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In an article buried in the NY Times, we have a another peek at the disgusting pay scales American universities are showering on their execs. You know, the ones who went into academia as a form of “public service.”
President Obama’s nominee to lead the Treasury Department, Jacob J. Lew, got a $685,000 severance payment when he left a top post at New York University in 2006 to take a job at Citigroup.
The payment, which a university official acknowledged on Monday, is considered unusual by outside experts in benefits and raises questions about why a tax-exempt university would give a large exit bonus to an executive who was departing voluntarily.
The payment was not disclosed in the university’s publicly available tax records, and it is receiving scrutiny from Senate Republicans as they consider Mr. Lew’s nomination, which is expected to come up for a vote in the Finance Committee on Tuesday.
At the time of his departure, Mr. Lew had been executive vice president at N.Y.U. He had typically earned $700,000 to $800,000 a year since his hiring in 2001, and sometimes more, according to the university’s tax records.
He also received mortgages of roughly $1.5 million through the school as a perquisite — $440,000 of which was forgiven by the university over time.
University officials defended the additional lump-sum payment, which was not required by his original employment contract, citing Mr. Lew’s role in addressing some of the university’s major problems at the time.
While severance payments are not unheard-of among universities, they are more typical when executives of long standing are ushered out. They can also be required by employment contracts, like the $1.2 million that Pennsylvania State University’s former president, Graham B. Spanier, received when he departed amid a child sexual abuse scandal in the football program.
But Mr. Lew’s exit was amicable. The revelations about his pay are not the first to raise questions about how tax-exempt, nonprofit groups in the state shower largess on their top officials. …
Bob Woodward calls obama’s petulance ”a kind of madness.” Politico has the story.
The Washington Post’s Bob Woodward attacked President Barack Obama on Wednesday, saying the commander-in-chief’s decision not to deploy an aircraft carrier because of budget cuts is “a kind of madness.”
“Can you imagine Ronald Reagan sitting there and saying, ‘Oh, by the way, I can’t do this because of some budget document?’” Woodward said Wednesday on MSNBC’s “Morning Joe.”
“Or George W. Bush saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to invade Iraq because I can’t get the aircraft carriers I need’ or even Bill Clinton saying, ‘You know, I’m not going to attack Saddam Hussein’s intelligence headquarters,’ as he did when Clinton was president because of some budget document?” Woodward added. “Under the Constitution, the president is commander-in-chief and employs the force. And so we now have the president going out because of this piece of paper and this agreement. ‘I can’t do what I need to do to protect the country.’ That’s a kind of madness that I haven’t seen in a long time.”
The Pentagon announced earlier this month the U.S.S. Harry Truman, which was supposed to leave for the Persian Gulf, will remain stateside due to budget concerns. The sequester, which will cut billions in defense spending, is scheduled to hit on Friday.
Woodward has become an unlikely conservative hero in recent days for calling out the administration over whether Obama had “moved the goal posts”’ in negotiations over the sequester.
Craig Pirrong at Streetwise Professor has more on the administration’s negotiating style.
Obama is playing the sequester game for all it is worth, by regaling the country with horror stories of what will happen if the sequester goes into effect. All he needs is a flashlight held under his chin while sitting by a campfire.
The prudent response to a need to cut spending due to a tightening of a budget constraint is to find the least important things, and cut those first. But Obama is not interested in being prudent. He is interested in being political. He is using the sequester as part of his war to the knife with House Republicans, and hence is going with the Washington Monument Strategy on Steroids, and focusing cutbacks on the most visible and vital services. For instance: furloughing TSA personnel. I am scheduled to fly to visit my parents on the day the sequester kicks in. Oh freaking joy. I say furlough them all. Forever. But no, we’ll get all of the stupid procedures with fewer people to implement them-and no doubt they will be under orders to work to rule to make the process as inefficient and painful as possible. Another for instance: releasing illegal aliens detained in prison. I could go on. But you get the point. It’s all about making the most painful and most visible and most inconveniencing cuts, all for political advantage. The man has no shame. This is not about executive leadership or stewardship. It is about Goebbels-esque propaganda theater. …
Marty Peretz expects little good will come out of the president’s trip to Israel.
