Sen. Christopher Dodd is getting criticism from out-of-state ">papers (but note the all the Connecticut residents quoted) over the AIG bonus bungle, but the Hartford Courant ran what might be the most significant story (hat tip: Instapundit, who has a lot more on Dodd):
An executive at mortgage giant Countrywide Financial overrode the company's loan-writing policies to give a discount to Sen. Christopher Dodd, the powerful chairman of the Senate banking committee, according to an internal Countrywide document turned over to congressional investigators and obtained by The Courant.
The Courant notes that the report, some 63 pages long, is ...
Continue readingDodd did it update
Apparently, Geithner did it too. (Previous Dodd did it post here.) As this episode illustrates, there ought to be a better way of tracking whose fingerprints--those of members of Congress, administration officials, lobbyists--are on which parts of what bills.
Continue readingFinancial crisis doesn’t disrupt financial fundraisers
"As the public boils with anger over millions of dollars in retention bonuses for American Insurance Group employees, financial interests quietly continue to woo lawmakers with fundraising parties this month.
Actually, I think that members are still wooing the financial industry by offering dinners, breakfasts and events geared to their industry. While members may be publicly throwing AIG under the bus, in private they're only too happy to cozy up with contributors, offering preferred access and insights in exchange for campaign cash.
One of the first rules of following Washington: Watch what they do, not what they say.
National ...
Continue readingDodd did it
Senate channels “Not Me”
Maybe we should make members pass a quiz on the contents of bills before they're allowed to vote. Case in point: the bonus exemption in the Stimulus Bill that AIG executives took advantage of. Where it came from and how it got into the bill is a mystery:
In an interview with CNN, Dodd denied inserting that exemption at the 11th hour, and insisted he doesn't know how it got there."When I wrote the language there was no such language like that," Dodd told CNN Tuesday.
Multiple Senate Democratic leadership sources also deny knowing how the exemption ...
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World Bank says protection on the rise
The Washington Post reports on a new World Bank study (a summary is here) showing that 17 members of the G20 had enacted measures to limit imports. The Post writes,
The report underscores a "worrying" trend toward protectionism as countries rush to shield their ailing domestic industries during the global economic crisis. It comes one day after Mexico vowed to slap new restrictions on 90 U.S. products. That action is being taken in retaliation against Washington for canceling a program that allowed Mexican truck drivers the right to transport goods across the United States, illustrating the tit-for-tat responses that ...Continue reading
Sleuthing the Stimulus’ bonus provision
So maybe Dodd's not to blame for the AIG bonus furor. Jane Hamsher uses OpenCongress.org to compare versions of the bill -- Donnie Shaw explains how here. Hamsher concludes:
So -- in the end, all compensation limits only applied to contracts written after February 11, at the specific request of Timothy Geithner, and AIG was able to pay out $286 million in bonuses on Sunday.It's impossible to know how many of those bonuses would have been covered by Dodd's original language without examining the individual contracts. What is certain, however, is that the loophole regarding "retroactivity" which ...
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BankTracker debuts at Investigative Reporting Workshop
I've been doing some Webinars over the past few days for reporters to show off some features of SubsidyScope.com for looking at bailout data from Treasury and the FDIC. One of the things I keep telling them is that lots of groups are looking at this data, building tools for parsing and analyzing it, and they should stay tuned.
Today I got to offer an incredibly vivid example of that: the Investigative Reporting Workshop released its BankTracker project, which uses FDIC data to answer the question, "how safe is your bank?" Wendell Cochran is heading up the effort ...
Continue readingMuckety maps PMA Group giving
There have been lots of different ways of slicing PMA Group contributions from Congressional Quarterly and the Center for Responsive Politics (see here too). Now Muckety looks at the web of connections of top PMA Group lobbyist Paul Magliocchetti. From CQ's analysis, Muckety begins by noting:
In addition to Magliocchetti, nine of his relatives - two children, his daughter-in-law, his current wife, his ex-wife and his ex-wife's parents, sister and brother-in-law - donated a total of $1.5 million to political campaigns in that nine-year period, according to the analysis.
The map is interactive; click the names to navigate it ...
Continue readingDon’t mean…
to keep picking on Dodd, but he does seem to be in the center of quite a lot of things lately:
While the Senate was constructing the $787 billion stimulus last month, Dodd added an executive-compensation restriction to the bill. That amendment provides an exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009 -- which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are now seeking to tax.The amendment made it into the final version of the bill, and is law.
Separately, Sen. Dodd was AIG's largest single recipient of campaign donations during the 2008 election cycle ...
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