I understand that when I write this it will be evident that I’m clearly not an ordinary American. And I’m completely OK with that. Here goes… I don’t believe that the AIG CEO should have been drawn in front of the cameras and skewered by Congressmen. I don’t believe that AIG honoring contracts to pay $165 million in bonuses is a heinous act. In fact, I feel that this whole parade of finger pointing at AIG is simply an effort to take the focus off of who is truly at fault in the first place. This whole debacle is merely the result of a government gone bad—publicly—making even more horrible mistakes as they try to fix their egregious errors, and getting caught with the consequences.
AIG is completely responsible for the debacle they created in the first place. Clearly they got carried away with their own sense of power and influence and wrote too many checks they could not cover. And they talked a good talk to many other key financial institutions worldwide to get them to play in their power game as well. So what did that get us? Financial ruin. Now let’s look at this for a moment… These people are supposedly uber-giants of expertise in financial management and yet they could not manage their own house! They got completely drunk with their power and just like an inebriated lug of a giant they lost their reasoning and functionality abilities and stumbled—hard! OK. So we’ve got a giant who’s in a drunken stupor about to self-destruct and take down questionably innocent bystanders in his wake. What do we do? Well, yeah, we give the alcoholic lush MORE power. No, we don’t take his license or privilege away. No, we don’t put him into any kind of treatment. Instead, we find him an even better “dealer” to work with (a.k.a. the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury) who can simply bail them out. We give him an even more audacious privilege of using the tax payer dollars and that of several generations to come to “get him back on his feet.” And then when he functions the same way he did previously, and even has the audacity to honor contracts, we react to publicly condemn him? Condemn the giant so that nobody is wise to the “dealer” who feeds and encourages his misbehavior. Now that’s quite the deception isn’t it? (Side bar: It’s interesting to note that Congress doesn’t really care about the legality of contracts. They don’t even enforce the most significant contract we Americans have to protect us, that of the U.S. Constitution.)Here’s the perfect part of this deception, folks. If (and I’m SOOO inclined to say “when”) AIG can’t pay us all back, what happens to them? If they go bankrupt, what recourse do we, the tax payers who’ve been yoked with indentured servitude in order to lift this giant’s sorry caboose back up, get back? What’s our collateral on this loan we’ve been forced to issue at the risk of death, jail time, or social and emotional ruin? Not one blasted thing! Nothing. We probably won’t even get a sincere apology from a public official when it does go belly up. Adding insult to injury is the fact that the primary people making these decisions are themselves so completely disconnected from the real picture due to their own wanton consumption habits. They are endowed with their salary for the rest of their life, benefit from a royal health plan, and yet some even fail to pay their own taxes.
AIG clearly has their own problems. But just as I shake my head in disbelief when women refuse to leave their abusive husbands, I just can’t figure out what kind of maniacal plan the Secretary of Treasury and the Federal Reserve had in mind on this one. Who gave them the authority to determine that one business gets bailed out above another? That one business is any more important to our social fabric than another? That the consequences called Real Life don’t apply to these companies? Even worse, IF you’re going to perform such an unprecedented act, aren’t you at least willing to go through the homework of everything that act entails, i.e. reading all of the contracts that are presently in place, properly appraising just how much their other assets really are worth, etc?! Gentlemen, don’t approve the act of an AIG bailout 100% and then get mad when something happens that you didn’t know about – i.e.: the AIG bonuses. You had every opportunity to know everything there was to know. It’s called a test. A real life test. You know, the kind of real life testing that all of your schooling and life experiences are supposed to prepare you for so that you’re actually competent enough to take the job that the American people pay you to do! And clearly you screwed up! It’s your own freaking fault that you didn’t know about it! Just as it’s your own freaking fault that you overpaid for assets in the tens of billions of dollars! So let’s be perfectly clear about this… whoever closed the bail out deal with AIG in the first place is 100% responsible and should be FIRED and perhaps even have charges filed for willful negligence at best, or treasonous acts at worst.
How dare our government condemn Madoff when they are doing the EXACT same thing with all of our money? And lest anyone forget, yes – it’s OUR money, not the government’s. We earn it while we work on the frontlines while we simultaneously are shown how little responsibility and accountability means to those who are in power. And yet we still provide our tax dollars for the purposes of paying for a government to protect our freedoms.The U.S. Government is mismanaging funds.
They are playing a shell game.
The Federal Reserve just keeps printing money and yet REFUSES to provide our country with an accounting of just how much money (via the M3 report) they are printing, thus we are unable to define for ourselves what our currency is really worth. How in the world is that any different than Madoff having his CPA send out false solubility reports to his investors?!
Oh, and one last point I’d like to make here. So, you have a government who has totally screwed up publicly enough that even the mainstream media can’t ignore it, and so what do the do to truly fix the problem? They paint every recipient of that $165 million bonus share as some kind of a criminal—even a terrorist if you will—against the sovereignty of this American people. And to show you just how big and powerful they are, they actually draft a bill which would directly tax all of these financial terrorists with a 90% tax! Using taxes as a weapon, you say? How can they do that? They can’t. It’s called a direct unapportioned tax, and it’s 100% illegal and completely unconstitutional, for the very same reasons why your present federal income tax is illegal. You don’t believe that our wonderful U.S. government would commit such an illegal act? Really? You just watched them try to do it right in front of your eyes against the AIG bonus recipients!Of course the government did nothing to preemptively thwart the payment of the bonuses to AIG executives. That’s because, very much like the ridiculous stimulus bill, they didn’t even bother to comprehend the entire picture of their actions. This is the same government who overpaid by over $70 billion dollars for the assets it purchased from the companies it bailed out! Whether or not there was a senator who acknowledged and attempted to keep the bonuses in the contract is beside the point.
I say kudos to the AIG Executive who resigned in the New York Times today! And I don’t care whether or not he does donate any of his money to charity. Legally, contractually, it’s his money. The U.S. Government simply bought into a Lion’s Zoo and is now whining when they got bit! And now they are claiming foul because many of the vital AIG personnel refuse to work under such
circumstances. Can you blame them? Sure you can’t relate to such a huge bonus in your own life. I get that. But it’s what the guy signed on for. It was part of the reason why he left his previous job to take a position with AIG 11 years ago. And now he’s being asked to work for free for an undetermined period of time while AIG fixes all of their screw ups and be persecuted by nearly an entire country in the meantime. Does that sound like a job you’d want to keep? Heck, when I heard during the live Congressional questioning that the CEO was working for $1 and taking all of the crap from Congress, I would have quit on the spot and told Congress that they can fix their own mess and not use me as a whipping boy.Here’s some wisdom my mother taught me. “Be very aware of what people say about other people, because they are likely to be saying the same thing about you when you’re not around.” You’ve seen what the U.S. Government is willing to do when we are looking. Now, get a clue as to what they are doing when we’re not watching!
Copyright 2009 Kellene Bishop. All rights reserved. You are welcome to repost this information so long as it is credited to Kellene Bishop.
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