Thread: AIG SCREWS THE TAXPAYERS

So I am tired of paying taxes for greedy people but if I don't I am totally stuck, I go to jail or lose everything I have worked for!!

Meanwhile AIG people party on our money and we are left screwed!!! I am so mad!!!!

Where does the madness end!!!


Were ALL VICTIMS OF THIS!!!!

Originally Posted by 93camaro

So I am tired of paying taxes for greedy people but if I don't I am totally stuck, I go to jail or lose everything I have worked for!!

Meanwhile AIG people party on our money and we are left screwed!!! I am so mad!!!!

Where does the madness end!!!


Were ALL VICTIMS OF THIS!!!!

I guess it ends when so many of our elected officials don't own shares in it, or we get them all out of office.

Hold on a minute...........

okay, I'm back. Thought I just saw a pig fly past the kitchen window

It is no different than this so called government screwing the American people by forcing us to subsidize trillions of dollars in so called stimuli and bailouts which are political payback for left wing special interests including open borders organizations, unions, big labor, corporations, the chamber of commerce and the Mexican government who will be allowed, encouraged and aided in importing more cheap labor through open borders. These entities (not the American people as the so called dog and pony show of an election was a sham) returned the taxpayer dollar, space and oxygen wasting schmucks to congress and placed one in the oval office.

It's EVEN worse because the bonus's go overseas to AIG's London workers!

What do you think will be the "new Name" for AIG??

You know how Obama loves to change phrases so we forget how we are treated by our Socialist President and his Chicago Mob Playa's.

I would like to get to be paid that kind of money for really screwing things up.

Obama is ticked, something he made clear in a speech earlier today. He said he has instructed Treasury Secy. Geithner to look into any possible legal way to stop this, but the bonus contracts were signed with workers over a year ago. Same time, Atty. General Andrew Cuomo in New York gave AIG until 4 p.m. today to provide all the names and functions of the bonus receivers, otherwise the company would be subpoenaed. Ilike this.

Originally Posted by vortex

Obama is ticked, something he made clear in a speech earlier today. He said he has instructed Treasury Secy. Geithner to look into any possible legal way to stop this, but the bonus contracts were signed with workers over a year ago. Same time, Atty. General Andrew Cuomo in New York gave AIG until 4 p.m. today to provide all the names and functions of the bonus receivers, otherwise the company would be subpoenaed. Ilike this.

Yep I like it too, but as far as contracts go I think that the ones responsible for the failure breached their side of the contract and should not be rewarded for failure!!

WASHINGTON (AP) - President Barack Obama declared Monday that insurance giant American International Group is in financial straits because of "recklessness and greed" and said he intends to stop it from paying out millions in executive bonuses.

"It's hard to understand how derivative traders at AIG warranted any bonuses, much less $165 million in extra pay," Obama said at the outset of an appearance to announce help for small businesses hurt by the deep recession.

"How do they justify this outrage to the taxpayers who are keeping the company afloat," the president said.

Obama spoke out in the wake of reports that surfaced over the weekend saying that financially strapped American International Group Inc. was paying substantial bonuses to executives.

Noting that AIG has "received substantial sums" of federal aid from the federal government, Obama said he has asked Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner "to use that leverage and pursue every legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole."

Said Obama: "All across the country, there are people who work hard and meet their responsibilities every day, without the benefit of government bailouts or multimillion-dollar bonuses. And all they ask is that everyone, from Main Street to Wall Street to Washington, play by the same rules."

"This isn't just a matter of dollars and cents," he added. "It's about our fundamental values."

The $165 million was payable to executives by Sunday and was part of a larger total payout reportedly valued at $450 million. The company has benefited from more than $170 billion in a federal rescue.

AIG reported this month that it had lost $61.7 billion for the fourth quarter of last year, the largest corporate loss in history. The bulk of the payments at issue cover AIG Financial Products, the unit of the company that sold credit default swaps, the risky contracts that caused massive losses for the insurer.

Rep. Barney Frank, chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, earlier Monday charged that the move to pay bonuses amounted to "rewarding incompetence."

"These people may have a right to their bonuses. They don't have a right to their jobs forever," said Frank, a Massachusetts Democrat.

Frank noted that the Federal Reserve Board, using a Depression-era statute, was the institution that gave AIG its initial government bailout, before Congress passed legislation providing for additional assistance and said that not enough safeguards were built into the deal.

It also was revealed over the weekend that American International Group Inc. used more than $90 billion in federal aid to pay out foreign and domestic banks, some of whom had received their own multibillion-dollar U.S. government bailouts.

Some of the biggest recipients of the AIG money were Goldman Sachs at $12.9 billion, and three European banks—France's Societe Generale at $11.9 billion, Germany's Deutsche Bank at $11.8 billion, and Britain's Barclays PLC at $8.5 billion. Merrill Lynch, which also is undergoing federal scrutiny of its bonus plans, received $6.8 billion as of Dec. 31.

The money went to banks to cover their losses on complex mortgage investments, as well as for collateral needed for other transactions.

"We ought to explore everything that we can through the government to make sure that this money is not wasted," said Sen. Richard Shelby, R-Ala. "These people brought this on themselves. Now you're rewarding failure. A lot of these people should be fired, not awarded bonuses. This is horrible. It's outrageous."

Frank said he was disgusted, asserting that "these bonuses are going to people who screwed this thing up enormously."

"Maybe it's time to fire some people," he said. "We can't keep them from getting bonuses but we can keep them from having their jobs. ... In high school, they wouldn't have gotten retention (bonuses), they would have gotten detention."

