Citi Hosts Anti-Union Conference Call
Sam Stein reports that Citigroup, which only still exists as a firm thanks to taxpayer largess, was hosting a conference call to help mobilize opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act. This, it seems, is capitalism. First you manage your business so catastrophically badly that your company not only becomes worthless, but that it threatens to destroy the livelihoods of billions of people around the planet. Second, you get the taxpayer to keep you in business. And third, you turn around and warn that higher wages for workers might destroy the world economy! As I’ve said before I don’t think we want congress meddling with the details of business decisions at major companies, even companies that are receiving taxpayer support. But there’s a fairly clear case to be made that firms on the public dole shouldn’t be engaged in lobbying or political activities.
Meanwhile, there’s a broader point to be made about the prestige of business in general and financiers in particular. A tendency develops to think that businessmen not only have in practice a loud voice in economic policy decisions because they’re so rich and politicians and media organizations are so corrupt, but that they deserve a loud voice in economic policy decisions because they’re so knowledgeable. But, look, I could take a bank and render its stock worthless. And so could Andy Stern or my cousins in grade school. These guys haven’t shown themselves to be knowledgeable about anything other than enriching themselves and there’s no particular reason to take their opinions about Employee Free Choice or unions or taxes or anything else especially seriously.
71 Responses to “Citi Hosts Anti-Union Conference Call”
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March 12th, 2009 at 1:04 pm
But there’s a fairly clear case to be made that firms on the public dole shouldn’t be engaged in lobbying or political activities.
Sure. Kind of like the Defense industry isn’t allowed to lobby Congress.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:07 pm
Because I might note that if these activities were good for shareholders in the first place, then they may well be good for the taxpayers qua shareholders.
I think Matt’s logic is that in America one should be allowed to privilege one group of citizens over another for exactly as long as one has the money to do so.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:11 pm
In-kind deals and deal-makers have become omnipresent across the legistlative spectrum. The oil companies writing the power bills, the doctor lobbies writing health care related bills in state legislatures. The machinery that was meant to create balances between the horrors, as the eighteenth century saw it, of direct democracy and the tyranny of an unaccountable monarchy and aristocracy has now become the operating system for the oligarchy.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:14 pm
Maybe Andy Stern should host a conference call to press for commission structure changes on Wall Street. Big banks are obviously rewarding the wrong thing if their employees put their companies at risk of bankruptcy in order to earn the big bucks.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:16 pm
Only if one is sufficiently moronic to equate being paid to perform a job with receiving a handout to prop up the company you’ve just run into the ground.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:27 pm
Conditions for taking TARP money, Fed support, and AARA funds should have included vocal advocacy in favor of EFCA, universal health care reform (including substantial cost cutting), and renewable energy reform. A conference call like Citi’s would have resulted in immediate repossession of all funds provided.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Because I might note that if these activities were good for shareholders in the first place, then they may well be good for the taxpayers qua shareholders.
Do tell: Which specific action of Citibank in the last decade was taken with the interests of its shareholders in mind? Who are these shareholders for whom they toil? The ones the Citibank executives don’t want to have a say in their compensation, perhaps?
March 12th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
@Steve LaBonne:
Exactly.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:31 pm
Yeah, contra Matt I think it’s hard to formulate a principled case against this. Not impossible, maybe, but hard.
The more defensible position, that I think most people would intuitively respect, would be simply a declaration of political hardball: If you want the Obama administration to bail you out, you must cease lobbying against that administration’s legislative priorities. Otherwise, no bailout for you.
If a bank is willing to let itself go down in flames rather than concede on EFCA, maybe American capitalism deserves to collapse.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:32 pm
But, look, I could take a bank and render its stock worthless.
Are you sure? These guys put a lot of brainpower into dreaming up schemes that caused this collapse. You and your grade school cousins would probably just put the money in a vault and let people withdraw their money every now and then.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:35 pm
“But there’s a fairly clear case to be made that firms on the public dole shouldn’t be engaged in lobbying or political activities.”
I trust you feel the same way about the political activities of all public servant unions….oh wait, of course you don’t
March 12th, 2009 at 1:37 pm
“Only if one is sufficiently moronic to equate being paid to perform a job with receiving a handout to prop up the company you’ve just run into the ground.”
