takes staggering amounts of money. What? Five times the total of those A.I.G. bonuses? At the least. So it’s always about the money really. You see, it takes money, money, money to hold those rallies and get those people revved so much so that it’s like the biggest orgasm they’ve ever had just to see “The One,” who loves the mutual masturbatory high that strokes his needy ego.
So it’s always about keeping those with the money the happiest.
Oh that populist talk? That’s for the adulatory dumb-dumbs. But the rich people get their greed fix with secretly amended amendments and that hotly sought-after access.
Oh that faux socialist talk? That’s to keep the middle class from realizing they’re slipping into the lower class while their incomes are being inflated so they’re in a higher tax bracket while a loaf of bread costs more and more.
And it’ll be the same as before. Under Bush. The rich will keep getting richer. And the poor will get hungrier and hungrier. And poorer.
And I’ll keep musing … and you can all think about it … and tell me what you think.
Meanwhile, listen to Mr. Boies:
Now, an AFTERWORD, from an e-mail I sent to Larry Johnson about the story above:
Disturbing to me is the fact that the Special Olympics snark popped into Obama’s mind so easily. Which tells me he has made similar remarks in the past and heard his friends make them too.
It was not a freshly minted idea or phrase — it signals that he habitually mocks those he considers lesser than himself. It is part and parcel of his overall arrogance. His sense that he is better than others…. which goes along with his addiction to having adulatory acknowledgement of his specialness via those worshipful rallies. He’s like a famous jock. He engages in jock talk that often involves mocking other people and, like famous players, he needs the “high” from recognition and adulation.
i am also FURIOUS with Jay Leno for “enabling” Obama re the AIG bonuses when Leno said, “You must have been stunned.” Oh The One Loved That Leno Last Night.
In my draft, I draw on the book title “All the President’s Men” — and I believe that these bonuses for AIG and ALL these bailed-out companies were discussed at the highest levels, including in the Oval, because, while Obama dishes out the faux populism to the average voter, he is ever mindful that it is the wealthy donors he must cater to and protect. He knows that altering the Wyden/Snowe amendment would please all his rich donors and that those grateful recipients of higher bonuses will remember the intervention in 2010 and 2012. It all boils down to the absolutely necessary campaign donations that enable his addictive need to stage those huge and expensive campaign rallies.
David Boies was on Hannity last night and brilliantly pointed out ALL the more intelligent ways to dispense with such undeserved bonuses as well as all of the legal problems with Congress’s utterly stupid, reactionary, confiscatory, and unconstitutional legislation yesterday. BUT (!!!!) HERE’S THE THING ::: THE CONGRESSIONAL DEMOCRATS KNOW THEY MUST DISPENSE WITH THE AIG KERFUFFLE POSTHASTE BECAUSE THEY NEED TO GET BACK ON TRACK TO PASS that budget.
Members of Congress pray their vote, coupled with all of their insincere outrage shouted out on every talk/news show, will placate voters, and they also know that, eventually, the courts will toss that legislation out on its ear.
But Rahm and Barack have given them instructions to get that mess handled and get back on track. (Everything done is tactical — even Barack’s loudly professed disdain for D.C., and his need to get away from it — is on purpose to make dumb people believe he’s one of them and hates D.C. practices as much as they do.)
POSTSCRIPTS:
(1) There are more A.I.G. bonuses to come:
On Friday, Mr. Liddy said he could not block the bonuses; he did agree to reduce executive bonuses set for July 15 and Sept. 15.
Will Mr. Boies be consulted before then, and will the unconstitutional, confiscatory House bill be quietly shelved in a back room somewhere down in the bowels of Congress?
(2) THIS WAS SOME “PICK,” MR. PRESIDENT: Your “pick” for the Treasury, Mr. Timothy F. Geithner, who shares an identical philosophy about business and an aversion to any regulation with former Fed chief Alan Greenspan:
Mr. Geithner’s instincts are that government should not dictate compensation issues to businesses.
So President Obama chose an anti-regulation extremist who believes business should be left to its own devices. That is hardly in keeping with the tenets of the Democratic party or the beliefs of the voters, ignorant as they were, sigh, of Obama’s campaign-era group of pro-privatization, heavily-pro-capitalist, anti-regulatory economic advisers (although we Hillary Democrats tried to tell them, in response to which they’d invariably stick their fingers in their ears and yell, “Racists! RACISTS! RAAAACCCCCIIIIIIISSSSSSSTTTTTTTS!!!”).
Here’s a description of Alan Greenspan that underscores that Geithner’s view of Wall Street and all business, really, is just like Greenspan’s:
SHORTLY AFTER she was named to head the Commodity Futures Trading Commission in 1996, Brooksley E. Born was invited to lunch by Federal Reserve chairman Alan Greenspan.
The influential Greenspan was an ardent proponent of unfettered markets. Born was a powerful Washington lawyer with a track record for activist causes. Over lunch, in his private dining room at the stately headquarters of the Fed in Washington, Greenspan probed their differences.
“Well, Brooksley, I guess you and I will never agree about fraud,” Born, in a recent interview, remembers Greenspan saying.
“What is there not to agree on?” Born says she replied.
“Well, you probably will always believe there should be laws against fraud, and I don’t think there is any need for a law against fraud,” she recalls. Greenspan, Born says, believed the market would take care of itself.
For the incoming regulator, the meeting was a wake-up call. “That underscored to me how absolutist Alan was in his opposition to any regulation,” she said in the interview.
Over the next three years, Born, ’61, JD ’64, would learn first-hand the potency of those absolutist views, confronting Greenspan and other powerful figures in the capital over how to regulate Wall Street. … Read all [requires subscription so I may reprint it this weekend] via the Stanford alumni magazine front-page story, “Prophet and Loss.”
Here’s the subtitle to “Prophet and Loss”:
Brooksley Born warned that unchecked trading in the credit market could lead to disaster, but power brokers in Washington ignored her. Now we’re all paying the price.
And, if you ask me, I predict we will CONTINUE to pay the price because we have a president who will welcome the coming inflation — even hyperinflation — because, after all, inflation will create more wage-earners who make over $250,000 per year, and he’ll be able to collect taxes, in all forms, on many more people, goods, and services.
I doubt we’ll get to the $1 billion paper money required in Zimbabwe to buy a loaf of bread. But who knows what we’ll be paying for bread soon. Want to predict its cost?
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