Congress & Geithner Knew About the AIG Bonuses Ahead of Time



After accusing the previous administration of a lack of oversight, Crowley says this:

Thank you, Mr. Chairman. Welcome to the committee, Mr. Geithner, and thank you for your responses so far. It never ceases to amaze me the level of apparent amnesia some of my colleagues on the other side of the aisle have had about how we got to this problem in the first place, and I thank you for answering Mr. Heller’s question in particular. By the line of questioning, you’re almost led to believe that because of a last month and a few days of a presidency we had the problem we have today, and thank you for setting the record straight. This didn’t happen overnight. This took eight years in the making of stagnant, at best, growth.

But yesterday, Mr. Secretary, the Treasury and the Federal Reserve announced a new fourth plan to rescue troubled financial services giant AIG. I do agree that AIG’s sustainability is the lynchpin for some of our recovery efforts, and it’s important for the federal government to work to keep it afloat. However, I must demand that AIG increase the accountability and transparency, something that was not done during the previous administration.

For example, just last month, AIG paid 343 employees of AIG FP — their Financial Products division that created the financial hole that AIG is in, and in turn a multibillion-dollar bill for American taxpayers — $56 million in bonuses and are slated to pay an additional $162 million in bonuses to 393 participants in the coming weeks. And there’s more. Further bonus payments totaling approximately 230 million (dollars) are due to 407 participants at AIG’s Financial Products division in March 2010. This makes no sense to my constituency.


In other words, congress knew well in advance that AIG execs would be getting these bonuses, yet they act like they were broadsided. I believe it's obvious the Dems are putting on a show to get everyone fired up and angry. Why? Hard to tell, it's never easy to find the logical behind the insane. But I would venture to say if they make enough people angry, then they can enact whatever legislation they want, under the guise of "fixing the problem."

2 comments:

Franklin's Locke said...

We all knew about them. It was in the NY Times in Nov. This is just to distract the People from the real issues. They are also purposely creating the populist anger. Problem. This whole thing blew up in their face and now Dodd and Geinther are going to be the scapegoats. They will be gone be September.

http://franklinslocke.blogspot.com/

Anonymous said...

Yes, the problems all started exactly eight years. to the minute, before Obama's inaugration.
There is no amnesia about the Democrat control of congress for the past two years: we are just never going to talk about it.

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