Because teachers unions are doing such a great job with their handouts! Please ignore the fact that some of the bets funded schools are also the most poorly run, the teachers need MOAR MONEYS for MOAR ADMINISTRATIVE BULLSHIT
March 12th, 2009 at 1:38 pm
You’re a bit late, that nonsensical analogy has already been made and refuted. Try reading the thread before hitting “Enter” next time.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:39 pm
Are wingnuts mentally capable of doing ANYTHING besides spewing their favorite talking points regardless of context?
March 12th, 2009 at 1:40 pm
Matt, love the blog, but seriously, are you proposing that in order to receive TARP money that a recipient has to tow the political line of a certain faction of the party in power?!? Would hate to have seen how that would work if Republicans insisted that Citi not give benefits to partners of gay employees or something. Taxpayers have invested a lot of money in Citi, and I for one would like to see them run their business in a profitable manner so we can get it back, as opposed to running it to please various Dem political constituencies.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:43 pm
I think of the conference call not as a Citi operation but a private one. Citi allowing their employees the opportunity to support their personal cause. There is no such thing as a person in management of a public corporation in America who is not against unions, right down to their very existence.
Citi’s involvement was in one way coincidental. Their status as a major corporation in tatters. Their is name almost worthless. The conference call an exercise in group phone sex.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:51 pm
This is the same Citigroup that drove up its share prices on Tuesday by prematurely declaring a return to profitability (see my blog post) and then disclosed today that bank executives had purchased Citi shares last week and made a profit of $2.2 million.
Surely they and others of their ilk have lost the moral authority to be heard in the public arena.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
That might make sense if I, as a taxpayer-part owner of Citibank, had even the slightest input into how Citibank was run.
There is no reason to assume that Citibank is lobbying for anything that would be good for the taxpayer/owners. The chief objective for Citi now is to try to make sure that the government gets as little as possible for the money received. That isn’t the normal mode of operation for a business. Normally, they try to avoid screwing shareholders (unless it’s really profitable). They do this to make themselves look like (and be) a good investment avenue. They have zero incentive to do that for their government shareholder. The government isn’t going to bail them out again after this crisis is over. The government wants to get rid of its stake in Citi as soon as it can. Private shareholders of Citi would actually find it encouraging if Citi managed to rip-off the government.
They could lobby for the abbrogation of its obligation to the government.
March 12th, 2009 at 1:56 pm
Cutting tax deductions for lobbying, think tanks
Is there any possibility of not using the public purse to subsidize the suborning of its own democractic processes?
March 12th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
Citi’s entitled to its opinions whether it’s on the dole or not. But it’s interesting that their objection is not founded on some question of fairness to workers’ right to a secret ballot, but rather assumes EFCA will lead to more unions. Why does Citi have a position on unions? EFCA’s not going to cause Citi’s workers to unionize, right? Why are they wading into this?
March 12th, 2009 at 1:58 pm
So, basically, when bought, companies should stay bought?
I note also that there are other reasons to oppose EFCA besides opposing raising wages. For instance, the fact that its supporters – such as Rachel Maddow – are known to mislead about it.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:01 pm
That’s ridiculous. He isn’t saying Citi needs to support the EFCA. He’s saying they shouldn’t be lobbying about it, or anything else. They should not be stoppped from fighting against unionization of their own employees.
If Republicans were in power, they’d be perfectly fine arguing that Citi could pay benefits to partners of gay employees, but should not be lobbying congress to get other companies to do so.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:04 pm
Wow, the populist screeds are flying today. Terry, these are paper profits only– these guys cannot sell for six months (and they cannot short, as your blog post implied). Executives buying stock of their battered company is something we should ENCOURAGE, not demonize.
Njorl, what are you talking about. Citi is being operated to (hopefully, one day) be profitable. What possible reason would they try to be running the company at a loss? So the executives who have lost a bunch on their stock can lose even more money?!? That makes no sense.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:05 pm
Citibank is run by charlatans and hucksters. Frankly, their rabid, frothing opposition to Free Choice suggests to me that it’s the right thing to do.
At the end of the day, all the union is really doing is moving money out of CEO pockets into employee pockets.
You know, if we did that, maybe the CEOs would spend a little less time thinking about their golden parachute, and a little more time thinking about how to keep the company in business over the long haul so they can afford to pay off their yacht.
It’s too bad that people are still believing the crooks who have shown they don’t care a fig about shareholders or the company. Citibank executives aren’t freaking out about free choice because it’ll drive their company into the ground–hell, they already did that! They’re freaking out about free choice because it threatens the only thing they really care about–their huge paychecks. So what if it strengthens the company and the economy over the long haul?
