Just when I thought I was done talking about how AIG had ruined my birthday, news came out today about the March bonuses from those “Rooskie Batards” over at AIG. It seems that as more bookkeeping paperwork has come out it seems that the 180 million dollars in bonus money that went to high ranking employees is actually more like 454 million dollars.
454 million dollars that is almost four times the amount that caused people to take to the streets. Rep. Elijah Cummings (D-MD) had this to say.
"I simply cannot fathom why this company continues to erode the trust of the public and the
I will bring the pitchforks if one of you guys brings the torches and I will meet you on Wall Street.
Moving with the speed of the Flash the House passed a bill today that would heavily tax bonuses given to employees in companies that have received bailout funds. The bill if it passes will impose a 90% tax on bonuses given to employees with family incomes greater than 250,000 dollars. Clearly this bill is an arrow pointed at AIG executives who just cashed their collective 165 million dollar retention bonus checks this week. Nancy Pelosi was quoted saying “We want our money back now for the tax payers!”
I should be happy right? I mean anyone who has read this blog in the past few months knows the outrage I have felt over AIG and their shenanigans. Finally they are getting hit with a sock full of nickels right in the mouth. This is what we wanted, the money back, right? I should be happy!
But you know what, I ain’t! This is wrong! Maybe not as wrong as AIG wrong (Cause they are REALLY wrong) but this is still a little wrong. And two wrongs don’t make it right.
The bill passed in the house today with a vote of 328-93. 243 democrats and 85 Republicans voting yes and 6 Democrats and 87 Republicans no. I really need for this to get voted down in the Senate.
I get it, we are all upset and yes we want the money back, but this whole taxing one group of folks specifically screams abuse of power to me. And while I love my country I am always honest about her. We are a young country; we are teenagers with daddy’s car keys and a learner’s permit. There is nothing I can point to in our history and say with any confidence that this step we are about to take is one we can handle with any real responsible.
I welcome any debate that anyone has. Prove me wrong, talk me down. I don’t really have an answer as to what we should do, but I know what we should not…..
I was a little nervous about putting references to monkeys in this blog entry but then I thought, hey if anyone accuses me of calling someone out their name I will just add myself to the “Sorry” list. But I digress….
Amid my slight fever yesterday I managed to tune into CSPAN and watch Ed Liddy be taken to task by congress over the AIG bonuses. As the proceedings went on one thing became very clear. If I were to trust Ed Liddy (yeah right) then every adult I encountered growing up has lied to me. See I had always been taught that “One monkey don’t stop no show!” But apparently that is not the case.
As Mr. Liddy continued to defend the 165 million in retention bonuses he made it quite clear that the same people who twisted this Gordian knot are the ”only”
people who can understand it and the only people who can untie it. They are for all intents and purposes irreplaceable. In other words all those old black folks whose knee I sat at and took in life lessons were wrong; one monkey can indeed stop a show.
Apparently blackmail is only illegal everywhere except Wall Street.
Here’s how I’m going to spend my St. Patrick’s day:
Tuesday morning, 3/17, I’m going to hop the Chinatown bus in Philly and travel up to NYC. My destination is somewhere around 70 Pine St., which is the location of the AIG building in the financial district of NYC. I expect to be there well before lunchtime.
I don’t know precisely where I’ll be hanging out (wherever security or the NYPD won’t run me off, hopefully), but if I get the opportunity I’ll try to update this post with an exact location. If you’re in NYC and feel moved to join me, stop by and say hello to the guy in a black leather jacket holding a poster board sign.
Someone’s gotta start it, and it’s not like I don’t have the time, if you know what I mean."
Fears about AIG bonuses may be bigger than people realize......
For the last day I have been combing the various news sites for information about the AIG bonuses and I have to say I am a little worried. A lot of stories on the news shows this morning and the news last night is about
Everyone is looking at this from a very clean sterile academic view, but that is not the world we live in. We live in a world where there is an actual term for someone going to work and shooting up the place. We live in a world where people make the decision to kill themselves and their families to keep them from suffering because they are at the end of there rope and don’t see another way out. For all intents and purposes we live in a world full of powederkegs.
Now let me state for the record I am not advocating violence or full scale civil unrest at all. In fact I am still asking people to contact their political representatives and voice their displeasure and ask for the money back. My fear however is that before the week is over some executive coming or going from the AIG building will meet some form of violent end. People (not numbers, not figures, actual people) with real bills and real problems are angry, tired, and frustrated, and probably very tired of hearing the term “Too big to fail”.
Everyone who reports about this story repeats the same line that these bonuses are not that big, that they are necessary to keep quality people, they these things were negotiated before the great financial crisis. But when you have been laid off from your job and you or trying to stretch a unemployment check, when 700 + people all apply for a janitor job, all this sounds like is jabber jabber jabber, or more specifically, once again the white collar is so much more important than the blue collar.
Stating once again, I hope and pray that my imagination is just running away with me but I also know you can only push people so far and sell them so much bull before you get a dangerous, uncontrolled, and illogical reaction.
Though it seems so much longer it has been exactly 6 months since the economy officially took a nose dive and we the tax payers of the
The top executives at AIG will be taking home bonus checks totaling around 65 million dollars. These “retention” bonuses were promised last year and are necessary in order to keep the cream of the crop put at AIG; otherwise they may pick up and move to another bank/financial institute down the street. After a lot of back and forth between Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner and AIG CEO Edward Liddy it was determined that these bonuses had to be paid so that legal action was not brought up against AIG by employees for breach of contract. It has also been determined that the
So essentially the same people who ran AIG into the ground and helped cause the modern day recession not only get off scot free but they get paid for doing the bad job that got us here! Now maybe it is just me, but that only makes sense in Bizarro opposite world.
I am pleading with everyone who reads this to do more than just get mad, I need you to do something. Included in this email is a website. The website will give you the website of each and every state representative that you send to DC to work for you. PLEASE!!!!! We need to write, email, call, send smoke signals…whatever it takes to get the message across that Wall Street can’t keep pissing in our faces and telling us it’s just rain, while they laugh themselves silly with our money. Tell them that we did not cough up 170 billion dollars that we didn’t have so they could party, entertain, and continue to live high on the hog while we continue to cut back and scrimp and try to make ends meet. Tell them that if they have no legal standing on how our money is used then you know what, we just need to have our money back.
Find your Representative.
Full story with all the disturbing facts.
It seems that the realities of the various situations are starting to hit home for some of those with big pockets. Last week Richard Wagoner, CEO of General Motors, appeared before Congress. He was joined by the CEO’s of Ford, Alan Mullay, and Chrysler Robert Nadelli as they sat with top hat in hand and requested a financial bailout t the sum total of 25 billion dollars. Too bad Congress saw them coming...literally.
The three big wigs all arrived in DC via their own separate private jets and they were immediately roasted by the panel of Congressmen like in flight peanuts. With the many transgressions of AIG and the egg on the face feeling many people on the hill have behind that fiasco, it was made clear very quickly that this was the very type of behavior that was unacceptable.
Well Richard Wagoner clearly got the message and his office has announced that when he returns to
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 16th 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!”
