Thread: A. I. G. ~ Arrogance Incompetence & Greed

Arrogance Incompetence & Greed

Jim Kirwan
3-19-9

Arrogance Incompetence & Greed is the definition of AIG, and everything that so-called company supposedly stands for. This is a present-tense comment because this problem is not only still here, it's growing!

One day shy of just two months in office, the abject failures of the Obamanation coup are already becoming clear. Obama needs to be called back from his favorite occupation of 'master of the campaign trail' to fire Timothy Geithner, along with Ben Bernanke who is the fraudulent head of the Federal Reserve System; along with everyone else in his "cabinet" and the White House that are attempting to serve two masters.

"The collusion to save this toxic company [AIG] in order to salvage the rogue financiers who conspired to enrich themselves by impoverishing millions is being revealed as the greatest financial scandal in U.S. history. Instead of taking bonuses, the culprits should be taking perp walks.

I'm not just referring to the swindlers in the Financial Products Subsidiary of AIG who devised and sold those insurance policies on derivatives that brought the world economy to its knees. They do seem deserving of a special place in hell, and presumably the same divine power that according to Scripture labeled usury a high moral crime and threw the money-changers out of the temple will consider that outcome.

However, the enablers are the AIG leaders who, as New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo revealed Tuesday, signed those bonus contracts a year ago to reward the very people "principally responsible for the firm's meltdown." That's a cool $44 million divided among the top 10 shysters, even though the depth of their chicanery was well known to top management.

But the $165 million in taxpayer funds used to reward them is but a sideshow in a far larger drama of moral decay swirling around the banking bailout. It should not distract from the many billions, not paltry millions, of our dollars being diverted to reward the very folks who brought us such misery. Consider the $12.8 billion of the $170 billion that taxpayers gave AIG in bailout funds that AIG then secretly diverted to Goldman Sachs, a company that evidently has a lock on both the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve no matter which political party is in power. It was the biggest payoff among those that AIG made to a score of foreign and domestic financial giants.

The bailout is a response to a banking crisis that resulted from the radical deregulation pushed by former Goldman Sachs honcho Robert Rubin when he was President Clinton's treasury secretary. Another Goldman Sachs chairman-turned-treasury-secretary, Henry Paulson, in the Bush administration designed the trillion-dollar bank bailout that will go down as the greatest swindle in U.S. history.
It was because of Paulson that AIG was saved from bankruptcy hours after Goldman rival Lehman Brothers was allowed to go down the drain. Why that reversal of strategy in a top-secret meeting called by then New York Fed Chair Timothy Geithner, a Rubin protégé and now Barack Obama's treasury secretary? Why was Goldman's Lloyd Blankfein the only financial industry CEO in attendance? When that news leaked out, his role was defended as that of a noninvolved concerned citizen with expert knowledge, and whose firm had no direct monetary stake in the outcome.

That was a lie.

Goldman Sachs was into AIG insurance policies for at least $20 billion, which is why the firm got that $12.8 billion while Paulson was in charge. It took six months for the embarrassing facts to finally come out. The bailout program was administered by Neel Kashkari, a former Goldman Sachs VP; why are we not surprised at that?" (1)

This is only one of the most obvious failures. Since the beginning of these attempted public extortions, way back in September of last year, there have been at least three, if not more, of these massive wealth-transfers from the public to the Banksters inside this disease. "Saying that the recession continues to deepen, the Federal Reserve announced Wednesday that it would pump an extra $1.2 trillion into the mortgage market and longer-term Treasury securities in order to revive the economy. The idea was to encourage more economic activity by lowering interest rates, including those on home loans, and to help the financial system as it struggles under the crushing weight of bad loans and poor investments." (2)

They've already done this time after time, and always with the same stated goal of unclogging the "frozen credit markets." Yet nothing has moved as far as access to loans is concerned: Despite having now spent over 3 Trillion dollars of our money on this; yet the bonuses and the takeover's of other institutions, using the illicit bailout funds, continue unabated. The upshot of all these trillions that are being added to the national debt, behind the closed and ultra-private doors of the Federal Reserve have made the case for fraud and grand theft on a scale never contemplated by anyone before the New World Order began this campaign to break the world; in order to create their New World Bank as the only viable solution to the impending global meltdown.

A small footnote to all of this could be in this paragraph that leaked out of Iraq today.

