A couple of days I ago, I wrote about my disgust with AIG’s bailout money going towards employee bonuses. Because like most fair-minded Americans, rewarding failure is the last thing I want to see done with my hard-earned tax dollars.
But after yesterday’s embarrassingly ridiculous and hypocritical show at the House Financial Services subcommittee hearing, more facts are coming to light. And not just facts about how much how many knew about these bonus agreements and when they knew it, but instead quiet little facts. Like that those AIG employees who led the company down the credit-default swap path are no longer employed by AIG. That those who remain in the Financial Services Division are there simply to clean up the mess and, in order to keep their expertise so the job could be done with all due expediency, AIG agreed last spring to pay retention bonuses. (Tim Geithner, are you paying attention yet?)
Not really an unreasonable business move, considering the circumstances. So while I still find the whole mess hard to stomach, I think it’s time to focus the blame with more accuracy.
In this case, blame is more properly placed on the hypocritical Congress critters. Not only for their haste to throw the TARP over the mess they created with Wall Street, but for continuing to stick their noses where they don’t belong. The truth is that AIG could have been allowed to go into bankruptcy and the same work would still be occurring to clean up their Financial Services Division. But then – and what they don’t want to become common knowledge – there would be a good chance that AIG would be unable to pay third parties – European Banks in particular, and the Congress critters would have had to bail them out, too; something that would have caused yet more and different concern among American citizens. So by bailing out AIG, not only could they hide bailout monies going to the European banks, but companies like Goldman Sachs could refuse direct payment of bailout money, also collecting it via AIG.
Far more expedient to keep the focus on all those AIG retention bonuses and televise smoke & mirrors shows from the halls of Congress. Easier to point the finger, spewing wrath and spittle in self-righteous indignation while desperately praying the American people will stay on the bandwagon and keep looking out the windows instead of noticing who’s really the guilty driver here.
This brings my thoughts back around to all those words of “transparency”. The honeymoon isn’t even over but already it means as little to this administration as it has to those in the past. And it means even less to the mainstream media, who simply pander to ratings and cater to this administration’s approval, instead of providing all known facts about issues.
Disillusionment is always dangerous to the status quo. Those Congress critters should, indeed, be very, very afraid.
[…] to dehumanize and demonize others when you need a scapegoat to cover your own shameful behaviors. As I wrote last week, the government’s misguided and borderline-illegal lynch mob attacks on AIG over bonuses bore […]