Posted on 03/30/2009 9:45:21 AM PDT by Michael Eden
First we find out that Christ Dodd - the Chairman of the Senate Banking Committee - had received more money from the most slimeball of the big Wall Street players than anyone with the possible exception of now-president Barack Hussein.
Then we find out that Chris Dodd wrote a clause that essentially specifically exempted AIG bonus money in Barack Hussein's stimulus package - but only at the direct behest of Barack Hussein's Treasury Department, Dodd hastened to add.
Now we find out that AIG was basically under the distinct impression (and we can only wonder how they got that impression) that they could basically buy their very own Banking committee chairman by funding Dodd's campaign.
Sen. Chris Dodd, who got more money than anyone from the corrupt and massive failures Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac; Sen. Chris Dodd, who got more money than anyone from now bankrupt and gone-with-the-dodo-bird Lehman Bros.; Sen. Chris Dodd, who got a sweetheart mortgage from corrupt Countrywide who's CEO is now in jail (and who sits at the very top of the Time Magazine's list of who was most responsible for the collapse of our economy).
So here's the story of the day via a little snippet from The Washington Times:
As Democrats prepared to take control of Congress after the 2006 elections, a top boss at the insurance giant American International Group Inc. told colleagues that Sen. Christopher J. Dodd was seeking re-election donations and he implored company executives and their spouses to give.At some point, one would expect the media and the public to start wondering whether Republicans were really the reason that the economy tanked after all, given the fact that so many Democrats - including the man who is now President and the Senate Banking Committee Chairman - were so deeply into the pockets of the biggest players in the financial disaster...The message in the Nov. 17, 2006, e-mail from Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products chief executive, was unmistakable: Mr. Dodd was "next in line" to be chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the insurance industry, and he would "have the opportunity to set the committee's agenda on issues critical to the financial services industry.
"Given his seniority in the Senate, he will also play a key role in the Democratic Majority's leadership," Mr. Cassano wrote in the message, obtained by The Washington Times.
Mr. Dodd's campaign quickly hit pay dirt, collecting more than $160,000 from employees and their spouses at the AIG Financial Products division (AIG-FP) in Wilton, Conn., in the days before he took over as the committee chairman in January 2007. Months later, the senator transferred the donations to jump-start his 2008 presidential bid, which later failed.
Now, two years later, Mr. Dodd has emerged as a central figure in the government's decision to let executives at the now-failing AIG collect more than $218 million in bonuses, according to the Connecticut attorney general - even as the company was receiving billions of dollars in assistance from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). He acknowledged that he slipped a provision into legislation in February that authorized the bonuses, but said the Treasury Department asked him to do it.
Nah. That would take brains and honesty, and both are in extremely limited supply these dark days.
If this gets much more ink, Dodd will have to get under the bus.
You left out HOW HORRENDOUS the scandal really is!
http://www.freerepublic.com/focus/f-bloggers/2218046/posts
>If this gets much more ink, Dodd will have to get under the bus.
He’ll just claim that he was checking out the mechanic’s work. [/cynic]
Lori,
I used the word “excesses” to describe AIG in a previous post, and got so much grief from a guy who claimed up one side and down the other that I was playing “class warfare” that I might have become gun shy.
But you’re right. The more you dig into AIG - and especially its “financial services division” that got into all the derivatives and then handed themselves bonuses rather than inform the public about the losses they had incurred - it starts looking nastier and nastier.
And on top of all that, something like $40 billion in taxpayer money that was SUPPOSED to help them start loaning to US BUSINESSES ended up going to AIG overseas subsidiaries.
Ignore the people who can’t handle the truth they give me heat all the time.
they’re not a bank. the loans to AIG were never for lending but to stop a cascading wave of defaults that would have ocurred had they failed to honor credit default contracts.
Keep in mind that with the legislation of the last years, it is hard to argue just what is a bank and what is a financial services institution. The lines got so blurred they pretty much dissolved all together.
ALL the TARP funds were pretty much intended to prop up the AMERICAN economy, and NOT the economies of other countries.
And more and more people, armed with the benefit of 20/20 hindsight, are realizing that the “cascading wave of defaults” was a crock, and that we’ve just poured hundreds of billions of dollars right down the drain.
I'm sensitive. I curl up into the fetal position and cry when I get heat. It's a good thing I'm not a woman, because my mascara would be running down my face all the time.
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