YET MORE LIES AND DOUBLE-DEALING FROM THE OBAMA ADMINISTRATION ...

SAY ONE THING TO SCAM US ....

WHILE DOING THE OPPOSITE ....

And so ...

"Pay Czar Feinberg Increased Base Pay at U.S. Firms: Report - Salaries on Average Rose a Reported 14 Percent to $437,896 a Year"

October 28, 2009

(Reuters) - Kenneth Feinberg, the Treasury bailout program's special master for compensation, who cut total compensation for top earners at seven bailed-out firms last week, increased base salaries at the companies, the Wall Street Journal said, citing its own analysis of Treasury data.

Base salaries at the companies on average rose 14 percent to $437,896 a year, the paper said, adding that 89 of the 136 employees under the pay czar's review got a raise in base salary.

The paper added that Feinberg agreed to more than double cash salaries for 13 of 21 Citigroup Inc employees.

Government officials told the paper they agreed to increase some base salaries in the wake of some companies expressing concern that the pay czar was planning to lock up too much employees' compensation for the long term.

Last week, Feinberg slashed overall pay by more than half for top earners at seven companies that received massive taxpayer bailouts, and ordered that most of their salaries be paid in the form of long-term company stock.

(Reporting by Ajay Kamalakaran in Bangalore, Editing by Ian Geoghegan)

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/wireStory?id=8932927

"White House Slams Financial Industry Execs, But Benefits From Their Donations - President Obama Walks a Line Between Raising Funds and Rebuking Execs"

By JAKE TAPPER

Oct. 20, 2009

The president flew to New York today to shake the money tree -- including some fruit from Wall Street.

The president was attending two fundraisers Tuesday evening for the Democratic National Committee, which were expected to raise around $3 million.

Democrats say about a third of the attendees are from the financial sector -- the same sector top White House aides just took to the airwaves to chastise for setting aside tens of billions of dollars for bonuses.

Goldman Sachs will award its executives $16.7 billion in bonuses; JP Morgan, $21.8 billion; Citi, $18.7 billion; and Bank of America, $24 billion.

"The American people have limited tolerance for this," White House senior adviser David Axelrod said Sunday on ABC's "This Week with George Stephanopoulos."

And White House Chief of Staff Rahm Emanuel said on CBS's "Face the Nation," "People are frustrated that Wall Street is back to behavior having just basically four months ago been in a different situation and the only way they got out of it is through the good graces of the government and the tax payers."

And last month, the president rebuked executives.

"We will not go back to the days of reckless behavior and unchecked excess that was at the heart of this crisis, where too many were motivated only by the appetite for quick kills and bloated bonuses," he said on Sept. 14.

The president's fundraising trip coincides with his pay czar Kenneth Feinburg's comments at a National Association of Corporate Directors meeting today, in which he talked about compensation packages he will introduce later this month for the top 25 executives at companies receiving exceptional help from the taxpayer.

Those companies include AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, General Motors, Chrysler, GMAC and Chrysler Financial.

"I've learned something about the incredible gap, the chasm between Wall Street perceptions and 'Main Street' perceptions," Feinberg said.

Bridging the chasm -- between the White House's criticism and its fundraising -- could be complicated.

According to the Center for Responsive Politics, between 1996 and 2006, the finance/credit industry never gave less than 57 percent to the Republican Party.

However, during the 2008 election cycle, 58 percent of the industry's political donations went to Democrats.

Yet donations on the whole are not exactly flowing, and tonight's fundraisers will not be a who's who of "Masters of the Universe."

"Though the giants of the financial sector certainly like to donate their money to the people in power, [they're] holding back just a bit here to see how it all plays out with the Obama administration's push for financial regulatory reform," ABC News' Political Director David Chalian said.

And still, tonight the president was expected to criticize members of the financial industry.

"We as a country should never again be faced with such a potential calamity because of the reckless speculation and deceptive practices of a short-sighted and self-interested few," the president will say, according to his prepared remarks.

He is also expected to directly call on those members to pass necessary reforms instead of fighting them -- a moment that could run counter to filling Democratic coffers.

