[Congressional Record (Bound Edition), Volume 156 (2010), Part 10]
[House]
[Page 13982]
[From the U.S. Government Publishing Office, www.gpo.gov]




                  NOTHING IS TOO GOOD FOR WALL STREET

  The SPEAKER pro tempore (Mrs. Dahlkemper). Under a previous order of 
the House, the gentleman from Oregon (Mr. DeFazio) is recognized for 5 
minutes.
  Mr. DeFAZIO. Well, big surprise--last Friday, the Obama 
administration went after the greed and excess on Wall Street during 
the financial meltdown. They went after it in the form of their 
esteemed pay czar, Kenneth Feinberg. He got out a feather duster and he 
waived it vaguely in the direction of Wall Street saying, shame, shame 
on you. He identified 17 mega-firms on Wall Street who paid out $1.7 
billion in bonuses and other emoluments to their executives while they 
were lining up at the same time with their hands out to take tens of 
billions of dollars of TARP bailout money to save their firms from the 
risky bets they had made that were endangering their future that had 
gone bad.
  Now, he described some of these bonuses and payouts as ``ill-
advised,'' ``poor judgment,'' ``lacking clear justification,'' but Mr. 
Feinberg, the all-powerful pay czar who talked so tough at the 
beginning, won't try and recoup the money. He says, ``It's not contrary 
to the public interest.'' Shaming, shaming will be penalty enough. But 
he won't name anybody who got the money. Can you imagine the guys at 
their really exclusive club or their private resort somewhere smoking 
their $500 cigars, drinking their expensive cognac, feeling really 
shamed when he won't even name the people who should be shamed? They 
don't even know they should be shamed. They got $10 million, they 
thought it was justified; they don't think he's talking about them.
  Now he said, At what point are you piling onto poor old Wall Street, 
going beyond what is warranted? Not in the public interest, piling on. 
Just think about it. Some of these executives who drove their firms to 
the edge of collapse and bankruptcy and tanked the U.S. economy and put 
8 million people out of work got $10 million. Now that $10 million 
little bonus, that's about 250 years pay for an Army captain in 
Afghanistan, 250 years for an Army captain, one day in the life of a 
failed Wall Street executive, and Mr. Feinberg says, ``They should be 
ashamed.''
  He went on to say, well, if he had gone after them, it could have 
exposed them and their firms to lawsuits from shareholders. Now, wait a 
minute, public interest, isn't that the public part of the corporation, 
the shareholders? But Mr. Feinberg apparently doesn't care much about 
the shareholders. This is about the executives, because those poor 
executives in those firms, why, their shareholders might try and 
recapture some of the misbegotten gains that these people got.
  Now, this all could happen because the original Bush-Paulson bailout 
didn't put any restrictions on executive pay and bonuses. Hundreds of 
billions of dollars to bail out Wall Street taken from the taxpayers, 
no restrictions on executive pay and bonuses; $1.7 billion paid out, 
ill-advised, poor judgment, lacking clear justification, they should be 
ashamed. But the pay czar isn't going to try and get it back.
  There is one thing very consistent about this administration: Nothing 
is too good for Wall Street.

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