Welcome to the Circus!

This has been a pretty brutal couple of days for a few choice politicians, as well as the AIG team.

Earlier this week, news broke of the bonuses that AIG was paying to a handful of execs totaling $168M (final amount still in dispute). Now, AIG is the recipient of, to my best estimate, approximately $187B in stimulus money(so the bonuses are .09% of that), which is being funded by us taxpayers. Naturally, because of that last fact, not too many people are excited the aforementioned bonuses. A wave of public outcry ensued, which was followed by strong denunciations from The White House, as well as both branches of Congress.

This is all pretty standard. Whenever there's a public outcry, there's a political one as well. This is most commonly referred to as demagoguery, when a leader or group of leaders makes use of a popular position only to gain power.

I realize this is just a claim, but my reasoning for feeling this way is this: If people like Congressman Barney Frank, the chairman of the House Financial Services Committee, or Senator Chris Dodd, the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, were sincere, they'd be stepping down first and offering up an audit trail of all of their indiscretions, but they're not. They're just calling for the firing squad to open up on AIG because it's politically expedient.

How dare they call on anyone to step down from leadership while they themselves enjoy their power, influence, and multitude of perks, all at the taxpayer's expense, while they also spend us into bondage at an unprecedented rate. It's not just those two, it's anyone calling AIG out. This includes almost every politician in Washington, including the President.

Now, I'm not a fan of AIG, I think that giving bonuses out to execs that ruin your company is not only ethically wrong, but really stupid. Add on top of that the fact that they received such a large amount of tax $$ and it's worse. But, strictly speaking, these bonuses were legal, and were made possible by an amendment which was added to the stimulus package that passed in February that not one of the congressmen or senators who voted for it read. It was added to the bill by Chris Dodd, and was approved to go in by a conference between a Senate sub-committee and the White House, according to Nancy Pelosi.

Yes, Nancy placed the blame on the Senate, and the White House, even though she rammed this bill down the throats of every member of her House, making them vote on a 1,000+ page bill within 7 hours of seeing for the first time.

The Dodd amendment gave a loophole to any institution that gave bonuses to its employees or executives as long as the bonuses were planned and contracted out prior to February 2009. So, when pressed on this amendment last week, Chris Dodd lied and said he didn't have anything to do with it, then recanted his lie two days later, but added that the White House told him to lie.

Hmm.

This is a disaster. It's situations like this that make it clear that the leadership in Washington is completely incompetent. These people that couldn't even get their story straight when the media lights are on, are the same people that would love to run our country's Health Care, and that would like to discourage charitable giving so that they, the Government, could take on a more "responsible" role there (see: "Strings attached").

When are we going to stand up to this group of underachievers?