Where's The 'Change'?

Lorne Gunter
Monday, March 23, 2009

So much for "change." Will Barack Obama's pledge of "hope" be the next to go? If this week's scandal in the United States over $165-million in retention bonuses paid to executives of the failed American International Group (AIG) insurance company proves anything, it's that politics as usual -- rather than the politics of change--dominates in Washington.

President Obama's promise to bring a new, bipartisan and meritocratic philosophy to government was an illusion. His vow to take money out of policy calculations and replace it with fact and reason was a farce.

Just who was the U. S. Senate's second-largest recipient of donations from AIG in the 2008 election cycle? Why, then-senator Barack Obama of Illinois, with over $100,000 received. And who was number one? Democratic Senator Chris Dodd ($103,000), who, as chairman of the Senate's banking committee, was responsible for inserting an amendment into President Obama's stimulus bill last month exempting all bonuses "executed on or before Feb. 11, 2009."
(John McCain was third on the AIG donations list at $59,000. So it's clear the company was trying to cover itself, no matter who won last fall's presidential race.)

Essentially, the AIG bonuses that have provoked such outrage among ordinary Americans were legal because the White House's own stimulus bill made them so. Only the handful of bonus packages negotiated between companies and their executives in the five weeks since the stimulus bill passed would have been forbidden. And how many of those could there possibly be?
I'm not trying to say none of this is the Republicans' fault, or that all of it can be pinned on the Democrats. My point is simple: No new clean-sweeping broom followed Mr. Obama into office. The same old feather duster that merely redistributes the particles every four or eight years is still in use.

Interestingly, though, the White House has tried to hang Senator Dodd out to dry over the AIG bonuses, and, specifically, the Feb. 11 exemption. But Dodd's original amendment would have given the U. S. Treasury Secretary discretionary authority to roll-back bonuses negotiated -- and even those paid -- since last fall.

According to The Wall Street Journal, the Feb. 11 limit was inserted into the final version under pressure from the Obama administration, which was eager to get bankers to accept money from the President's stimulus package. The White House was afraid bankers would turn down bailouts if they contained too many restrictions on executive compensation, so it pressured members of Congress to insert the bonus-exemption clause.

Also, according to the political donations monitoring site opensecrets.org, many of the biggest recipients of stimulus and bailout cash so far have been among the top-20 donors to Mr. Obama's presidential campaign: Goldman Sachs, Citigroup, J. P. Morgan, Morgan Stanley and others.

Now consider that Mr. Obama won last fall with a lot of help from unions, who mobilized their members to come out and vote for him. In return, President Obama is backing the cynically named Employee Free Choice Act, which permits unions to win certification on job sites without a secret ballot vote by workers. If union organizers can get enough workers to sign certification cards -- something that can easily be achieved through intimidation--no vote need be taken.

And the President has enlisted the voter registration group ACORN to help with the next U. S. census, the results of which determine not only federal funding to cities and counties by population, but also how many congressional districts each state will have and where. This is an interesting choice, considering ACORN was previously mired in controversy for adding people's names to voters' rolls without their knowledge and for allegedly added deceased and imaginary voters.

It is little wonder, then, that many recent opinion polls show Mr. Obama losing the support not just of Republicans, but of independent voters, too. While still over 50%, his approval ratings are flirting with those of George W. Bush at the same early stages of his presidency.

The more thing change ...

lgunter@shaw.ca