Free Republic

Once upon a time in America, baseball was not only the National Pastime but also the national obsession, an idyl of summer. Every town and city had a team. Abbott and Costello made their bones with their classic routine "Who's on First?" Baseball was the great equalizer on sandlot and ballpark. Everybody knew the words to "Take Me Out to the Ball Game," and everybody shared in the enthusiasm for the home team. Baseball was the great equalizer for Jews in the common excitement of the sports culture, as it eventually would be for blacks and Hispanics. But Detroit fans...

big donations from Wall Street to Bush's super PAC Right to Rise dropped by 85 percent in the second half of 2015. Funding would've plummeted to 95 percent if not for the $10 million gift from former AIG CEO Hank Greenberg. . . Wall Street donors now appear to be backing Sen. Marco Rubio and Ohio Gov. John Kasich.

If there were any doubt that Eliot “Client 9” Spitzer has spiraled down into further delusion and irrelevance, it was erased Friday afternoon in an embarrassing and bizarre shootout between the disgraced former NY Attorney General and CNBC’s Maria Bartiromo. At issue were allegations that a trove of private emails may exist showing the former purchaser of high-priced prostitutes launched a personally motivated prosecution against former AIG chief Hank Greenberg. Of the eight charges Spitzer brought against Greenberg, six have been dropped, with the last two in the process of being dismissed, according to Greenberg’s lawyer. Still, throughout the interview...

According to Richard Holbrooke, Richard Holbrooke is essentially this country's top diplomat -- Hillary Clinton is merely his "pupil. This despite the fact that Holbrooke has hit the trifecta of shady business dealings over the last few years: a member of AIG's board with more than $800,000 in compensation, a managing director at Lehman Brothers, and the recipient of a "Friends of Angelo" loan from Countrywide (that alone was enough to get Jim Johnson thrown under the Obama campaign bus). Now comes another revelation from the New York Times. Despite repeated denials, according to three sources, Holbrooke did offer former...

AIG lawyer: Ex-top exec plundered retirement plan By MADLEN READ The Associated Press Monday, June 15, 2009; 9:35 PM NEW YORK -- The former top executive of American International Group Inc. plundered an AIG retirement program of billions of dollars because he was angry at being forced out of the company, a lawyer for AIG told jurors Monday at the start of a civil trial. Attorney Theodore Wells told the jury in Manhattan that former AIG Chief Executive Officer Maurice "Hank" Greenberg improperly took $4.3 billion in stock from the company in 2005, after he was ousted by the company...

EXCLUSIVE AIG is trying to seize a $490M charitable endowment -- and claw back $27M it gave charities -- to pay executive bonuses......... back in the 70s, AIG co-founders set up their own offshore piggy bank -- and seeded it with stock shares that would build up nest eggs and bonuses for retiring AIG execs. Legal experts say that if AIG wins, it would have the right to sue to claw back some of the $27M already awarded to charities. The US govt owns nearly 80% of AIG via the Treasury's $70B cash infusion and loans for up to $85B....

SO maybe Eliot Spitzer did kill AIG, after all. Nobody doubts the in surance giant is basically kaput, or that the promix ate cause is billions in losses in obscure instruments known as credit-default swaps, or CDSs. But American International Group didn't go deadly deep into CDSs until after New York Attorney General Spitzer had forced out Maurice "Hank" Greenberg out as CEO. GO back to March 2005, just days after Spitzer scored his biggest scalp during his eight-year tenure as the Sheriff of Wall Street by compelling Greenberg's departure. The new CEO, long-time AIG executive Martin Sullivan, held an...

SO maybe Eliot Spitzer did kill AIG, after all. Nobody doubts the in surance giant is basically kaput, or that the promix ate cause is billions in losses in obscure instruments known as credit-default swaps, or CDSs. But American International Group didn't go deadly deep into CDSs until after New York Attorney General Spitzer had forced out Maurice "Hank" Greenberg out as CEO. GO back to March 2005, just days after Spitzer scored his biggest scalp during his eight-year tenure as the Sheriff of Wall Street by compelling Greenberg's departure. The new CEO, long-time AIG executive Martin Sullivan, held an...

Former AIG chief executive officer Hank Greenberg said the company under his leadership never had the kind of retention bonus system that has subjected it to withering criticism. "When I was there, nobody had a contract with the company, including me," Greenberg said in a nationally broadcast interview Friday. "If you didn't do the job, you didn't deserve to be there. We had a bonus plan based on performance." Greenberg's interview was broadcast on CBS's "The Early Show" a day after the Democratic-led House approved a bill that would impose punitive taxes on big employee bonuses from AIG and other...

> Maurice "Hank" Greenberg, 83, claimed in papers filed in federal court in Manhattan Monday that the company, once the world's largest insurer, has ruined his fortune by lying about its financial health. >

The worst economic turmoil since the Great Depression is not a natural phenomenon but a man-made disaster in which we all played a part.In the second part of a week-long series looking behind the slump,Guardian City editor Julia Finch picks out the individuals who have led us into the current crisis Alan Greenspan, chairman of US Federal Reserve 1987- 2006Only a couple of years ago the long-serving chairman of the Fed, a committed free marketeer who had steered the US economy through crises ranging from the 1987 stockmarket collapse through to the aftermath of the 9/11 attacks, was lauded with...

NEW YORK (Reuters) - Former American International Group Inc (AIG.N) Chief Executive Maurice "Hank" Greenberg said on Tuesday the U.S. government support for the giant insurer will have to continue until the hobbled company is back on its feet.

http://news.independent.co.uk/business/news/article334117.ece