"The Iraqi government has hinted at further concessions for international oil corporations operating in Iraq. On Wednesday, Iraq's oil minister told an OPEC gathering in Vienna that Iraq will consider granting foreign companies a share in oil production profits, rather than the current system of receiving fixed fees. Earlier this year, Iraq raised the amount foreign companies can recoup from oil projects from 49 percent to 75 percent.

Now we can withdraw from Iraq with dishonor, because the illegal invasion of Iraq has now almost given us over 75% of Iraq's oil, and it only took us six years, hundreds of thousands of damaged or dead Americans and well over another $3 trillion, not on the books, to achieve this war-crime that greatly enhances the Corporatocracy's holdings of other people's resources. I'd bet money that this doesn't make any local news headlines in USA Inc.

Obama's 'job' throughout this entire series of continued criminal thefts of the public's money, was supposed to serve the American public by defending and protecting the Constitution (and the laws of this Republic), against all enemies both foreign and domestic-nothing else counts. If our Shadow-leader cannot do this then he should resign or be impeached-immediately.

kirwanstudios@sbcglobal.net

1) Perp Walks instead of Bonuses
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-sc ... 76145.html

2) Fed plans to inject another $1Trillion to aid the Economy
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/19/busin ... ed.html?hp

BACKGROUND:
Perp Walks instead of Bonuses, interview on Democracy Now:
http://www.democracynow.org/2009/3/19/t ... journalist

Death Threats for AIG Executives
http://rense.com/general85/dthr.htm

http://www.rense.com/general85/arro.htm

Who got money funneled into AIG, and right back out of AIG?

http://www.forbes.com/2009/03/16/aig...quity-cds.html

After months of stonewalling, government-controlled American International Group (nyse: AIG - news - people ) finally revealed the names of the counterparties that were funneled $108 billion in taxpayer funds. The largest recipients of AIG bailout funds were European banks, Wall Street firms and, to a lesser degree, municipal governments.

While some of the payments disclosed were run of the mill obligations for an insurance company, the $52 billion that was used to satisfy or exit credit default swaps, insurance contracts on securities, are at the center of a growing storm of controversy. Last week, Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke was grilled on Capitol Hill over AIG's refusal to divulge details about these transactions.

The fundamental concern is that favored firms may have been overpaid for assets using a large chunk of AIG's $170 billion bailout package. Though it is now known who the counterparties are, AIG refused to itemize what exactly it is each of them brought to the table. As a result, it's impossible to know if some firms got better deals than others, or if taxpayers got a raw deal all together.

Here's aggregated data about what got passed through AIG to its various counterparties. For lying about Goldman Sachs and claiming it had no exposure to AIG's situation, the CEO of that firm Blankfein ought to be facing some S.E.C. prosecution since it is a publicly traded company whose stockholders were deliberately mislead. He didn't sit in on that secretive meeting at the Federal Reserve's offices in NYC out of charitable interest in the financial sector in general, and rumors of a total $20 billion counterparty exposure to AIG were probably right on the money. So far $13 billion has surfaced, and there's $7 billion more to go.

The information in parentheses shows how much was paid in quarterly amounts by AIG to each such counterparty. Where the tale gets really dicey is in their having "paid off insured amounts" to many of these banking counter-parties EVEN THOUGH WHAT WAS INSURED was NOT in DEFAULT. There were 4 appendices released by AIG with listed institutions and vague explanations. The one to pay attention to is the "Maiden Lane III LLC" appendix, since that's the one where all the bones can be dug up.


$12.9B Goldman Sachs (2.5/5.6/4.
$12.0B Bank of America/Merrill Lynch (7.0/2.3/7.6)
$5.2B Bank of America (0.2/0.5/4.5)
$6.8B Merrill Lynch (6.8/1.8/3.1)
$11.9B Societe Generale (4.1/6.9/0.9)
$11.8B Deutsche Bank (2.6/2.8/6.4)
$8.5B Barclays (0.9/0.6/7.0)
$5.0B UBS (0.8/2.5/1.7)
$4.9B BNP Paribas (0.0/0.0/4.9)
$3.5B HSBC Bank (0.2/0.0/3.3)
$3.3B Calyon (1.1/1.2/0.0)
$2.3B Citigroup (0.0/0.0/2.3)
$2.2B Dresdner Kleinwort (0.0/0.0/2.2)
$1.6B JPMorgan/Morgan Stanley (0.6/0.0/1.0)
$0.4B JPMorgan (0.4/0.0/0.0)
$1.2B Morgan Stanley (0.2/0.0/1.0)
$1.5B Wachovia (0.7/0.8/0.0)
$1.5B ING (0.0/0.0/1.5)
$1.1B Bank of Montreal (0.2/0.9/0.0)
$1.0B Deutsche Zentral-Genossenschaftsbank (0.0/1.0/0.0)
$0.8B Rabobank (0.5/0.3/0.0)
$0.7B Royal Bank of Scotland (0.2/0.5/0.0)
$0.7B DZ Bank (0.7/0.0/0.0)
$0.5B KFW (0.5/0.0/0.)
$0.3B Banco Santander
$0.4B Dresdner Bank AG (0.0/0.4/0.0)
$0.4B Credit Suisse (0.0/0.0/0.4)
$0.2B Citadel (0.0/0.0/0.2)

