Bonus Betting

It’s maddening to hear of the bonuses being doled out to both current and former AIG employees, but don’t let them use this as a ruse to take the heat off the issues going on behind those bonuses. The amount of money in said bonuses is 465 million, which is one half of a billion, and we’re doling out billions upon billions to all kinds of banks, foreign and domestic and where is the media spot light? On half a billion. Where have all the other billions gone?

They won’t tell us, as Bob Kuttner economics writer for American Prospective stated “…Treasury was essentially saying, This is proprietary business information. We're not even going to require AIG to tell you who got all the money." Bob Kuttner said “You know, this is being run by the Treasury in the way that JPMorgan and Company were brought in after the bank panic of 1907. It's being run like a private bankers' club, instead of like a government agency that owes the taxpayer some transparency and some accountability.”

The huge risks AIG took are hidden away in the twisted language of credit default swaps, and now it’s become complicated to figure out who in our own government knew what and when.

One thing we do know is that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner was in on that 750 billion dollar bank bail out bill because he was head of the New York Federal Reserve at that time, and now as Treasury Secretary, he won’t tell us where AIG spent our tax dollars.

Now it’s come out that 12 billion of the AIG bailout money went to Goldman Sachs a Wall Street banking firm, where former Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson was at one time CEO. And billions more are going to AIG’s counterparts, foreign banks.

Not only does AIG steal our money, they add insult to injury. According to a report on the News Hour “much of the bonus money went into a division that took huge losses linked to risky mortgages, but company officials have said they need those employees to help undo the damage.” With employees like those who needs enemies?

There’s a lot more going on with this AIG swindle than meets the eye, the bonuses are a diversion to take attention away from the greedy capitalists who stole 90% of the money and control our country with evermore success.