March 12th, 2009 at 2:09 pm
I would make the argument that Citigroup can’t lobby on these ground: first, Citi has asked for and received monies from the Federal government to stave off insolvency, huge amounts of it that probably constitutes a majority of their operating cashflow; second, lobbying costs money – phone calls are relatively cheap, but they have to pay lobbyists and researchers, and they contribute to front groups and political action committees and politicians; third, using money given by the government for a stated economic purpose and using instead to advance personal political interests of the executives is deeply unethical, a breach of trust with the government and the taxpayer. Unless 100% of the money that Citigroup spends on lobbying comes out of the personal checkbooks of Citigroup executives, and all work by people employed by Citigroup to lobby happens outside of normal business hours, then they’re misusing funds.
Now, a public employee’s union or a teacher’s union is a different case. Public employees of all kinds take public moneys as wages, and they provide in exchange an agreed-upon amount of labor in return. Once they’ve provided the labor, the money is now private, and they can spend it on whatever they want, including union dues that can then be spent on lobbying.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:10 pm
Njorl– Hosting a call for an important client is normal course for any bank. Lobbying is normal course for any business, union etc. Citi needs to run it’s business to make money, not satisfy the Democrat special interest of the day.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:11 pm
To be fair we should also then tell the UAW to STFU.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:13 pm
But there’s a fairly clear case to be made that firms on the public dole shouldn’t be engaged in lobbying or political activities.
How does it compare to the case that students with government loans shouldn’t be involved in politics?
How does it compare to the case that doctors receiving NIH grants should pipe down on, e.g,, stem cell research?
How does it compare to the case that colleges which receive Federal funds (i.e., all colleges) should just pipe down.
I guess the concept of,and commitment to, civil liberties disappeared on Jan 20, 2009.
Sam Stein reports that Citigroup, which only still exists as a firm thanks to taxpayer largess, was hosting a conference call to help mobilize opposition to the Employee Free Choice Act.
That is what he reports, all right, but “mobilize” ought to mean something different from “inform”. Did anyone exhort call participants to phone their congressman or write a check to some oppo group? Odd that Stein neglected to mention that – it would have been a compelling detail. Of course, an informational call where investors can hear from some bill opponents doesn’t sound nearly as exciting.
I think the commitment to reality passed with the civil liberties schtick on Jan 20.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:18 pm
I love the way you end up wrestling with all these issues that result from bailing out these guys. Generally, we should avoid these complex problems by *not bailing people out in the first place*.
As for the claim that they have no special expertise and that anyone can run a bank into the ground, I agree – but if that’s the case, we should *fire* them. The fact that they’ve been left in charge suggests that many people (or at least important people) think they do actually have special competence, even if it’s kind of situational.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:26 pm
Tom, students are not allowed to fund, say, political candidates or political causes using money from (government) student loans. What they do with their free time is pretty much their business. NIH grants also, similarly, can’t be used to purchase ads in the newspaper or on television. And, indeed, public universities are not allowed to push or favor political causes or candidates.
Which isn’t to say I give much a crap about what a Citi CEO does. There’s probably some booboo in funding or using company equipment, and it makes me wretch at the principle of it all, but it’s not much worth getting worked up over.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:27 pm
Sorry to cut in, but quite obviously it doesn’t necessarily have that purpose when we’re talking about corporate lobbying; in that case, it generally has the purpose of economically benefiting the MANAGERS, whose interests are sometimes congruent with those of the shareholders- and, as shown on a spectacular scale by Citibank, sometimes not.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:28 pm
And while I am at it – the proposition before us is that “Citigroup” calculated its vast corporate interest and decided to oppose EFCA by hosting a call for some institutional clients and including the WalMart analyst who thinks EFCA will hurt WalMart stock.
Hands up if you think the Citi board got input from the credit card folks (who might like EFCA), the mortgsge division (ditto), the corporate lenders (probably opposed), the European and Asian units (who don’t care) and so on, before authorizing this unified position.