AIG has agreed to Obama administration requests to restrain future payments. Geithner had pressed the president's case with AIG's chairman, Edward Liddy, last week.

"He stepped in and berated them, got them to reduce the bonuses following every legal means he has to do this," said Austan Goolsbee, staff director of President Barack Obama's Economic Recovery Advisory Board.

Obama did note in his remarks Monday that Liddy "came on board after the contracts that led to these bonuses were agreed to last year."

In an interview that aired Sunday on CBS' "60 Minutes," Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke did not address the bonuses but expressed his frustration with the AIG intervention.

"It makes me angry. I slammed the phone more than a few times on discussing AIG," Bernanke said. "It's—it's just absolutely—I understand why the American people are angry."

In a letter to Geithner dated Saturday, Liddy said outside lawyers had informed the company that AIG had contractual obligations to make the bonus payments and could face lawsuits if it did not do so.

Frank appeared on NBC's "Today" show and Shelby was interviewed on ABC's "Good Morning America."

Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or redistributed.

Per interview with Maria Bartiromo on CNBC, Cuomo said AIG had not responded to his request by the 4 p.m. deadline, and subpoenas are going out the door as of 4:30 today!

Don't lose sight of the big picture.

Media is ignoring coverage of tax protester groups (which might tend to be Constitutionalist leaning people) -- such as LA Times ignoring the 8,000 - 15,000 who showed up to protest in Fullerton, CA.

At the same time, the same LA Times (owned by same parent group that owns the Chicago Tribune) gave advance coverage to A.N.S.W.E.R. and its "plans" to do a protest about the AIG executives getting bonuses from bailout money, which will then become (also) a generally anti-Iraq war protest marking year 6 of the Bush-decided invasion.

Hmmm ... let's think this through logically.

A.N.S.W.E.R. probably bashes capitalism in general, and says that free markets are a "failure" and a buncha hogwash.

The people from the Fullerton rally group WHO ACTUALLY SHOWED UP to protest taxation (but got ignored) point their fingers of blame at the government for voting for insane bailout bills in the first place. And most likely, they aren't people who are anti-private business across the board. Small to mid-sized businessesa actually employ 70% of the labor force of this country. If their owners aren't so OVERTAXED that they just give up to get out from under the hassles of making products, selling products, meeting payroll and worrying night and day about their responsibilities. They're the kind of Mom'n'Pop firms that populate the National Federation of Independent Businesses, which is no multinationalist-dominated National Association of Manufacturers. Multinational big businesses are a whole different beast, ready to export jobs in a heartbeat.

The problem is not free markets. Or private business.

The problem is BIG -- BIG government and lobbyist-indebted politicians acting in collusion with BIG business (especially behemoth banks and finance sector outfits) to screw over the "net positive" contributing people who work, or who entrepreneur and employ others, and pay taxes disproportionately. In the past 10 years, Wall St. firms have funneled $5 billion toward D.C. -- close to $2 billion in campaign support for the pols and $3 billion to support lobbyists and lobbying-law-firms.

The lowest 40% of American wage-earners don't pay federal taxes at all, but are hit with Ponzi scheme payroll taxes for Social Security, and hurt by all the little gimmicky taxes (phone, excise, sale taxes).

The highest elites in the billionaire category are like Warren Buffet who figured that his taxes only ran 17% a year ago because he derives his billions of revenue flow from lower-taxed investments and is way beyond the cutoffs where payroll taxes (paid by everybody) are going to mean anything to him as a percentage of what he makes in a year. (He's probably not on a wage-earning payroll at all.)

Other super-wealthy have figured out loopholes and charitable foundations and LLCs that handle their lifestyles with little tax impact.

So as Obama -- who voted for the TARP !!! just like McCain did too! -- now points fingers at AIG bonuses, don't lose sight of what's really been going on.

It's like an alcoholic who has an "enabler" with the politicians and their beneficiaries. Real circle of greed.

AIG says it has used $90 billion of the $160 billion given to it by TARP, and nearly $13 billion of that has gone just to Goldman Sachs alone. The same place that produced the new Treasury Secretary Geithner and the old Treasury Secretary Paulson, and key Obama finance advisor Bob Rubin and ... etc. etc. And other big chunks went to foreign banks like Germany's Deutsche Bank, and England's Barclay's Bank etc. I'd heard that Clinton's ex-Treasury Secretary Rubin (an Obama campaign advisor and leading Wall St. "donation bundler" who is now at Citigroup but ex-Goldman Sachs, and who with Greenspan lobbied for repeal of Glass-Steagal act protections for investors, and others made sure the fix was in for AIG because Goldman Sachs was an AIG "trading partner" on some of these swaps and derivatives deals to the tune of $20 billion, and that was last fall!

Sure enough, today's news about who got what from AIG confirms $13 billion of that $20 billion exposure came from public coffers. What's really irritating is that the current CEO of Goldman Sachs was DENYING any exposure by Goldman to AIG's woes last fall! Talk about a LIE!

Millions in executive bonuses isn't chump change, standing alone, but in the bigger picture of things -- $700 billion of TARP and over a Trillion in extensions of cash infusions from the Fed to certain banks -- it's a drop in the bucket.

Class hatred and generic anti-business hatred is being stirred up, and there's a clever deflection by Obama and business-bashers of where the real blame should go.

Blame should be aimed at BIG. Government and its favored/protected and bailed out BIG allies on Wall Street.