AIG Fiasco Represents Essence Of Democrats' Corruption

Start Thinking Right ^ | March 20, 2009 | Michael Eden

[Michael Eden]

The mainstream media is reporting the fiasco over a company receiving tens of billions of dollars to avoid bankruptcy paying out $163 million in bonuses to their executives as "Republicans and Democrats trying to outdo one another in being outraged." What most of the media is not telling you is that Democrats are 100% responsible for the AIG bonus fiasco.

One hundred percent.

The place to begin is the first thread that began to unravel. From CNN:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- Democratic leaders scrambling to strip AIG executives of bonuses are having a hard time answering a key question: Why didn't Congress act to prevent the bonuses in the first place?

Sen. Chris Dodd says he has no idea how the exemption clause got inserted into the recent stimulus bill.

"There's always more we can do, and hindsight is 20/20," said Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid Tuesday.

But though some lawmakers did move to prevent bonuses in the stimulus bill last month, the final language actually makes an exception for pre-existing contracts, effectively exempting AIG.

Senate Banking Committee Chairman Chris Dodd, D-Connecticut, who originally proposed the executive compensation provision, said he did not include the exemption clause, which said new rules "shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009."

In an interview with CNN, Dodd denied inserting that exemption at the 11th hour, and insisted he doesn't know how it got there.

"When I wrote the language there was no such language like that," Dodd told CNN Tuesday.

Multiple Senate Democratic leadership sources also deny knowing how the exemption got into the bill.

But that was a colossal lie which didn't last long. From the Christian Science Monitor:

After first denying a role, Sen. Christopher Dodd (D) of Connecticut confirmed to CNN on Wednesday night that he had added language to last month’s $787 billion stimulus bill that allowed American International Group to give $165 million in “retention bonuses” to employees.

On Thursday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner confirmed, also to CNN, that his department had asked Senator Dodd to include the enabling language in the bill.

The Connecticut-based insurance giant, now owned 80 percent by the federal government, has been on the receiving end of $182 billion in taxpayer funding.

So now we know that the Obama administration, via the Treasury Department, asked Chris Dodd to essentially write language protecting AIG. From the perspectives of the White House, the Treasury, and the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, the only problem is that they got caught.

Obama and Dodd took more campaign contributions from AIG than anybody. And now these weasel hypocrites actually have the audacity to blame AIG for giving them money - which they kept and used to defeat their political opponents.

“While AIG was collapsing, and her executives crawling to DC with hat in hand,” said Sen. Dodd, D-CT, “my campaign, and then-Senator Obama’s were getting what can only be termed influence bonuses from the same firm. Naturally, I knew nothing about this, and I’m now seething with anger at the injustice.”

President Obama and Sen. Dodd were the two largest recipients of campaign contributions from the beleaguered company, and the only politicians to garner six-figure amounts from AIG in 2008 — $103,100 for Sen. Dodd and $100,332 for presidential candidate Obama.

This is the picture of raw, naked, distilled chutzpah. And it defines who these liberals are. "It's not OUR faults we accepted AIG bribe money! It's that nasty AIG's fault! We were just innocent pawns in all of us."

And it wasn't Obama's fault that he accepted a sweetheart real estate deal from convicted swindler Tony Rezko; and it wasn't Dodd's fault that he accepted a sweetheart mortgage deal from convicted Countrywide CEO Angelo Mozillo.

I saw that vile hypocrisy the day that Obama - caught red-handed in a racist, anti-American church where he had spent 23 years - used the occasion to deliver a patronizing sermon on race relations that the mainstream media stumbled all over themselves to announce as more sacred than the Gettysburg Address. This is just more of the exact same weasel hypocrisy brought to a different venue.

Barack Obama and Chris Dodd are quivering, gelatinous piles of diarhea packaged and marketed in a glossy-slick coating of deceit and demagoguery. And that is all they ever were.

Like every smart corrupt swindler, Barack Obama had fall guys. In this case, he had two apes to do his bidding: Timothy Geithner and Chris Dodd.

Dodd's role we've already explored. But tax cheating Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner's case is almost as nauseous. From Propublica:

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner insists that he didn’t know the timing or size of the AIG retention bonuses that have caused so much fury over the last few days.

This is what he told The Washington Post:

"I was stunned when I learned how bad this was on Tuesday [March 10]," Geithner said. "I shouldn't have been in that position, but it's my responsibility and I accept that."

Turbo Tax Tim Geithner says he had no idea what was going on, but it was his own Treasury Department staff that asked for the word change to protect AIG. From the Wall Street Journal:

WASHINGTON -- A provision in President Barack Obama's stimulus law might have forestalled payment of $165 million in bonuses to employees of American International Group Inc., but was altered before final passage at the request of the Obama administration, Senate Banking Committee Chairman Christopher Dodd said Wednesday night...

...The Obama administration had not tried to hide its concern about the moves to clamp down on executive compensation. Both Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers lobbied Mr. Dodd to make changes.

And to quote Greta Van Sustern of Fox News:

"Tim Geithner has only been our Treasury Secretary for less than two months, but as the president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, he was one of the architects of last September's bailout of AIG. And some say that's the problem. Yes, he helped save AIG, but why didn't he stop these multi- million-dollar bonuses?"

So Timothy Geithner, the tax cheat Obama handpicked to run the Treasury Department, is just another guy who has his fingerprints all over this collosal fiasco who is now saying, "Don't look at me! I didn't have anything to do with anything!" The fact that he is specifically mentioned as approaching Chris Dodd on behalf of his boss Barry Hussein, and the fact that he was the central figure who came up with the AIG bailout in the first place, just gets thrown away with the argument, "Are you going to believe me, or are you going to believe your lying eyes?"

