The Pay Czar's Power Grab

By: Michelle Malkin
FrontPageMagazine.com | Thursday, August 20, 2009

Pay czar Kenneth Feinberg's official government title is "Special Master for Compensation." You'll be happy to know that he's really getting into the confiscatory spirit of his role. Asked by Reuters whether his powers include reaching back and revoking bonuses awarded to financial industry executives before his office was created earlier this year, Feinberg asserted broad and binding authorities — including the ability to "claw back" money already paid out.

Regulations governing his office explicitly limit his jurisdiction over contracts signed before Feb. 11, 2009. But the fine print is no obstacle to Obama's czars. "The statute provides these guideposts, but the statute ultimately says I have discretion to decide what it is that these people should make and that my determination will be final," Feinberg claims. "Anything is possible under the law."

Yes, he said "anything." It's not just senior executive officers who fall under Feinberg's purview. "These people" also includes "the next 100 most highly paid employees" of all bank bailout recipients, who must file compensation proposals with their pay overlord by Friday.

But why stop there? The Troubled Asset Relief Program has morphed from a toxic asset buy-up to a capital injection plan and back to a toxic asset buy-up. The money has been doled out to auto supply companies and life insurance companies. Congress wants to siphon off more of it to bail out bankrupt California and create a "national housing trust fund" to bail out low-income renters. Grabby-handed politicians have used TARP as a crowbar to pry open new areas for command-and-control meddling under the guise of saving the economy.

How much longer until the pay czar is determining all corporate pay he wishes to deem "inappropriate, unsound or excessive"? House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank has yapped all year long about extending pay curbs to all financial institutions and perhaps to all U.S. companies.

Let's remember that the Beltway hysteria over bonuses served as a convenient distraction from the responsibility of subprime meltdown-enabling lawmakers like Frank and Obama's crony economic team. Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner landed his previous job as head of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York thanks to heavy lobbying by his Wall Street mentors Robert Rubin and Larry Summers, both of whom sat on the New York Fed's selection committee. Their cronyism had multibillion-dollar consequences for taxpayers.

Rubin was also an executive at New York-based Citigroup, which Geithner regulated. Or was supposed to regulate. Instead, he helped foster Citi's spending binge and engineered the teetering company's $52 billion federal bailout. This makes the Obama administration's recent protestations about one Citi employee's $100 million compensation package look like the very kind of manufactured outrage of which it incessantly accuses its political opponents.

Geithner also had a hand in the $30 billion Bear Stearns bailout and the multilevel AIG bailouts ($85 billion and $38 billion under President Bush and another $30 billion in March 2009 under Obama). Massive sums of that taxpayer money went to major financial institutions that had employed Obama's moneymen and their closest confidants. Goldman Sachs, for example, raked in nearly $13 billion in December 2009 from AIG in federal TARP funds — and reported record profits this quarter with a bonus pool of more than $11 billion.

The "solution" isn't to empower a pay czar to curb bonus payouts ex post facto. The solution is to stop dumping billions into failing companies in the first place.

As for private businesses (what's left of them, anyway), this is a teachable moment, to borrow one of the president's favorite phrases. Government strings are like sexually transmitted diseases: They attach forever. If a basket-case company is willing to take bailout money, it will pay an interminable price. The long arm of regulators can and will reach back and open sealed deals and signed contracts on a whim. The Obama campaign chant is the czars' chant, too: "Yes, we can!"

Drop in world temperatures fuels global warming debate

(Analyst's Note: This McClatchy article shows the debate over global warning is not yet completely quiet. Still, the administration's action is swift on this issue, regardless if it costs America astronomical amounts. How is it we can legislate the planet's climate but can not yet pay the car dealers for their "clunker rebates"; because we "never let a good disaster go to waste?"

Lets' fix the current failing government programs and our national economic crisis before we buy into fixing more new supposed "disasters".)

By Robert S. Boyd | McClatchy Newspapers

WASHINGTON — Has Earth's fever broken?

Official government measurements show that the world's temperature has cooled a bit since reaching its most recent peak in 1998.

That's given global warming skeptics new ammunition to attack the prevailing theory of climate change. The skeptics argue that the current stretch of slightly cooler temperatures means that costly measures to limit carbon dioxide emissions are ill-founded and unnecessary.