Last week President Obama announced he will finally visit Israel. But there’s no guarantee that it will be a pleasant trip. And it certainly will not be if he lectures the Israelis yet again about what they owe the Palestinians. After all, the Arabs of Palestine could have had, like the Jews, a state pursuant to the 1947 U.N. Partition Plan (which sanctioned for the Arabs a bigger state than the Jewish one that was offered) and then again after the 1967 Six-Day War. Instead the Arab League responded to Israeli peace overtures with the Khartoum declaration of the “three nos” of the Arab Solidarity Charter: “no peace with Israel, no recognition of Israel, no negotiations with it.”
Comparisons will inevitably be drawn between Obama’s 2009 trip to Cairo and his impending one to Jerusalem. His fanciful Cairo speech—delivered with no evident recognition that each and every one of the Arab countries was at that moment on the precipice of chaos—was a shoddy and slippery job, historically so misleading on so many matters that one can hardly attribute it to innocent error. Granted, some of this had to do with the president’s own ignorant romanticization of Islam and the Arabs. Some of it was sheer invention, like his treatment of U.S. diplomacy during the late-18th- and early-19th-century Barbary Wars as a prelude to a long-term peace between Muslim principalities and America and his taking on for the American people sins against Muslims, like prohibiting the wearing of the hijab, which are actually not issues in the U.S. Largely, the speech could have been not an oration but an indictment of the United State before the International Court of Justice. Does the Internal Revenue Service really discriminate against Islamic charities, as he claimed?
It is not even four years since Obama’s counterhistoric discourse. But already two years back, with the beginning of the dreamily named Arab Spring, his version and vision of these societies had degraded into real human and social wreckage. Of course, the happy chimera still holds as a liberal canonical truth. …
Even the NY Times is throwing up over the president’s $500,000 sale of access. Jonathan Tobin has the story.
To say that Barack Obama has never practiced what he preached about campaign finance reform is the understatement of the century. The president rode to office and then was re-elected with the help of a massive influx of private cash, all the while saying that money was the root of all political evil. He routinely denounces the wealthy and the influence of big business while taking their money and selling access to the White House to the same Wall Street moguls to whom he accuses Republicans of being in thrall.
Even when practiced at such Olympian levels, hypocrisy is not against the law. Thus the news that a new pro-Obama 501(c)(4), organized by the rump of the Obama re-election campaign, is gearing up to not only advocate for the president’s policies but to reward donors with access to the White House and the president himself is not so much a question of legality but a matter of setting a new low in ethical standards. As even the New York Times noted in an article published this weekend, the access sale being conducted by the president’s Organizing for Action group crosses a line that most groups that similarly label themselves as educational rather than political don’t:
“Giving or raising $500,000 or more puts donors on a national advisory board for Mr. Obama’s group and the privilege of attending quarterly meetings with the president, along with other meetings at the White House. Moreover, the new cash demands on Mr. Obama’s top donors and bundlers come as many of them are angling for appointments to administration jobs or ambassadorships. …
Many traditional advocacy organizations, including the Sierra Club and the National Rifle Association, are set up as social welfare groups, or 501(c)(4)’s in tax parlance. But unlike those groups, Organizing for Action appears to be an extension of the administration, stocked with alumni of Mr. Obama’s White House and campaign teams and devoted solely to the president’s second-term agenda.” …
More on this from Ed Morrissey.
… Clearly, the White House and President Obama object to having the wealthy influence elections with their cash. When it comes to influencing the government, however, that’s a different story. The New York Times’ Nick Confessore reported over the weekend that Obama’s former presidential campaign-turned-activist group, Organizing for America (OFA), has begun a fundraising drive and wants to attract big donors. And it has something to sell — access to the president and seats on an advisory panel.
Half of the funding for OFA is expected to come from wealthy donors, each pledging to raise and/or donate $500,000 to kick into the tax-exempt “social welfare group.” Obama’s aides will appear at fundraising events for OFA, which should raise eyebrows on its own. But the benefit of the big-ticket donations should drop jaws as well as raise eyebrows:
“Giving or raising $500,000 or more puts donors on a national advisory board for Mr. Obama’s group and the privilege of attending quarterly meetings with the president, along with other meetings at the White House,” Confessore reports. “Moreover, the new cash demands on Mr. Obama’s top donors and bundlers come as many of them are angling for appointments to administration jobs or ambassadorships.”
There is nothing new about selling ambassadorships, not in this administration or that of any American president in recent memory. Ambassadorships have long been a perk for donors and cronies, especially to countries with lower strategic value. The outright sale of seats for meetings at the White House is something very new, however, and amounts to a form of simony at the Church of Hope and Change. …