Kenneth Feinberg is the best known and most notorious of President Obama’s many “czars.”
Appointed to keep an eye on the executives of companies that received “bailout” funds under TARP, Obama’s “Pay Czar” is a zealous populist bureaucrat who talks as if he knows far better how to set compensation limits for their employees than these companies or the markets in which they operate.
On a Fox News interview just last week Feinberg said that in his opinion “nobody should receive more than a base cash salary of $500,000” and won’t “if they are under my jurisdiction.” This is consistent with the limits he is already imposing on those over whom his power extends.
The nation is fortunate that Feinberg’s his current jurisdiction extends only to the likes of GM, Citi Group, AIG and the others that accepted TARP funds last year. One suspects from this and similar statements that the man believes we’d all be better off if he or some other government functionary had the power to set salaries throughout our once-free economy.
Perhaps as he watched the Super Bowl, he focused on the NFL’s salary structure with its inordinately lavish rewards for success.
Whether those who work at AIG or play for the NFL make too much money begs the question of what makes someone like Feinberg think he knows better how to attract and retain top talent than the men and women whose economic survival depends on their ability to do so.
The “hook” that allows him to dictate compensation limits is the fact that these corporations accepted TARP funds and that their subsequent earnings may not have been possible without the taxpayer infusion that saved them in their time of crisis.
Like the corner dry cleaner who takes cash from a mafia loan shark, however, they have quickly discovered that they have a new partner with far different interests than their own and the raw power to make them do what he wants.
Feinberg himself admits that the onerous limits he is imposing are a great incentive to these companies to pay the government back, but many in Congress and the Obama administration want to keep the government involved in decisions affecting not only TARP recipients but virtually any company doing business with the government or somehow benefitting from the expenditure of public funds.
This would allow the anti-business, tax-the-rich types running things these days to control corporate management and move us further down the road to the soft socialism of Europe they so admire.
NFL teams play in stadiums subsidized by taxpayers and federal money is directed to infrastructure improvements that allow fans to reach them, so a review of Peyton Manning’s salary might well be in order.
During the next few months, we can expect the Administration and its allies in Congress to spout a left-wing populism designed to convince voters that our problems are the fault of martini-drinking country club grandees rather than government and that Republicans are little more than their paid stooges.
Thus, although the president enjoyed much wider support from Wall Streeters and Fortune 500ers in 2008 that Republican Sen. John McCain, Obama and his henchmen are working overtime to link these “moneyed interests” with the GOP, citing Republican House Leader John Boehner’s recent conversation with a Wall Street insider.
Boehner wondered why Wall Street continues to fund Democrats while looking to Republicans for protection against predatory government. Washington Democrats quickly piled on, ironically citing Boehner’s quite reasonable question as proof that it is Republicans who are too close to big business these days.
The class-envy card has been played before by desperate politicians, but rarely works for the simple reason that the American people are smarter than the president and his allies believe.
The condescending way in which the president suggested in his “State of the Union” that his programs aren’t selling not because people have a substantive problem with them but because he hasn’t explained them in terms they can understand is of a piece with the claim that a Republican won the Massachusetts Senate seat for the “same” reason Obama won the White House in 2008.
Businessmen are too often their own worst enemies and there is little doubt that the boys and girls at AIG are playing into the hands of demagogic politicians these days, but fortunately for all of us, Americans tend to have more common sense than either Fortune 500 types or politicians.
David Keene is chairman of the American Conservative Union.