"So if there are folks from the industry here tonight, I ask you to join with us in passing what are necessary reforms; don't fight them," he will say.

"It's important for our country."

"And in the long run, it will be good for your industry to have a level playing field in which everyone knows the rules -- and everyone knows that the rules will be enforced."

http://abcnews.go.com/Politics/president-o...tory?id=8875715

Of course, we could also call Obama THE DANCER ...

Or THE HIGH-STEPPER ...

Because he sure can do a good two-step, along with a mambo, fandango and a tarantella ...

OH!

Right ...

He can also moon-walk right up there with the best of them ....

And so ...

"Pay czar says he doesn't want broader powers - Administration pay czar says his authority should be limited to big bailout recipients"

By JIM KUHNHENN, Associated Press

Last updated: 6:05 p.m., Wednesday, October 28, 2009

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration's "pay czar" who reduced pay for executives at seven major corporations doesn't want broader powers over the rest of the financial sector.

"I am troubled at the notion that it could be expanded," Kenneth Feinberg said Wednesday of his role overseeing pay at the largest recipients of government bailouts.

"That is a mistake."

But Feinberg, who ordered cutting top executive compensation at the seven companies in half, told a congressional committee that the standards he used should guide the broader marketplace.

"I'm hoping that the report that I issued and the recommendations that I made as to these seven companies will have some effect, voluntarily, in influencing how the private sector goes about establishing compensation practices," he said.

His testimony comes as Congress continues to struggle with what role government should play in determining top executive pay at companies that are so large and intertwined that their failure can ripple throughout the economy.

The House earlier this year voted to tie compensation to performance in hopes of reducing risky behavior.

The limits would apply to any financial firm with more than $1 billion in assets.

The Senate has yet to act on pay regulations.

Feinberg last week set pay for the top 25 executives at Bank of America Corp., American International Group Inc., Citigroup Inc., General Motors, GMAC, Chrysler and Chrysler Financial -- all seven received billions of dollars in government bailouts.

At the same time, the Federal Reserve proposed that it would monitor pay packages at nearly 6,000 banks, including those that have not received government aid, to make sure they don't encourage high-risk gambles.

The Fed would not set pay, but could veto pay policies.

Feinberg told the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform that he rejected compensation plans by six of the seven companies because they were contrary to the public interest.

That the companies submitted such proposals, he acknowledged, indicated a lack of understanding over the public outrage over high pay at bailed out firms.

"I found that the submissions did not adequately address the major concerns expressed by the American people," he said.

Feinberg said Chrysler Financial had unique circumstances that justified their pay plan.

Feinberg became pay czar earlier this year as Congress was responding to outrage about huge bonuses being paid to AIG.

Lawmakers wanted to curb executive compensation at companies getting exceptional assistance.

Feinberg has been reviewing compensation packages since August.

Feinberg said that in some instances his compensation scheme increased the monthly salary received by executives at the seven companies.

But he disputed a Wall Street Journal report Wednesday, saying he dramatically cut the overall cash payments to those executives.

"My definition of base salary is not only what you get twice a month, but also draws that may be provided during the course of the year, guaranteed commissions, guaranteed bonuses," he said.

Feinberg must now deal with the compensation structures for the next 75 most highly paid executives at the seven companies and then determine 2010 compensation for senior executives.

He said he expects to have to renegotiate some past retention contracts with several of those company officials.

Republicans cautioned that while it was proper to rein in compensation of executives at recipients of government money, the practice set a dangerous precedent.

"One person, one single person is deciding what people make," said Rep. Jim Jordan, R-Ohio.

"That is a dangerous, dangerous place we're going."

Democrats said they wondered whether Feinberg's work would have a broader effect.

"When they talk about multimillion dollar bonuses, it's like shoeshine money to them," Rep. Elijah Cummings, D-Md., told Feinberg.

"I can't see, with all your fine work, that is going to be turned around."

IT SHOULD COME AS NO SURPRISE THAT THE OBAMA WHITE HOUSE IS LYING TO US HERE ABOUT ALL OF THESE ALLEGED STIMULATION JOBS ...

THE OBAMA ADMINSTRATION IS AS FAST AND LOOSE WITH THE TRUTH AS WAS GEORGE W. BUSH ....

