Mar 17 2009
The Real Outrage over AIG is not the Bonuses…
Like most people, I find the recent information that AIG paid out 165 million dollars in executive bonuses fairly outrageous. For a company to claim to be on the verge of death and to take Billions in tax payer dollars to remain afloat, for our own good of course, then to shower some of that cash on the top execs is arrogant and condescending.
I mean, the bonuses are supposed to be a merit bonus, yes? So where is the merit in being on the verge of corporate failure. Well….I guess you could say they were a success in sucking us.
But while gross, that is not the worst outrage over the situation. (I will deal with the fact these were contractural bonuses, and what this means if the government starts interferring with legal contracts later.)
Worse is the fact that we had to bail them out, twice to the tune of many Billion dollars in the first place. Worse yet is that the Federal Government has become the teat for corporate America to suckle at.
But in something even more outrageous, maybe we ought not act so surprised.
You see, the politicians were on AIG’s payroll too.
NW Republican (with a Hat Tip to RedState) reports on this juicy tidbit from Open Secrets:
Obama’s “pay to play” antics have landed him over a $100k from AIG.
Senator Barack Obama received a $101,332 bonus from American International Group in the form of political contributions according to Opensecrets.org. The two biggest Congressional recipients of bonuses from the A.I.G. are - Senators Chris Dodd and Senator Barack Obama.
The story continues at Open Secrets but their site was down, so I will do a part two on how bad this really is tomorrow.
But considering this information Obama and Freddie Mac and Fannie Mae, it won’t be a real shock.
When the federal government announced two months ago that it would prop up mortgage buyers Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, CRP looked at how much money members of Congress had collected since 1989 from the companies. On Sunday the government completely took over the two government-sponsored enterprises, and we’ve returned to our data to bring you the updates, this time providing a list of all 354 lawmakers who have gotten money from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac (in July we posted the top 25). These totals are based on data released electronically from the FEC on Sept. 2 and include contributions to lawmakers’ leadership PACs and candidate committees from the floundering companies’ PACs and employees. Current members of Congress have received a total of $4.8 million from Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, with Democrats collecting 57 percent of that. This week we also wrote about how much money lawmakers had invested of their own money in the companies last year–a total of up to $1.7 million.
The grand total? Your ‘winners’ are once again, Chris Dodd and Barack Obama.
Dodd $165,400.00
Obama $126,349.00
This clip of Rick Santelli also notes that our outrage at the bonuses and even of the bailouts to AIG are only the tip of the iceberg:
No, the real outrage, to me, is why did our mainstream media ignore all of these pay for play, tit for tat political donations.
Most Main Stream media outlets pride themselves on being watchdogs, but for Obama they have gratefully been nothing but lapdogs, only stirring to attack Obama’s enemies.
That is certainly outrageous.That all of this was happening right under our noses, while we slept, and our media sang us to sleep. While John Stewart attacks CNBC for not seeing the crisis coming and somehow preventing it, he himself is clpable for ignoring the corruptoin in the man we elected.
Most of the media went into the tank for him, and here we are.
Hope and change. Well we got what we paid for. We will just be paying for it for several generations, at this rate.
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One Response to “The Real Outrage over AIG is not the Bonuses…”
From an article by Elliot Spitzer, former governor of the state of NY:
Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG’s bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG’s counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?
(and…Why weren’t the counterparties immediately and fully disclosed?…)
For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman’s collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG’s inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG’s trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.
*Let’s hope that public outrage and Republican backbone bring a quick end to futile bailouts.*