WE SHARE THE OUTRAGE

Lamar Thames'J

Just like you, my wife and I are outraged at the bonus payments made to present and former officials at American Insurance Group, more commonly referred to as AIG (or as it will become known: Ain’t It Great?)

The outrage is understandable. Taxpayers (without a vote on the matter) get to fork over some $170 billion (that’s BILLION, with a B, folks) to bailout a company whose conglomerate Ponzi scheme worked little better than little ol’ Bernie Madoff’s one-man backroom operation. 

Here’s the rub for me, the $170 billion — or to paraphrase Barry Goldwater, “A billion here a billion there and pretty soon you are talking real money.” — is money the U.S government said it had to give to AIG to “bail them out” because they were so deep in hock and and so big we couldn’t afford to allow them to fail.

Since when does a company’s business plan fail so miserably that the executives deserve bonuses? That just doesn’t make any sense to me whatsoever. I know that these executives were supposed to be among the best in the business and that they had to be guaranteed performance bonuses to either stay with AIG or agree to work with them in the first place. But shouldn’t they have been required to EARN that money by, oh, I don’t know, maybe making the company successful? From what I can see, nobody at AIG did anything that even remotely suggests they deserve bonuses. From my limited business background, that is how I remember it was supposed to work.

We keep hearing that the government can’t take back the bonuses because we might get sued because of contractural clauses the executives had with AIG. Well, I say, just let them try to sue us. Then all those who have been duped or hurt by AIG’s malfeasance and misfeasance could file class action lawsuits against them in their dereliction of duty. Take that, AIG.

None of the big financial houses should be exempt from our outrage either. Everyone of the people my age that I have talked to have suffered unnecessarily significant losses in their retirement portfolios. I contend, like comedian Jon Stewart says, that somebody should have spotted some of these signs of a deteriorating economy more than two years ago and brought it to the attention of the Middle America. Then, if we failed to pay attention to it, shame on us. But for now, shame on everyone for not noticing long before now.

There apparently is enough evidence being bandied about that officials in Washington, possibly as far back as last summer under the Bush administration, knew about the bonuses. It would be an absolute outrage to allow these bonuses to go through without a fight. We need to put forth a surge of opinion to our elected officials over our disgust of this situation. And it is time to take names and remember, there is another election in two years. It is time to take back Washington from all political influences.

In an afternoon update, it appears the new AIG CEO Edward Liddy is trying to calm the waters. He said in congressional testimony that he has asked and many of the AIG executives have agreed to return at least half of their bonuses, some even are returning 100 percent. The outrage is still present, however, as we wait to see how this whole thing plays out.