Obama et al knew about bonuses for AIG
As I wrote in a previous post on this subject, President Barack Obama, Republican Senator John Grassley and all the other politicians going after AIG for handing out to bonuses to traders knew about these bonuses when they decided to bail out the insurance company.
See Senator Chris Dodd, for instance:
Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) on Monday night floated the idea of taxing American International Group (AIG: 0.9516, 0.1715, 21.98%) bonus recipients so the government could recoup the $450 million the company is paying to employees in its financial products unit. Within hours, the idea spread to both houses of Congress, with lawmakers proposing an AIG bonus tax.
While the Senate constructed the $787 billion stimulus last month, Dodd unexpectedly added an executive-compensation restriction to the bill. That amendment provides an “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009,” which exempts the very AIG bonuses Dodd and others are seeking to tax. The amendment is in the final version and is law.
The hypocrisy is absolutely stunning. They are playing games. It’s all politics. Opportunism at its finest.
Don’t fall for it – Grassley, Dodd, Obama are all lying, spinning and distorting in order to get your vote. Only the blind can’t see this.
This means they all deserve your outrage. Not AIG, which told the government about the upcoming bonuses, but politicians who go agree to these bonuses, even guarantee them by law, and then pretend it’s just as shocking to them as it is to you.
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Separately, Sen. Dodd was AIG’s largest single recipient of campaign donations during the 2008 election cycle with $103,100, according to opensecrets.org.
I think we should propose a special tax on any contributions received by our lawmakers from these bailed out firms.
It’s incredible that we don’t have a policy which forces legislators to recuse themselves when they have these types of conflicts of interest.
Good luck proposing that one. Congress is pretty inexplicably tied to interest groups. That would essentially either mean outlawing interest groups or changing the rules to disallow Senators who’ve received money from these companies from becoming chairmen of related committees.
The first is political suicide for any legislator proposing it, and the second just isn’t going to happen. If there’s any issue that could find bi-partisan support this session, it’d be a rally against changing those rules.
Speaking of which, Joe Lieberman (who’s also my Senator), who doesn’t even sit on Dodd’s committee, made over $154,000 from the now dead Lehman Brothers (Dodd made $122,000), $108,000 from UBS (Dodd made $110,000), and $103,000 from the now sold Bear Stearns (Dodd made $201,000). His highest amount of contributions for last year come from United Technologies, a major aircraft manufacturer. Lieberman is chairman of the Homeland Security committee and a member on Armed Forces.
My point? Connecticut is well known as one of the big insurance company states and sits next to another. That fact alone may explain a lot of the money, and the fact that Dodd is chairman of Banking is another.
Also, these statistics are used all the time without realizing that individual contributions are lumped in if they’re high enough, so the total number might be lower. Are corporate PACs also contributing? Sure.
This isn’t a defense of Dodd, because my last comment on the corruption scandal surrounding him was definitely not that. It’s simply a rebuttal to your comment that the Senators should recuse themselves.
Alls I’m saying is: not happening.
CHARLES Grassley
AIG fails then takes our money (the bail-out money), throws a 400K party and is now passing out millions in bonuses to its employees. It reminds me of the sinking Titanic; they put all the wealthy people on under-populated boats (boats that the poor had paid for with their tickets too) and let the poor die needlessly in the icy waters. Our economy is sinking, and the bail-out money (everyone’s money) is being used to get the few to shore.
Those few will get to coast comfortably with their millions of (our) bail-out money while the rest of us suffer till the economy rebounds. The worst part is, failures like AIG’s failure is one of main reasons we’re in this position in the first place.
@Michael Merritt The word you’re looking for is inextricably. It can easily be explained.
Congressmen don’t “make” anything from contributions. They’re not paid from them. Corporate donations aren’t illegal. However, the only thing that will fix it is a 100% public financing of campaigns. They will NEVER push that.
Breaking News: Dodd Says loophole that protects AIG Bonuses added per request of the Obama administration. The video is about a fifth of the way down.
http://www.butasforme.com/2009/03/17/obamas-stimulus-bill-explicitly-grants-aig-the-legal-right-to-hand-out-bonuses/
Obama should take full and direct responsibility for this mess.