I don’t see many hands. Here is an alternative view – that Citigroup could care less, that they have no opinion, and that some folks in the equity investors group did this on their own initiative since EFCA may well affect different businesses differently. My apologies – I am not sure whether equity analysts are entitled to have an opinion and offer it under the new regime. I also have no idea why Citi’s dubious lending decisions reflect well or poorly on their equity analysts, but I am sure someone can explain that to me.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:31 pm
I do think that is the case here with Citi. What I’m arguing is that the government has the power to make an enforceable fiduciary duty to the public go away. Such an elimination would only be achieved through significant lobbying.
On the flipside, if Citi had a legitimate issue and lobbied the government for action that benefitted them and their shareholders, it would not be fair to their competitors. Assume you are a large shareholder of another bank, run well enough so that you needed no government help. How would you feel about being in competition with Citi? Would you like Citi going to Congress and lobbying them with statements like, “do this for us because you will profit as our shareholder”? Of course not.
Citi should be out of governmental decision-making processes until they have no incentive to rip th egovernment off, and the government has no reason to favor them over their competitors.
March 12th, 2009 at 2:34 pm
Shorter M Yglesias – free speech for me but not for thee
March 12th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
I wonder how many of those who defend Citi’s rights in this matter would also defend the right of colleges which receive public money to ban armed forces recruiters from their campuses.
March 12th, 2009 at 3:10 pm
You know, the worst part of this is that Campesino, Tom, and co. just don’t register the obvious rejoinder. I quote myself: “Students are not allowed to fund, say, political candidates or political causes using money from (government) student loans. What they do with their free time is pretty much their business. NIH grants also, similarly, can’t be used to purchase ads in the newspaper or on television. And, indeed, public universities are not allowed to push or favor political causes or candidates.”
You’re acting like putting prohibitions on what government money is used for is totally unheard of, some new Stalinist tactic. Am I the only one who remembers the hissy fit Republicans threw when Clinton or Gore or someone used a White House telephone to ask for campaign contributions?
The only important factor in this entire thing is whether the CEO used Citi offices or equipment for this meeting. If not, then I think it’s totally their prerogative; if so, they probably did something which should be illegal.
March 12th, 2009 at 3:17 pm
Ryan Says:
March 12th, 2009 at 2:48 pm
I wonder how many of those who defend Citi’s rights in this matter would also defend the right of colleges which receive public money to ban armed forces recruiters from their campuses.
=============================================================
Where are you going with this. So you think taking public money gives the college the right to suppress speech from military recruiters?
March 12th, 2009 at 3:27 pm
DTM:
Not always. Steve LaBonne is right that the interests of the managers are not always the interests of the owners. The owners, for example, could arguably benefit from regulations that prevent managers from looting their corporations Enron-style, but the managers lobby against it because it’s not in their own interests, and because the owners have little power over the managers, generally speaking.
Moreover, I think what’s not being said here is that executives are not without ideas and ideology of their own. There are many different kinds of business ideologies, from benevolent paternalists who love welfare capitalism to social darwinists who believe that corporations should only focus on the bottom line; from corporate planners like the folks at GM in the 1950s who outright despise the free market, to free-market absolutists who worship Milton Freidman; from white-shoe executives who favor stabolity of the system to corporate raiders who like nothing better than creative destruction.
A lot cf business politics is about these ideologies. Consider GM or GE lobbying against universal health care in the 40s-60s; they gave health care to their workers, they would have actually gained from a universal health care system that put their competitors on a level playing field and took some of the burden off their backs. Yet they opposed it because they believed that big government was bad, that there should be no outside interference between the workforce and the employer, that managerial prerogative is a sacred trust, that the private sector was inherently more efficient than the public sector, and so on. That’s ideology, not the bottom line, talking.
Now is this ideology the same as all of the thousands of owners? Probably not. A good example for this can be found if you look at executive hostility to even the most toothless of shareholder activism campaigns.
March 12th, 2009 at 3:37 pm
Zephyrus– yes, the government can attach strings to money it gives, like requiring a 21 y/o drinking age for federal highway funds, so I suppose that Congress could have tied TARP money to restricting what subjects were appropriate for an equity analyst conference call, but that wasn’t done. No, what we have here are people who have no idea how a corporation works getting mad that a small activity by a corporation that received government funds runs counter to the party in power’s position on an issue. Seriously, our side has been in power for a couple of months and already people are starting to go all GW Bush and start ramming things down people’s throats, law ornprocess be damned.
March 12th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Justin, if there were no strings attached to how the government money was to be used, then I think it’s pretty obvious that you can’t punish the people after the fact. My impression is that the big issue people have with it is that no strings were attached.
