AIG to Taxpayers: F@$% You

Attention AIG Executives:

THE NATIONAL BACKLASH IS COMING.  CASH THOSE BONUS CHECKS AT YOUR OWN PERIL.

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The below is an actual first paragraph of an article in the NY Times business section this morning.  Seriously, its actually real.

The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

Wait wait wait, there’s more:

The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives and 6,400 employees across the sprawling corporation.

I’m not done yet, hang on:

A.I.G., nearly 80 percent of which is now owned by the government, defended its bonuses, arguing that they were promised last year before the crisis and cannot be legally canceled.

Ok, so the rest of the article is basically a detailed account of why no one at the Treasury or in Congress, including Tim Geithner and Chris Dodd, have been able to figure out how to get the taxpayer out of shoveling more millions at the rocket scientists who’ve done such a great job that their multinational conglomerate collapsed.

We own 80% of this company and have plowed in with over $100 billion in rescue capital for both AIG and its thick-as-thieves counter-parties and we can’t find a way to slow the bonus machine?

I’ve come up with a solution.  Send a team of recently-returned, battle-hardened Army Rangers down to AIG with a pile of these “bonus” checks and let any of the execs who feel frisky enough to wrest this money from the taxpayer “come and git it”.

This is a much more effective solution than having Geithner’s DC puppy dog lawyers and accountants on our side.  We, the taxpaying citizens, who have watched a handful of recklessly greedy elites bring our economy to the brink of depression, would prefer to see a different appendage of the government watch over our hard-earned assets from now on: The military.

Let’s see ’em try to steal now.

Full Story:  AIG Planning Huge Bonuses (NYT)

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