The $165 million in bonuses is trivial for the simple reason that the government has blown so many trillions that a couple hundred million is chicken feed. Getting angry about that is the equivalent of becoming furious at a mole hill of scandal while ignoring the mountain of scandal it is sitting on.

Get angry at Barack Obama. Get angry at Chris Dodd. Get angry at Timothy Geithner. Get angry at the Democrats who rammed this porkulus - YES! REPUBLICANS WERE CALLING IT FOR WHAT IT WAS ALL ALONG! - down our collective throats. After piously describing how open and non-partisan the Obama administration would be, Republicans were completely shut out of the porkulus bill, and the final version was submitted with such secrecy that even speed-reading champ Evelyn Wood could not possibly have finished reading it before the vote was taken. And the result is all kinds of little bombs like the AIG bonuses that nobody got to know about.

The politicians who can be demonstrated to have been in the pockets of AIG asked and wrote language in their own damn stimulus bill to protect AIG. It's as clear as day.

This isn't about AIG; it's about Democrats. THEY are the ones responsible for this fiasco, and for all their self-righteous after-the-fact outrage, they are the ones who should be held to account for this mess that they created.

The media is making this all about the $165 million in bonus money that AIG paid out (not mentioning that they did so under the protection of Chris Dodd, Timothy Geithner, Barack Obama, and every Democrat who voted for the stimulus bill, of course). It is part of the hard-left's agenda to demonize big business, and that is how they are covering this story. They do not want you to know about the Democrat's role in this fiasco. And they also don't appear to want you to know that fully $40 billion in government bailout money to AIG actually went to foreign banks, and not to the US economy. Given that the bonus money doesn't even amount to a meaningful fraction of 1% of this far greater disgrace, shouldn't that be covered?

I am reminded of the scene from 1984 in which the citizens of Oceania were gathered together for their mandatory "Two Minutes Hate" to direct the people's rage at the target of the government's choosing. Once the anger was purged from their systems, they could go back to being passive tools for Big Brother.

Don't get mad at the "Two Minutes Hate" target that the liberal media has set up for you to take attention away from the liberals who are really to blame; get mad at the people whose policies created the fiasco. Get mad at the Democrats who pulled the strings for the AIG mess.

[Vn_survivor_67-68]

meanwhile, gummint kills another little bank:

FDIC Says FirstCity Bank In Stockbridge, Ga., Closed
Last update: 3/20/2009 6:33:24 PM
WASHINGTON (Dow Jones)—A Georgia bank was closed Friday, a regulator said.
FirstCity Bank in Stockbridge was closed by the Georgia Department of Banking and Finance, according to the Federal Deposit Insurance Corp.
The FDIC was named as receiver.
As of Wednesday, FirstCity had total assets of $297 million, with total deposits of $278 million.
It was the 18th U.S. bank closed this year, the FDIC said.

[phatus maximus]

Maybe if these mush heads would actually slow down and read, discuss and understand a tenth of the legislation they “have to pass or disaster will ensue” none of them would have to be backtracking so often...

There I go again, thinking politicians, particularly DFL, give a rats hiney about ethics and good sensible legislation...just as long as it soothes those feelings of the people the sensibility of law not needed...

[Uncle Miltie]

Who is Hank Greenberg?

[Michael Eden]

I don’t know why you ask me, given that I don’t mention him in this article, but he is a founder of AIG, and a former chairman.

There appears to be a move to hold him responsible - but this is coming from the SAME people who say Bush is entirely to blame for the bad economy because it collapsed under his watch. Things were going great at AIG at the time that Greenberg retired. So the libs who are trying to attack Greenberg - and in a backhanded way attack Bush and absolve Obama, suffer from a massive case of hypocrisy.

Greenberg has repeatedtly publicly said he did not believe in the kinds of bonuses paid out to AIG execs, and would NOT have approved them.

And the point of my article is not to examine AIG corporate culture and blame this exec versus that. Rather, it is to show that Democrats specifically inserted language into the stimulus bill (the one Republicans voted against and had nothing to do with) protecting and enabling AIG bonuses.

[bitterohiogunclinger]

“Barack Obama and Chris Dodd are quivering, gelatinous piles of diarhea packaged and marketed in a glossy-slick coating of deceit and demagoguery. And that is all they ever were.”
You're not being fair to diarrhea.

[Michael Eden]

You're not being fair to diarrhea

- - -

One day, I believe, a child will squirt runny poop out of his little butt and his concerned mother will ask,

"DO YOU HAVE OBAMA AGAIN?"

[Uncle Miltie]

I was asking in the vein of:

“Who is John Galt?”

Greenberg having been improperly chased from AIG by the government, and the results having occured after he left. Had Greenberg remained, would AIG be in this fix? I don’t know. But the Greenberg / Galt analogy bears further exploration.

[Michael Eden]

Gotcha.

Glad to hear we’re on the same page. I’m not a huge fan of most of Ayn Rand’s philosophy, but her Atlas Shrugged rightly understood the gigantic chasm pitfalls that liberalism would reduce this country into.

I don’t know if Greenberg would have been able to steer AIG away from this disaster or not (it depends on how risk averse he was versus a determination to maximize profits). But I DO know that the people pointing a finger at Greenberg have a hidden agenda.

Based on what I’ve seen from Greenberg’s interviews, he has held up pretty well against his detractors.

[ding_dong_daddy_from_dumas]

[Michael Eden]

That’s pretty good.

But to truly understand what happened, we really need a middle panel between the two shown.

In the middle panel, the “Congress” dog (an insult to dogs, btw) says, “Here, let me get the key for you” while reaching under the mat and wagging his tail.

These friggin’ Democrats are so morally bankrupt and so full of hypocrisy it is beyond insane. And yet because of continual biased coverage they are allowed to get away with the most vile crap over and over and over again.