The nation is outraged at the insane bonuses given to AIG executives. Yes, this is robbing the taxpayer. There’s another part to this story. It seems that the AIG failure is providing a second round of taxpayer money to the banks that caused this financial crisis. According to an article in Slate, after they already received a payoff last year and now they want more.
…we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman’s collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG’s inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG’s trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.
The bonuses are a way to distract the public while the real theft of our treasury is taking place, again. Ah, laizze-faire economics as brought to you by Congress and the former Republican President, George W. Bush.
Read the complete Slate article here…
Never trust your money with Republicans. They will line their pockets first, tell you that they lost your money, then ask for more and then blame you for the losses.
Organizing for Change 
5 replies on “Double Dipping”
It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure. The payments to AIG’s counterparties are justified with an appeal to the sanctity of contract. If AIG’s contracts turned out to be shaky, the theory goes, then the whole edifice of the financial system would collapse.
Nice… we must share their pain. No one is sharing our pain. And what exactly makes “white collar contracts” superior to “blue collar contracts”? There must be some lobby money here someplace.
Yup, keep the ‘stupid public’ looking in the wrong direction, makes it a whole lot easier to rob them blind.
Republicans like big government even though they won’t admit it.
http://www.cnn.com/2009/POLITICS/03/18/zelizer.small.government/index.html
GREAT summary!
Never trust your money with Republicans. They will line their pockets first, tell you that they lost your money, then ask for more and then blame you for the losses.
WooHoo!
Thanks for your support and for all your great emails and the link to the Texas Liberal.