None of this being that interesting anyway–I’m skeptical that this conference call had any chance of corrupting influence anyway. An equity analyst and the Chamber of Commerce oppose EFCA and want to undermine it however they can. This surely dooms its prospects.
I’m not sure, though, that in principle it would be inappropriate for the federal government to put restrictions on how TARP money is used with respect to the political process. Just that it didn’t come up, because this doesn’t really has little chance of genuinely influencing anything, and any effort to do anything about it would far exceed any benefits (read: zero) that would come from it.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:16 pm
We didn’t bail these institutions out so that they could better pursue their own interests.
We bailed them out in order that they would pursue our interests; that is, in order to achieve achieve public policy goals. These were to unfreeze credit markets, to prevent economic collapse – all in support of the overarching goal if protecting the broader U.S. standard of living.
There may be no principle at stake – it’s simply incongruous for Citibank, living now on borrowed time, to campaign to drive that standard of living -my standard of living – down.
Now, Citibank might once have seen expenditures on this sort of issue campaign as part of its core business model. It might normally have corrupted its investment advice in service of such campaigns as well, as it did in this case.
How this might have maximized returns for Citi’s former shareholders is unclear. It certainly doesn’t maximize returns for me, as someone who works for a living and pays taxes.
To the contrary – Citi’s management appears to be in the habit of attacking its investors, impoverishing them whenever possible.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:18 pm
Tom, students are not allowed to fund, say, political candidates or political causes using money from (government) student loans. What they do with their free time is pretty much their business. NIH grants also, similarly, can’t be used to purchase ads in the newspaper or on television.
Uh huh. And Citi has about $2 trillion in assets and about $50 billion in Federal money.
Who thinks the federal money can be trace directly to the Institutional Equity budget where the call was sponsored?
So do we conclude that Zephyrus thinks that a student with a $5,000 student loan can’t give *any* money to a political candidate, since maybe the fungible federal money went there? I assume he (she?) is not that stupid.
As to “NIH grants can’t be used to purchase ads”, well, Citi wasn’t buying an ad, was it? Are doctors on NIH grants allowed to talk to reporters and lobbyists about their views on a bill, or not? That is an easy question for me (Of course they should). Zephyrus will have a harder time with it – extending the Citi “logic”, doctors who receive *any* NIH money should STFU on all legislation before the government.
You know, the worst part of this is that Campesino, Tom, and co. just don’t register the obvious rejoinder.
I hope that was responsive – duty called.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:34 pm
I didn’t say anything that could possibly be construed to mean this to anyone who can speak English.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:38 pm
dumb, dumb, dumb….any company that is threatened with unionization is going to almost certainly going to see labor costs rise. It is the obligation of Citi to report the possibility of an impact on forward earnings. That is what analysts do for a living.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:40 pm
And Citi has about $2 trillion in assets and about $50 billion in Federal money.
If Citibank had $2 trillion in net assets we wouldn’t be having this conversation. It doesn’t. Perhaps it has $2 trillion in net assets, but it also has liabilities that put it under water. We don’t have to trace a single dime. A this moment, by definition, Citibank is spending tax payer money every time they turn on a light.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:44 pm
1. The government has no contractual relationship with the UAW. The UAW receives no government money whatsoever. Neither does the SEIU. This makes the attempted equivalence less-than-compelling.
2. Government contracts involve anti-lobbying provisions all the time.
March 12th, 2009 at 4:49 pm
I actually have only a little problem with that. I failed to make clear that I was distinguishing between official lobbying vs political action. I don’t want Citi using the very commmon legal bribery that we call lobbying, but they should be allowed to do things like that conference call.
I do think it’s immoral, but lots of immoral things are legal. I think the government should inform Citi that spending money on things other than their business will result in denial of future assistance. They should really stick to banking until they are able to do it adequately. I’d feel the same way if Citi were funding political action on liberal issues.
GM, for example, would benefit immensely from sociallized medicine. I think they should be forbidden to lobby government for it (or anything else), and it should be frowned upon if they use corporate resources to organize political action for it. Once they get their house in order and pay the government back, they can do what they please.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:08 pm
If Citi really was doing this for money at the behest of their clients, and not political ideology, that’s fine. They can sell all the bad, inaccurate analysis in support of bad causes they want, provided they are getting their stockholder’s money’s worth.
