I think it's a diversion. All of a sudden these million dollar bonuses are all over the news. Plenty of bailout recipients have given out bigger bonuses. AIG got $180 BILLION so far in bailout funds and the $165 MILLION they gave in bonuses is some huge deal? What happened to the other $179+ BILLION? It was spread out to other companies on Wall Street and around the globe, companies like Goldman Sachs, who gave compensation of over $70 million to some of their guys. That's not total, that's $70mil per guy. GS got their own direct bailout funds too.
Hank Paulson, a former Goldman Sachs guy, tried to push the bailout crap through as quickly as possible and included in his original proposal "Decisions by the Secretary pursuant to the authority of this Act are non-reviewable and committed to agency discretion, and may not be reviewed by any court of law or any administrative agency."
The conspiracy theory stuff gets more believable every day. Looks to me like AIG is being used as a scapegoat.

I love how everyone runs to get infront of the lynch mob now that this has come to light. The sad truth is that this is a very small amount of money in the larger picture(Tough to say that 170mil is small but.....). I would like to have this much time and energy spent on finding out how the other 99.9% of the bailout is managed(maybe we could save AIG if it was).
This is just another political football that the Reps are beating the Dems over the head with. One of those "gotcha" moments that the Dems have been using so well in the last years on the Reps but turned around. I was tired of it when the Dems did it and I dont like it much now that the Reps are using it either. It is like grade school all over again. Grow the F- up and put some effort into something that will help the country instead of B.S. that means nothing but scoring some points against the new admin.
I think the banking industry failing is a little more important than passing laws that violates our constitution. This taxation of a certain group after the fact is dangerous no matter how much they should not get those bonuses. I would like to see my party STFU and quit using a bad situation to make points and the other side STFU get on to what needs to be done to bring our country out of this.........That is the bank industry by the way.
Sorry for the long rant but come on.

Palin 2012?

"No, 2112. That's when America will be ready for a woman president."

You think women will be smart by then?

http://www.slate.com/id/2213942/

The Real AIG Scandal
It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full.
By Eliot Spitzer
Posted Tuesday, March 17, 2009, at 10:41 AM ET
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------

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?

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.

It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure. The payments to AIG's counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG's contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.

But wait a moment, aren't we in the midst of reopening contracts all over the place to share the burden of this crisis? From raising taxes—income taxes to sales taxes—to properly reopening labor contracts, we are all being asked to pitch in and carry our share of the burden. Workers around the country are being asked to take pay cuts and accept shorter work weeks so that colleagues won't be laid off. Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? Haven't we been told recently that they are beginning to come back to fiscal stability? If that is so, couldn't they have accepted a discount, and couldn't they have agreed to certain conditions before the AIG dollars—that is, our dollars—flowed?

The appearance that this was all an inside job is overwhelming. AIG was nothing more than a conduit for huge capital flows to the same old suspects, with no reason or explanation.

So here are several questions that should be answered, in public, under oath, to clear the air:

What was the precise conversation among Bernanke, Geithner, Paulson, and Blankfein that preceded the initial $80 billion grant?

Was it already known who the counterparties were and what the exposure was for each of the counterparties?

What did Goldman, and all the other counterparties, know about AIG's financial condition at the time they executed the swaps or other contracts? Had they done adequate due diligence to see whether they were buying real protection? And why shouldn't they bear a percentage of the risk of failure of their own counterparty?

What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and AIG? Didn't they almost merge a few years ago but did not because Goldman couldn't get its arms around the black box that is AIG? If that is true, why should Goldman get bailed out? After all, they should have known as well as anybody that a big part of AIG's business model was not to pay on insurance it had issued.

Why weren't the counterparties immediately and fully disclosed?

Failure to answer these questions will feed the populist rage that is metastasizing very quickly. And it will raise basic questions about the competence of those who are supposedly guiding this economic policy.

Eliot Spitzer is the former governor of the state of New York.

Mf

This one is a little more related Hank....

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UP73cK3GXdo

Typed up Barney Frank....hit images....and



Mf

That ain't gonna' happen Hank because Barney is the lefts' icon for puttin' it to the man.<pun intended>

Not to prejudge BF in this photo....butt....maybe he was just telling the young strapping lad...."nice game".

Mf

Here is the best article I've seen explaining how this mess came to be. We need to get past the Democrat/Republican/liberal /conservative bickering. We are all getting screwed. This is a long read but is worth the time.
http://www.rollingstone.com/politics/story/26793903/the_big_takeover/

+1

I can't believe I read the whole thing. Certainly thought provoking.

+2

Had a meeting yesterday, in which a Dr. of Economics tried to tell us that the problem was flawed 'models'.......hooboy

Was it dogfish who coined the term asshattery?