Proposals to combat global warming are "crazy" and will "destroy more than a million good American jobs and increase the average family's annual energy bill by at least $1,500 a year," the Heartland Institute, a conservative research organization based in Chicago, declared in full-page newspaper ads earlier this summer. "High levels of carbon dioxide actually benefit wildlife and human health," the ads asserted.

Many scientists agree, however, that hotter times are ahead. A decade of level or slightly lower temperatures is only a temporary dip to be expected as a result of natural, short-term variations in the enormously complex climate system, they say.

"The preponderance of evidence is that global warming will resume," Nicholas Bond, a meteorologist at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration's Pacific Marine Environmental Laboratory in Seattle, said in an e-mail.

"Natural variability can account for the slowing of the global mean temperature rise we have seen," said Jeff Knight, a climate expert at the Hadley Centre for Climate Prediction and Research in Exeter, England.

According to data from the National Space Science and Technology Center in Huntsville, Ala., the global high temperature in 1998 was 0.76 degrees Celsius (1.37 degrees Fahrenheit) above the average for the previous 20 years.

So far this year, the high has been 0.42 degrees Celsius (0.76 degrees Fahrenheit), above the 20-year average, clearly cooler than before.

However, scientists say the skeptics' argument is misleading.

"It's entirely possible to have a period as long as a decade or two of cooling superimposed on the long-term warming trend," said David Easterling, chief of scientific services at NOAA's National Climatic Data Center in Asheville, N.C.

"These short term fluctuations are statistically insignificant (and) entirely due to natural internal variability," Easterling said in an essay published in the journal Geophysical Research Letters in April. "It's easy to 'cherry pick' a period to reinforce a point of view."

Climate experts say the 1998 record was partly caused by El Nino, a periodic warming of tropical Pacific Ocean waters that affects the climate worldwide.

"The temperature peak in 1998 to a large extent can be attributed to the very strong El Nino event of 1997-98," Bond said. "Temperatures for the globe as a whole tend to be higher during El Nino, and particularly events as intense as that one."

El Nino is returning this summer after a four-year absence and is expected to hang around until late next year.

"If El Nino continues to strengthen as projected, expect more (high temperature) records to fall," said Thomas Karl, who's the director of the National Climatic Data Center in Asheville.

"At least half of the years after 2009 will be warmer than 1998, the warmest year currently on record," predicted Jeff Knight, a climate variability expert at the Hadley Centre in England.

John Christy, the director of the Earth System Science Center at the University of Alabama in Huntsville, who often sides with the skeptics, agreed that the recent cooling won't last.

"The atmosphere is just now feeling the bump in tropical Pacific temperatures related to El Nino," Christy said in an e-mail. As a result, July experienced "the largest one-month jump in our 31-year record of global satellite temperatures. We should see a warmer 2009-2010 due to El Nino."

Christy added, however: "Our ignorance of the climate system is still enormous, and our policy makers need to know that . . . We really don't know much about what causes multi-year changes like this."

In addition to newspaper ads, the Heartland Institute sponsors conferences, books, papers, videos and Web sites arguing its case against the global warming threat.

The skeptics include scientists such as Richard Lindzen, a meteorologist at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology, who thinks that climate science is too uncertain to justify drastic measures to control CO2. He calls the case for action against global warming "silly" and "grotesque."

Others go further. For example, Don Easterbrook, a geologist at Western Washington University in Bellingham, thinks the world is in a 30-year cooling phase.

"The most recent global warming that began in 1977 is over, and the Earth has entered a new phase of global cooling," Easterbrook said in a talk to the American Geophysical Union's annual meeting in San Francisco in December.

Government scientists strongly disagree. "Claims that global warming is not occurring . . . ignore this natural variability and are misleading," said NOAA's Easterling.

In reality, global warming "never ceased," said Karl, the climate data center director.

Lockerbie bomber flies home to a hero's welcome

(Analyst's Note: Click Here to access an extensive article article from the UK about the recent release of Abdelbaset Ali Mohmed Al Megrahi, the only person ever convicted in the Lockerbie bombing. Of the 270 people who died on that flight, 189 were Americans. The article includes photos and videos of the story. It raises many questions of the message that mercy represents to those who are shown celebrating the man on his return to Libia. Do we reduce the threat to our nation by showing mercy? Can mercy rob justice?)