March 12th, 2009 at 5:22 pm
It wouldn’t have been practical for the first round of TARP money. The Fed pressured many banks to take money which they didn’t need. They did this to try to hide which banks needed cash. If they put restrictions on what banks could do, they could not have done it this way. It’s starting to get dicey now. A lot of banks that were doing well rewarded their managers with large bonusses, but because they got TARP money, people in congress are condemning them. They’re threatening to give the money back, and thereby expose the bad banks. The real bad banks are using this as cover to pay big bonusses to their management. It certainly is a big shitpile.
March 12th, 2009 at 7:57 pm
DTM:
The point we were trying to correct was whether “Holding aside Citi specifically, as a general matter do you think it is true that business lobbying doesn’t have the purpose of economically benefiting the owners of those businesses?” And we argued, yes, it does.
To get to MY’s overall point, if the lobbying is being undertaken not as a normal part of “economically benefiting the owners” (of which the government is now one), but rather because of their own ideological biases against unionization, then they shouldn’t be spending the government’s money to do so. Especially since, now that the government is a part-owner, to oppose legislation that could increase wages, thereby increasing tax revenues, Citigroup’s lobbying is also against the economic interests of this part-owner.
March 12th, 2009 at 9:25 pm
I often get the feeling that when the sun finally explodes and the earth is a glowing cinder, Al the Unstoppable Hack will still be there, tapping away with his latest shameless hackery.
March 12th, 2009 at 9:26 pm
Al really is an amazing phenomenon. I don’t think I’ve ever witnessed another human being who lies and deceives so obsessively.
March 12th, 2009 at 10:00 pm
“But there’s a fairly clear case to be made that firms on the public dole shouldn’t be engaged in lobbying or political activities.”
Looking forward to Matt getting vocal against the lobbying and political activities of ACORN and public employee unions.
March 12th, 2009 at 10:10 pm
Looking forward to Matt getting vocal against the lobbying and political activities of ACORN and public employee unions.
That’s the difference, I think, between Al and people like harkin; Al is an accomplish liar, while the world’s harkins are just blithering idiots.
March 13th, 2009 at 6:41 am
Vikram Pandit is a generous lover though I am not fond of the mallaka
March 13th, 2009 at 6:55 am
What is so goddamn wrong with imposing “political” conditions on the bailout? These people ran their companies into the ground and crashed the whole economy while taking home huge amounts of personal wealth. Now their business is being kept on life support by us, the US worker and taxpayer. If what they get for their crimes is $50 billion, then with that we have the right to make them strip naked and dance on one leg while singing the Internationale, much less support EFCA. We should take a class view on this and extract everything we can while we can, in the interests of the majority – they certainly have for years in the interests of the tiny minority.
March 13th, 2009 at 1:53 pm
Again, does that mean ACORN must stop their political activities now that they are getting all kinds of Federal money?
Seems as if ALL entities then must do the same. NGO’s et al. Anyone touched by the Federal nanny teat must cease from knocking the nanny teat whilst suckling from it.
March 13th, 2009 at 2:33 pm
What is so goddamn wrong with imposing “political” conditions on the bailout?
Well, for one thing, EFCA is not established Federal law. What Matt is proposing is that the executive branch impose a rule outlawing recipients of federal money from opposing a proposal by its partisan allies in Congress.
Imagine if, say in 2004, the Repubs in Congress were pushing through an anti-abortion bill. Would it be okay if Bush put out an executive order banning any recipient of federal money from lobbying against that bill?
It’s conditioning money on strictly partisan purposes, and in order to get a bill passed (a bill which is not universally loved, btw).
March 13th, 2009 at 2:36 pm
Also, you’re talking about banning a conference call.
This a bit different from, say, requiring that colleges that receive federal aid allow military recruiters on campus. In that case, no one’s first amendment rights are being stomped. In this case, you’re demanding that people not talk to each other as a condition of receiving money.
March 13th, 2009 at 6:38 pm
You know, I like this approach. Let’s apply this exact same rule during Republican administrations to scientists at federal agencies. It doesn’t matter if it’s their honest, best-judgment analysis that anthropogenic global warming is real and that we need to stop it; since they’re using public funds, they have no business making statements using government resources that oppose the Administration’s policy goals.
March 24th, 2009 at 4:22 pm
The U.S. economy appears to be slowing faster than we thought, people are eyeing a recession and, in the heat of the moment, that is causing panic.\par