The outrage over the AIG “outrage”
As if your blood wasn’t boiling enough over this issue, Jim VandeHei at The Politico promises to make it rise even more with this one:
President Barack Obama and everyone else in Washington is in a sprint for the microphones to express outrage at the big bonuses for the knuckleheads who screwed up American International Group and threaten to do the same to the rest of the economy.
Obama wants to take every legal step possible to kill the bonuses. Sen. Chuck Grassley (R-Iowa) wants the AIG executives to consider killing not just the bonuses but themselves, too.
Here’s something neither Obama nor Grassley answered in their bellicose remarks Monday: Why did it take so long for the president and senior lawmakers to get so worked up? More troubling, why did it take so long for them to discover AIG planned to give huge bonuses in the first place?
Watching the coverage the past 24 hours, it would seem AIG just made public its plans to give top employees big bonuses. Wrong.
AIG disclosed its retention-bonus program more than a year ago, including bonuses directed to those handling the exotic derivatives that got the company and the country into this mess.
The bonuses were essentially a nonissue when AIG got its initial bailout money, almost $150 billion under President Bush in the two months surrounding the presidential election. Joe Biden, then the vice presidential nominee, came out strongly against the bailout. Obama did not.
Timothy Geithner, then at the New York branch of the Federal Reserve, was a huge proponent and architect of the AIG bailout. So if Obama had strong private opposition to the idea it did not affect his pick for the person who would oversee all bailouts.
The bonuses were again a nonissue when Obama himself increased the bailout to $173 billion last month.
It’s not like Republicans were any quicker to stop this impending “outrage.” Grassley might want AIG employees to seriously think about suicide now but the Iowa senator, who has been the senior Republican on the Senate Finance Committee for nearly a decade, was seemingly unaware of AIG’s publicly announced plans.
And of course, let’s not forget Chris Dodd’s “outrage” over the bonuses when he had a very large role to play in making it so they were ‘protected’ in the first place. Whether or not you support the bonuses being paid out, you’ve got to want to throw something at the wall after listening to his duplicity on this issue, which reminds me of his “outrage” over the collapse of FM/FM in spite of the significant role he and many other Democrats played in enabling our economic collapse last year.
What’s the latest “solution” proposed by Democrat “leaders” in Congress? Tax the bonuses, w/ Rep. Carolyn Maloney saying they should be taxed at 100%.
It’s hard to know what to say about all this that hasn’t already been said by others. I just know it stinks that the American people are stuck – once again – with having to trust the same party to “get it right” that got it so damn wrong in the first place.
Can we just kick everyone out and start all over again?