OR MORE SO, EVEN ....

And so ...

"STIMULUS WATCH: Stimulus jobs overstated in report - White House promises release of better jobs data; defends earlier report"

By BRETT J. BLACKLEDGE and MATT APUZZO, Associated Press

Last updated: 6:35 p.m., Thursday, October 29, 2009

WASHINGTON -- The White House is promising that new figures being released Friday will be a more accurate showing of progress in President Barack Obama's economic recovery plan.

It aggressively defended an earlier, faulty count that overstated by thousands the jobs created or saved so far.

Ed DeSeve, serving as Obama's stimulus overseer, said the administration has been working for weeks to correct mistakes in early counts that identified more than 30,000 jobs paid for with stimulus money.

He said a new stimulus report Friday should correct many mistakes an Associated Press review found that showed the earlier report overstated thousands of stimulus jobs.

"I think you'll see a pretty good degree of accuracy," DeSeve said in an interview.

White House spokesman Robert Gibbs downplayed errors in job counts identified by the AP's review, telling reporters, "We're talking about 4,000, or a 5,000 error."

The AP reviewed a sample of federal contracts, not all 9,000 reported to date, and discovered errors in one in six jobs credited to the $787 billion stimulus program -- or 5,000 of the 30,000 jobs claimed so far.

Even in its limited review, the AP found job counts that were more than 10 times as high as the actual number of paid positions; jobs credited to the stimulus program that were counted two and sometimes more than four times; and other jobs that were credited to stimulus spending when none was produced.

For example:

-- Some recipients of stimulus money used the cash to give existing employees pay raises, but each reported saving dozens of jobs with the money, including one Florida day care that claimed 129 jobs saved.

-- A Texas contractor whose business kept 22 employees to handle stimulus contracts saw its job count inflated to 88 because the same workers were counted four times.

-- The water department in Palm Beach County, Fla., hired 57 meter readers, customer service representatives and other positions to handle two water projects.

But their total job count was incorrectly doubled to 114.

Those errors were included in an early progress report on the stimulus released two weeks ago that featured numerous mistakes, including a Colorado business' claim that its stimulus contract created more than 4,200 jobs.

TeleTech Government Solutions actually hired 4,231 temporary workers for its stimulus project, but most of them worked for five weeks or less and the others no more than five months, company president Mariano Tan said.

The short-term positions should have been reported as 635 full-time, 40-hour-a-week jobs under the government's method of calculating stimulus work, Tan said.

The AP's review sampled some of the contract data reported on the government's Web site, recovery.gov, that serves as the official accounting of stimulus data.

The review focused on the most obvious cases of jobs wrongly tied to the stimulus because of record duplications or misinterpretations of how the jobs should be counted.

In some cases, businesses reported short-term projects with large job counts, which appeared inaccurate in the records.

The AP contacted businesses to discuss their jobs reports and confirmed the errors.

Some businesses actually undercounted jobs funded with stimulus money, the AP's review shows, because they reported only new jobs created, not existing jobs saved.

But by far the most reporting errors were found in the number of jobs credited to the stimulus.

Gibbs said that early data couldn't be reviewed as carefully as new data will be.

"Three days after the data was received, it was required to be put on the Web site," he said.

The Colorado business' job count, along with many others, has been corrected, Gibbs said, and will be updated in Friday's report.

"We disputed, as the AP disputed, the report that came in that calculated a number of jobs but didn't accurately account, the way we account for, a full-time, yearlong employee as being a job," Gibbs said.

His comments during his daily meeting with reporters came hours after the White House issued a midnight press release complaining about the AP's review of jobs the government credits to stimulus spending.

DeSeve, who criticized the AP's review as misleading, said the administration is aware of problems with the early data.

Agencies have been working with businesses that received the money to correct mistakes.

Other errors discovered by the public also will be corrected, he said.

"As a result, whatever problems the early and partial data had, the full data to be posted on Friday will provide the American people with an accurate, detailed look at the early success of the Recovery Act," DeSeve said in a statement the White House issued just after midnight Thursday.

------

Associated Press writer Philip Elliott contributed to this report