Yesterday, the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.’s (FDIC) board voted 3-2 to move forward with a proposal to charge banks higher fees for deposit insurance, in accordance with the riskiness of their pay packages. As the Wall Street Journal put it, the FDIC wants to use deposit insurance fees “as an incentive to encourage compensation practices that favor less-risky behavior.”

In order to draw favorable ratings from the FDIC, pay packages would need to have a healthy portion of restricted company stock, with extra bonus points for having compensation decided by independent members of boards of directors. “This isn’t about levels. It’s about structures,” said FDIC Chair Sheila Bair, who sided with two other board members in approving the proposal.

Meanwhile, the heads of both the Office of Thrift Supervision (OTS) and the Office of the Comptroller of the Currency (OCC) — bank regulators who also have seats on the FDIC board — voted against it. Bair was reportedly very displeased with the no votes, and took her fellow regulators to task, saying she can’t understand why they keep waiting to address Wall Street pay:

I must say, to take a position that we should not even be asking these questions is not one that I can understand. I also cannot understand why we need to keep waiting. We need to keep waiting for this or that, and in the interim, nothing changes. We just maintain the status quo, and the longer we try to [implement] meaningful reforms, the more momentum for that dissipates…To suggest this agency shouldn’t do anything, when there is such an overwhelming amount of evidence that this is clearly a contributor to the crisis and to the losses that we are suffering, I just cannot understand that.

Earlier this week, a former Wall Street banker slammed those bankers who “just don’t get it” on compensation, and now we have a regulator doing the same to her colleagues. I hope this is a sign that more people will begin to get serious on the real structural issues with banks’ executive compensation, especially with some of the bonuses that we are likely to see in the next few days.

As for the merits of the FDIC plan, I think it makes a lot of sense to have banks with compensation structures that encourage higher risk pay more for federal deposit insurance. Not only is it sensible in principle, but in the long-term, it’s a much better way of addressing Wall Street pay structures than coming up with a tax on bonuses (though that still leaves open the question regarding 2009 bonuses, which were largely earned on the backs of taxpayers).

The FDIC’s proposal, along with a fee on “too big to fail” banks that will be dedicated to funding a robust resolution authority, will help to address some of Wall Street’s perverse incentives that contributed to the economic crisis. Bair is right to want to get these efforts underway right now.

Clean energy legislation passed by the House, now pending in the Senate, faces fierce opposition from the proprietors of fossil fuel companies, and much has been reported on how domestic oil and coal companies have flooded the debate with money, lobbying, and misinformation. These opponents of clean energy reform claim to be “standing up” for American jobs and security. However, according to an investigation by ThinkProgress, many of the lobbyists and right-wing operatives engineering the attacks on clean energy reform either work directly for petro-governments, or work for companies in the business of importing foreign oil:

– Nigeria’s Bayelsa State, the region of the country producing much of its crude oil, is registered with the Carmen Group as its representative in DC. (Update: The Carmen Group later informed ThinkProgress that it no longer represents Nigeria.) The Carmen Group is run largely by employs lobbyist David Keene as a Managing Associate, who also manages the American Conservative Union. (Update: The Carmen Group’s Managing Director Richard Masterson tells ThinkProgress that Keene “does not work for any energy-related interest at the Carmen Group.”) Keene has lobbied against clean energy reform and used his conservative organization to generate “grassroots” opposition to legislative efforts to move away from a fossil fuel based economy. Although the extent to which the Carmen Group “provide[s] general representation before the United States Congress” is unclear — as Justice Department disclosures indicate — the Nigerian state has lavished Carmen group lobbyists with $903,450 in payments since 2006. According to a report produced Monday by the State Department, Nigeria is at risk of becoming a haven for terror and extremism. In the past, Keene, the coordinator of the CPAC convention, has been caught auctioning off conservative grassroots support to his corporate lobbying clients for as much as $2 million dollars.

– The lobbyist-run front group Americans for Prosperity is perhaps the most active anti-clean energy group in the country. In addition to working furiously to orchestrate anti-clean energy themed tea parties, Americans for Prosperity is running anti-clean energy legislation ads, anti-climate change science ads, and is even barnstorming around the country with anti-clean energy “hot air” rallies. The organization was founded and is bankrolled by David Koch of Koch Industries, a major refiner of oil. Through Koch Industry subsidiaries — Koch Supply & Trading and Flint Hills Resources — Koch imports crude oil and unfinished oils from a variety of foreign sources, including from Saudi Arabia and Nigeria.

