RUSH: Timmy Geithner, the tax cheat, held a press conference to talk about the Obama administration’s plans to ‘rework’ executive compensation rules. Geithner tried to pull an Obama. He tried to do doublespeak, like Obama does. Let’s listen together and see if Little Timmy was able to pull it off.
RUSH: This is just unbelievable. See, Obama can get away with this. Obama can get away with saying he’s not going to do something while announcing that he’s going to do it. Timmy can’t do it. What they’re trying to say is they’re going to walk back on this notion that they’re gonna cap executive compensation. ‘Yeah, we’re not going to…’ They’re going to let Congress do it. Obama’s walk… The Obama administration, ‘Oh, we’re not going to do that,’ is what Little Timmy’s trying to say here. So they’re going to leave it to Congress to handle it on the bonus side but they’re not walking back from anything here. To the extent that they’re making the announcement, they want everybody to think they’re walking back because they’re panicking in the Obama White House, trust me. They are in trouble. They don’t have universal love and support backing everything he’s doing, despite… You won’t know this because the government-controlled media does not report such things. Now, the next phase of this was, reporters wanted to ask questions. A reporter said, ‘How does this reconcile with the TARP guidelines on executive compensation, Mr. Secretary?’
GEITHNER: I’m not going to take any questions on that! But we’re going to be laying out, uhhh, relatively soon the detailed regulations to apply to congressional conditions on, uh, compensation for companies that have capital investments from the government. Thank you all for coming.
RUSH: I’m not going to take any questions on that. Obama did the same thing the other day, ‘Come on, guys. I’m not talking about that.’ ‘Oh, okay! Sorry. We didn’t mean to offend you.’ So let’s go over to the authority on all of this in Congress — executive pay, compensation and bonuses — none other than Barney Frank. He was on MSNBC this afternoon. Andrea Mitchell and her show, and her question: ‘I know a lot of this legislation is legislation you proposed back in 2006 that in fact then-Senator Obama joined in the Senate. Why don’t you tell us what you’ve done today and how it comports with what you’re doing on the Hill.’
FRANK: No one is setting pay caps. No one is — at least that I’m aware of, is — trying to put any limits on the actual amounts. We are saying that shareholders should have a major say. The problem has been that boards of directors and CEOs are each other’s best friends. They’ve picked each other. Boards of directors have not proven to be a really independent check in this regard. So we’ve adopted what the British have had for a long time called say-on-pay. When you have the annual proxy vote — that has to be sent out to the shareholders anyway, no extra funding is required — you give them a chance to say whether they approve or disapprove the total compensation packages.
RUSH: The Banking Queen, Barney Frank, has just told us how it’s going to go down.
(playing of Banking Queen parody)
RUSH: Barney Frank with the vocal portrayal there. (snorts) Sheh! What a bump! What a bump to come out of there at that one, rinky-dink, Dave ‘Baby’ Cortez, 1963, I believe.
Okay, folks, just to repeat now. It hasn’t been posted yesterday, but it’s soon coming. A congressman says that captured terrorists — in fact, high-value detainees; high value detainees in Afghanistan, terrorist detainees — are being read their Miranda rights on orders from the Obama administration. Now, I want you to stop for just a second here and imagine the ramifications of this. If this is true, if we’re reading noncitizens Miranda rights and thereby granting them citizenship, then how can we deny citizenship to illegals working and living in the United States?
BREAK TRANSCRIPT
FARZAD: Do you look back at your career and ask yourself, why are we always so late to the game as regulators? Whether it’s the S&L crisis, you clearly could have seen all this stuff in ’05 and ’06.
FRANK: Oh, I did see it in ’05 and ’06.
FARZAD: Why didn’t you say anything else?
FRANK: I did, because the Republicans were in control —
FARZAD: No, you can’t blame the Republicans.
(cross-talk)
FRANK: I’ll tell you what you can’t do, you cannot ask me a question and interrupt me three words into the answer. The answer is I can blame the Republicans. In 2005, several congressman from North Carolina and myself proposed a bill to restrict subprime lending, and we were rejected by the Republican majority. In 2007, when I became the chairman and we became the majority, we regulated Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and we passed a bill through the House to regulate subprime mortgages. Yes, I will show you things that I said about subprime mortgages and a bill we tried to pass in 2005 when the Republicans were in control and wouldn’t allow it to happen.
RUSH: I think this is sorta just the opposite of what really happened. It was the Democrats who were making the regulators pound sand during committee hearings. The Bush administration tried numerous times to rein in Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, and it was Barney Frank and Chris Dodd who stood in the way, didn’t want it to happen. Anyway, it’s a good question, why do guys always get away with acting like innocent bystanders, why didn’t you do something about it, you guys are always late to the fire. It’s a great question, you could see old Barn didn’t like it one bit.