Kenneth Feinberg is a Washington, D.C. attorney specializing in mediation and alternative dispute resolution. He was appointed Special Master of the U.S. Government’s September 11th Victim Compensation Fund and later as the Obama administration’s “pay czar.”
Originally from Brockton, Massachusetts, he received a Bachelor of Arts from the University of Massachusetts-Amherst in 1967 and a law degree from the New York University School of Law in 1970. He worked for five years as an administrative assistant and chief of staff for U.S. Senator Ted Kennedy, and as a prosecutor for the U.S. Attorney General. Before founding his own firm, The Feinberg Group, in 1993, he was a founding partner at the Washington office of Kaye Scholer LLP.
Feinberg has served as Court-Appointed Special Settlement Master in cases including Agent Orange product liability litigation, Asbestos Personal Injury Litigations and DES Cases. Feinberg was also one of three arbitrators who determined the fair market value of the Zapruder film of the Kennedy assassination and was one of two arbitrators who determined the allocation of legal fees in the Holocaust slave labor litigation. He is a former Lecturer-in-Law at Columbia University and currently serves as Lecturer-in-Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School, the Georgetown Law Center, and the University of Virginia School of Law, and taught a course called “Mass Torts” at the University of Virginia School of Law during the 2006 spring term. He has also taught short courses on the 9/11 Victims’ Compensation Fund at the UCLA School of Law, New York Law School, Vanderbilt Law School, and the University of Virginia School of Law. In the spring of 2008, Feinberg also taught a course at NYU entitled “The 9/11 Victim Compensation Fund: Alternatives to the Civil Justice System.”
Feinberg was also the Chief Administrator to the Hokie Spirit Memorial Fund, which commemorates the students who died in the April 2007 shooting rampage at Virginia Tech.
Feinberg is the new Pay Czar, but he is also known as the Compensation Czar. His formal title is Special Master for TARP Executive Compensation. It is reported that currently he receives no compensation for this position and the position was created by Treasury Appointment. He reports directly to Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner. Feinberg was appointed to examine compensation practices at companies that have been bailed out more than once by the federal government. But that is not the whole story… His power goes much further than that.
Feinberg’s the embodiment of what executives feared since the federal government began pumping billions of dollars into private companies on the brink of collapse. He’s there to police compensation of executives in companies that received “significant” help under the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP).
An experienced mediator who has handled many high-profile cases, Feinberg will decide how much to pay the top 100 executives at many of the firms bailed out by the federal government in the 2008-2009 recession. The companies makeup a once-prestigious roster of U.S. corporate titans like American International Group (AIG), Citibank, Chrysler, Chrysler Financial, General Motors, GMAC and Bank of America.Labaton, Stephen, “Overseer to Set Executive Pay at Rescued Companies,” The New York Times, June 10, 2009.
Pay czar Kenneth Feinberg’s official government title is “Special Master for Compensation.” You’ll be happy to know that he’s really getting into the confiscatory spirit of his role. Asked by Reuters whether his powers include reaching back and revoking bonuses awarded to financial industry executives before his office was created earlier this year, Feinberg asserted broad and binding authorities — including the ability to “claw back” money already paid out.
Regulations governing his office explicitly limit his jurisdiction over contracts signed before Feb. 11, 2009. But the fine print is no obstacle to Obama’s czars. “The statute provides these guideposts, but the statute ultimately says I have discretion to decide what it is that these people should make and that my determination will be final,” Feinberg claims. “Anything is possible under the law.”
Get that? “Anything is possible under the law.” He will levy the law any way he sees fit and attack at his sole discretion those he views as “unworthy.” No real oversight – no limits – raw governmental power to be used however Feinberg wishes to. Period. This should cause the blood of every American CEO and business owner to run cold. Feinberg not only intends to go after those who took TARP funds, his sights are set on controlling the pay of executives nationwide – pay leveling – wealth redistribution.
Yes, he said “anything.” It’s not just senior executive officers who fall under Feinberg’s purview. “These people” also includes “the next 100 most highly paid employees” of all bank bailout recipients, who must file compensation proposals with their pay overlord by Friday.
But why stop there? The Troubled Asset Relief Program has morphed from a toxic asset buy-up to a capital injection plan and back to a toxic asset buy-up. The money has been doled out to auto supply companies and life insurance companies. Congress wants to siphon off more of it to bail out bankrupt California and create a “national housing trust fund” to bail out low-income renters. Grabby-handed politicians have used TARP as a crowbar to pry open new areas for command-and-control meddling under the guise of saving the economy.
How much longer until the pay czar is determining all corporate pay he wishes to deem “inappropriate, unsound or excessive”? House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank has yapped all year long about extending pay curbs to all financial institutions and perhaps to all U.S. companies.
Bottom line, the Pay Czar’s power may very well extend to companies who did NOT take TARP funds. Let’s look at the definition of Marxism…
the economic and political theories of Karl Marx (1818–83), German political philosopher, which argue that class struggle is the basic agency of historical change, and that capitalism will be superseded by communism
Marxism is the political philosophy and practice derived from the works of Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels, though the name ‘Marxism’ has been used by many with political perspectives those men would likely reject. Marxism is a political-economic theory that presents a materialist conception of history, a non-capitalist vision of capitalism and other types of society, and a non-religious view of human liberation. Closely related to the ideology of communism. At its core, Marxism holds a critical analysis of capitalism and a theory of social change. The original Marxian vision consisted of three complementary parts, each of which is hard to separate from the other two:
1. The dialectical and materialist conception of history. Marx interpreted the history of any society as being the result of conflicts within society, including those between social classes (e.g., bourgeoisie and proletariat) and between the development of the forces of production (technology, the labor force, etc.) and the relations of production (institutions). Accordingly, a society’s possible futures are interpreted in terms of these conflicts.
2. The critique of capitalism. Capitalism is seen as a society in which a small minority of the population (the bourgeoisie or capitalists) dominates and exploits the vast majority (the working class or proletariat). In Marx’s labor theory of value, workers typically have no choice but produce more value and more output than is necessary to pay the cost of their reproduction as people in society over time. They do this under conditions that they do not control, i.e., under the direction of the supervisors and threatened by unemployment or poverty rather than following democratic decision-making, and thus give the surplus-product to the owners, the bourgeoisie. The capitalists then use this surplus (also called surplus value) to accumulate more wealth and power for themselves. Often, this accumulation goes ‘too far,’ causing an economic crisis.
3. The theory of revolution. In Marx’s conception, workers under capitalism are alienated since they do not control a major portion of their day (the working-day) and must follow orders, producing goods or services that they do not own and cannot choose to avoid producing. They are alienated from their own true selves as members of society, from the products of their labour, and from nature. The solution — which Marx saw as existing below the surface of actual bourgeois society — was for workers to unite in labor union and political parties, to take political and economic power away from the bourgeoisie. In fact, he saw this kind of collective self-liberation as the only true liberation of the working class.
Notice the use of the term ’social change’ which Obama adheres to. And the reference to ‘never letting a crisis go to waste’ in the form of an economic crisis. The most interesting line there is:
The solution — which Marx saw as existing below the surface of actual bourgeois society — was for workers to unite in labor union and political parties, to take political and economic power away from the bourgeoisie.
All of this is relevant to the Pay Czar since he physically controls what executives are paid. This Czar is a truly Marxist building block, just as community organizing and social change are… Welcome your new Pay Czar – he may be telling you what you can and can’t be paid very soon.
