AIG ruined my Birthday!!!!!

I don’t know why this bothers me as much as it does. It is almost to the point that it makes me sick. Maybe it’s personal, maybe it’s because all this went down on my birthday this year, that is probably it. AIG has become the bane of my existence. For those not in the know, AIG on September 16^th was on the brink of financial ruin so our government stepped in and provided an aid package in the form of an 85 billion dollar loan.

Ok AIG is one of those interwoven finger in a lot of pies type businesses. If AIG closes it takes a lot of banks and other businesses around the world down with it. I get that. I think something should be put in place to prevent any other company from ever becoming that powerful but that is a fight for a later day. So AIG closing its door would be a bad thing.

A week after we signed over the check the top Executives of AIG took a preplanned week long vacation that cost a little under half a million dollars. I want to stress that this weekend was planned before everything went to shit. Having said that, why was this weekend not cancelled? I mean had these executives worked that hard unrealizing their debt that got us to the need to the bailout in the first place they needed a thousand dollar massage?

Yes a couple of weeks later AIG executives were called up to the hill to answer questions. I sat for two hours and watched this on CSPAN. All it did was piss me off some more. These suits would have you believe that AIG’s financial crisis just appeared out of nowhere. Meanwhile they are giving themselves bonuses and paying former CEOs a million dollars a month to keep them on retainer in case someone needs to call and ask them a question. Yeah, a million dollars a month to sit by the phone in case someone needs to ask you something your former secretary probably knows where to find the answer. A week later AIG got 37 billion more dollars.

Today AIG gets another bailout. Seems the third quarter report came in and AIG has taken a huge hit as Revenue declined 97 percent to $898 million from $29.84 billion in the third quarter of 2007. 40 billion more going to AIG as a rescue.

Again I do understand how large AIG is and how overly connected it is. Having said that perhaps it is time to take the patient off life support. Harvest the organs for where they can be used elsewhere and let the patient go on to its reward. In less than two months we have shoved almost 200 billion dollars down this hole and there does not seem to be any end in sight.

I did something a few weeks ago I had never done before , I wrote my Congressman about this and if you are as upset as I am I think you should as well. I will be writing him again today and maybe tomorrow and possibly the day after that. In this new post 2008 Election Day we need to get on the bus early as far as getting involved and making our voices heard. And my voice says “No more money for you!”