– Currently, FreedomWorks is focusing their energy activism on supporting the status quo reliance on fossil fuels. Throughout 2009, as FreedomWorks leader Dick Armey organized tea party opposition to clean energy reform, he simultaneously worked for the lobbying firm DLA Piper on the account of Sheikh Mohammed Bin Rashid Al Maktoum, Prime Minister of the United Arab Emirates. According to disclosure forms filed with the Justice Department, the UAE paid Armey’s lobbying firm at the time to help maintain the “development of UAE energy resources, which represent about 10 percent of global oil reserves.”

– Oil companies have attempted to demonstrate popular support for fossil-fuel dependence by hosting “Energy Citizen” rallies around the country, where employees of oil companies are bused in for large events. The “Energy Citizen” website claims that converting a clean energy economy would mean “less energy independence.” Ironically, the main sponsor of the Energy Citizen effort is the American Petroleum Institute, which is a trade association for companies like Chevron, Exxon Mobil, and Sunoco. These companies, in turn, are highly dependent on foreign oil imports — from countries including Algeria, Nigeria, Saudi Arabia, Libya, and Venezuela. For perspective, Exxon Mobil imports 27%, Valero 29%, and Chevron 36% of its oil from Persian Gulf countries alone.

As a report by Rudy deLeon and Dan Weiss has argued, “America’s dependence on foreign oil transfers U.S. dollars to a number of unfriendly regimes, while robbing the United States of the economic resources it desperately needs for domestic development and American innovation.” It is alarming, though, that American lobbyists — funded by foreign oil — are working furiously to continue the status quo that is putting the nation’s security at risk.

Today, the congressionally mandated Financial Crisis Inquiry Commission (FCIC) officially got underway with a hearing featuring testimony from the CEO’s of Goldman Sachs, Bank of America, Morgan Stanley, and JP Morgan Chase. The goal of the commission is to examine the causes of 2008′s financial collapse and deliver a report to Congress by December 15.

The commission’s chairman, Phil Angelides, kicked off the question and answer portion of the hearing with a bang, grilling Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd “God’s work” Blankfein on a host of issues. Angelides tried to ask Blankfein what would have happened to Goldman in the absence of extraordinary government support for the financial system, and Blankfein replied that government help wasn’t necessary to keep his firm afloat:

We had tremendous liquidity through the period, but there were systemic events going on. If you’re asking me what would have happened but for the considerable government intervention, I would say we were in, it was a more nervous position than we would have wanted. We never anticipated the government help, we weren’t relying on those mechanisms…That weekend, when we became a bank-holding company, the next day, we capitalized ourselves privately with Warren Buffet, and the day after that we did a capital raise for $5.75 billion…We weren’t relying on that government help. That government TARP legislation came about three weeks later.

Watch it:

Blankfein did add “the fact is the world was unsafe. The government, taxpayers, regulators took extraordinary measures to reduce an intolerable level of risk to a much more tolerable level of risk, and that we should all be appreciative of.”

But watch Blankfein’s tactic here, equating “government help” with “TARP.” This is what I was thinking of when I expressed concern about the Obama administration framing its push to implement a bank fee solely in terms of recouping TARP. As Angelides pointed out, there were a whole host of government interventions, many still in place, that supported the banks as they returned to sky-high profits.

And the notion that Goldman did not need or benefit from programs other than TARP is nuts, and the commission should point that out over and over. Blankfein cited investments by Warren Buffet and others as Goldman’s actual savior, but as Daniel Harrison noted, Buffet only invested in Goldman after Goldman received billions as a counterparty to AIG, and he likely only “did so on the basis that the firm was reasonably supported by government aid.” The prior weekend, Goldman was given government permission to convert from an investment bank into a bank-holding company, giving it access to low-cost loans from the Fed, which also presumably factored into investors’ decisions.

This is important as the administration seeks to implement a levy on the biggest banks, and as Congress debates various ways to raise taxes on Wall Street. If the banks are allowed to frame TARP as the only step taken to help them, they can make the easy argument that paying back TARP has made taxpayers whole, which is not really the case.