As a member of the House Financial Services Committee, Rep. Brad Miller (D-NC) has had a front-row seat for the fireworks over the financial bailout — and he’s not convinced that the new administration has changed the Treasury Department.
“I want change I can believe in,” he told me in an interview late yesterday. “I don’t think I have change I can notice.”
Miller’s chagrin over Treasury’s lack of responsiveness and transparency signals a distressing trend for the Obama administration. As the nation seethes with anger over lavish spending at bailed-out banks — particularly AIG’s $450 million in bonuses to the same executives who bankrupted the company — a number of lawmakers from both parties are pointing out that Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner’s team could have clamped down on the excess earlier.
And Miller is no gadfly; he has worked with colleagues on predatory lending and mortgage bankruptcy measures that have become top-tier priorities thanks to the financial crisis. He was candid in calling out Geithner for failing to fully inform Congress about his management of the bailout: “I don’t feel a lot of confidence in all of this, because I don’t have much idea what they’re doing … I’m a fairly conscientious member of the Financial Services Committee, and I haven’t found out.”
One thing Miller is sure of is that Goldman Sachs, the alma mater of Bush Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson, “had a lot of influence over” the decision to rescue AIG’s counterparties (among which Goldman was No. 1).
“I don’t want to sound like a right-wing conspiracy theorist who thinks the Trilateral Commission controls the world, but it seems [Goldman] had a lot of influence over this,” he said, citing the Obama administration’s decision to waive ethics rules to bring in a former Goldman lobbyist as Geithner’s chief aide.
Miller was particularly aghast at AIG’s suggestion that its Financial Products employees would sue if they were denied their retention bonus payments. “I’ve been wracking my brain thinking of ways we can sue them,” he quipped.
Miller’s not alone. After the jump, you can read more skeptical reaction to the Obama administration’s sudden — and likely ineffective — change of heart on AIG’s bonuses.
Rep. Scott Garrett (R-NJ), another senior member of the Financial Services panel, told PBS’ “NewsHour” yesterday that Geithner already understood AIG’s plans to pay out the bonuses before the flap erupted over the weekend:
So it’s only now that it’s making headlines that the president is coming back and basically second-guessing his own treasury secretary on this. Why Secretary Geithner didn’t raise this when he first understood it is beyond me.
Senate Minority Leader Mitch McConnell (R-KY) expressed similar concerns in a speech this morning, asking why Treasury didn’t crack down on AIG’s bonuses before offering the company another $30 billion bailout earlier this month:
Over the weekend, we learned the extent of the bonuses being paid to some of the same people at AIG that were responsible for getting them into this mess. Many of us expressed absolute outrage. And yesterday, the White House joined that chorus and promised to do everything possible to get the taxpayer’s money back.
I appreciate their efforts.
However, it would have been better if this pledge included action two weeks ago when the Treasury agreed to give AIG another $30 billion in taxpayer money. For example, wouldn’t the Treasury and the taxpayer have had more leverage over AIG’s executive contracts before providing another $30 billion in taxpayer money–rather than allowing the bonuses to be paid with taxpayer money?