$38.8B US Banks
$50.2B Foreign Banks
$12.0B Municipal Bonds
$84.0B Unaccounted for

Sidenote: Nearly $44 billion was paid out to 20 firms, most of which were banks. One non-bank that appeared on the list was the Citadel Investment Group, the giant hedge fund based in Chicago. It received about $200 million. Its founder Kenneth C. Griffin staged his second marriage to Anne Dias-Griffin, the French-born head of Aragon Capital (another hedge fund) in the gardens of Versailles Palace, over in France. His firm once had a peak of $20 billion under management but is reportedly down to about $13 billion now. In a presentation to Goldman Sachs back in 2005, he was a big fan of derivatives:

"The market for credit derivatives has effectively created a huge new pool of risk-taking capital for our debt markets. By unbundling and trading credit risk without having to transfer the underlying asset, this market has introduced an entirely new and vital way of spreading risk. Credit derivatives, to use one example, let banks transfer risk from their portfolios, allowing them to create new loans. They also provide price transparency into instruments that might otherwise be hard to value. This represents an enormous improvement in our financial system – but one that could not have occurred without the innovation that competitive market dynamics trigger."

But when testifying in 2008 to the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform:

"The rapid growth in the use of derivatives has created an opaque market whose outstanding notional value is measured in the hundreds of trillions of dollars. As a result, there is great concern about the systemic effects of the failure of any one financial institution."

He also served on the Committee on Capital Markets Regulation

Griffin hedges his bets in political giving as well ... there's a long list at this link.

http://www.newsmeat.com/fec/bystate_...&first=kenneth

Griffin, Kenneth C.
Chicago, IL 60611
Citadel Investment Group/President OBAMA, BARACK (D)
President
OBAMA FOR AMERICA $4,600
primary 05/30/07
---
Griffin, Kenneth C.
Chicago, IL 60611
Citadel Investment Group/President OBAMA, BARACK (D)
President
OBAMA FOR AMERICA $2,300
general 05/30/07
-----
Griffin, Kenneth C.
Chicago, IL 60611
Citadel Investment Group/President OBAMA, BARACK (D)
President
OBAMA FOR AMERICA $-2,300
primary 05/30/07


Political donations seem to buy political favors. The "For Sale" sign is up at the Congress and the White House.

Growth in number of Registered Lobbists

1998............................10,693
1999............................13,336
2000............................12,758
2001............................12,078
2002............................12,351
2003............................13,167
2004............................13,407
2005............................14,444
2006............................14,880
2007............................15,405
2008............................15,150

Growth in Spending on Lobbying

1998............................$1.44 Billion
1999............................$1.44 Billion
2000............................$1.54 Billion
2001............................$1.63 Billion
2002............................$1.81 Billion
2003............................$2.04 Billion
2004............................$2.17 Billion
2005............................$2.41 Billion
2006............................$2.60 Billion
2007............................$2.84 Billion
2008............................$3.24 Billion

The combination of political donations plus lobbying from Wall St. banking interests alone was estimated at $5 billion for those same years.

http://www.cbsnews.com/blogs/2009/03/04 ... 2645.shtml

March 4, 2009 10:24 AM
Report: Wall Street Spent $5 Billion For Political Influence
Posted by Brian Montopoli

A group called Wall Street Watch is out with a report that finds that “Wall Street investment firms, commercial banks, hedge funds, real estate companies and insurance conglomerates made $1.7 billion in political contributions and spent another $3.4 billion on lobbyistsâ€