If you guessed President Barack Obama and Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT), pat yourself on the back.

Last year President Obama recieved $104,332 and Senator Dodd recieved $103,900.  Next was Senator John McCain (R-AZ) at $59,499 and then Secretary of State Hillary Clinton at $37,965.

Several news organizations are picking up on this story now, so it will be interesting to see if it gains any traction (or generates any outrage).

No word from President Obama, Senator Dodd, or anyone else recieving contributions, on  if they will be giving returning the contributions.

Link:

American International Group: All Recipients | OpenSecrets.

He got called on it.

Now Senator Dodd is saying he is the one that put the loophole that allowed the AIG executive bonuses, but it isn’t his fault – it is the Treasury Department.  He says the Treasury Department insisted on putting the loophole in.

The Treasury Department says it didn’t ask for any exemption.

Senator Max Baucus (D-MT), chairman of the Senate Finance Committee (and one of the people on the conference committee to resolve the differences between the Senate and House versions of the bill) said most of the bill was written by Senate and Treasury staffers.

I have four questions:

1. Do any of these people actually know what the heck is going on up there?  None of them seem to take any responsibility for anything, but they sure like writing big checks on the tax payers’ dime.
2. Do any of these people actually do any work?  Sure, they are busy.  You can’t give 20 interviews a day, telling everyone that nothing is your fault and everything is that other guys fault, and not be busy.  What I’m asking is: Do any of them actually do the work we sent them to Washington to do?
3. Why haven’t any of these jokers just blamed all of this bad government on George W. Bush?  Have we finally gotten to the point where they realized that they can’t blame everything on him or have they just not gotten around to pointing the finger at him yet?
4. How much longer are we going to allow these clowns to run the circus?

Link:

ABC News: Dodd vs. Treasury: Who Is Responsible for AIG Loophole?.

“This is another outrageous example of executives – including those whose decisions were responsible for the problems that caused AIG’s collapse – enriching themselves at the expense of taxpayers.  A car mechanic or teacher in Connecticut shouldn’t have to subsidize the bad decisions of these executives. Executives at other companies receiving TARP funds have voluntarily foregone bonuses – there’s no reason why those at AIG shouldn’t do the same.”

Wow, that’s harsh!

What’s even harsher than that?  ABCNews.com published this report today:

Last month, the Senate unanimously approved an amendment to the stimulus bill aimed at restricting bonuses over $100,000 at any company receiving federal bailout funds. The measure, which was drafted by Sen. Olympia Snowe, R-Maine, and Sen. Ron Wyden, D-Ore., applied these restrictions retroactively to bonuses received or promised in 2008 and onward.

But then…

The provision was stripped out during the closed-door conference negotiations involving House and Senate leaders and the White House. A measure by Sen. Chris Dodd, D-Conn., to limit executive compensation replaced it. But Dodd’s measure explicitly exempted bonuses agreed to prior to the passage of the stimulus bill.

Here’s the exact language from Dodd’s measure in the stimulus: “The prohibition required under clause (i) shall not be construed to prohibit any bonus payment required to be paid pursuant to a written employment contract executed on or before February 11, 2009…”

Good job keeping the People’s best interested firmly in your sights, Senator!

Maybe things like this and the Senator’s ability to get sweetheart mortgage deals explain why Dodd is in a statistical tie for re-election in 2010 (Connecticut (CT) Poll * March 10, 2009 * Connecticut’s Dodd Tied With S – Quinnipiac University.)

Now, THAT’S harsh!

Links:

Dodd Statement on AIG Bonuses.

The Note: How Congress Protected AIG’s Bonuses.

1) ABCNews.com provides us with this nice bit of analysis in their article Could Be Worse: AIG Double Bonus Jeopardy.

While critics like Rep. Barney Frank, D-Mass., argue that the time has come to fire AIGFP employees, Russell Miller, the managing director of Executive Compensation Advisors, said there may still be reason to retain them.

“The difficulty here is that the same people who got us into this mess, we need them to help us turn it around, and we’re doing that with taxpayer dollars,” he said.

“We need to develop a plan that recognizes that: 1) this is a legal obligation and 2) these employees are needed to help turn the company around and 3) these employees likely want to continue working at AIG given the current market environment [emphasis added],” Miller said.

Seriously?  Do you really think that the employees who helped tank AIG would “likely want to continue working” there “given the current market environment”?  I don’t know about anyone else, but if I had an employer who was willing to pay me hundreds of thousands of dollars to sit around and lose billions for them then give hundreds of thousands (if not millions) more in “retention-payments”, I can’t think of anywhere else I’d rather continue working.  Seriously, if anyone has a position open like this (especially with one of those AIG approved, iron-clad employment agreements) let me know, I am totally qualified!

2) Also from ABCNews.com, the Political Punch blog, by Jake Tapper, recounts this exchange between Tapper and White House press secretary Robert Gibbs (Two Weeks Ago: White House Says It’s Confident It Knows What Happened to Previous AIG Billions).

TAPPER:  AIG, is the administration confident that it, that it knows what happened to the tens of billions of dollars previously given to AIG?

GIBBS:  Is it confident — I’m sorry?

TAPPER:  That they know — that you guys know what happened to the previous billions before you hand over this next $30 billion.

GIBBS:  Yes — yes, the — I mean, I don’t think it’s a — well, obviously, you’ve got a huge insurance company that is losing money, not the least of which because of its sheer size and sheer size and decrease in the growth in our economy.  It experiences a far bigger drop, largely because of its size. But, again, the steps that — that Treasury and — and others took were to ensure a larger systemic problem wasn’t one that we had to deal with here today in letting something just die.

TAPPER:  But in terms of specifically the — I guess it’s like $150 billion before, you guys are confident…

GIBBS:  Yes.

I assume Mr. Gibbs is using the political definition of the word “Yes”, which is “until proven otherwise”.  Interestingly, this is also the political definition of the word “no”.

3) The New York Times had this quote from Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., in a March 14th piece (A.I.G. Planning Huge Bonuses After $170 Billion Bailout – NYTimes.com.):

“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday.

Mr. Liddy is refering to the executives in the AIG Financial Products group – the ones at the center of AIG’s $100 billion dollar loss.  These are “the best and the brightest talent”, eh?  Holy crap, we are in trouble.

“I don’t know whether the ($165 million in bonuses) is an issue as much as just the chutzpah of the people running AIG,” Grassley said. “That they could thumb their nose at the taxpayers, it’s more that.

“The attitude of these corporate executives and bank executives, and most of them are in New York, that somehow they’re not responsible for their company going into the tank,” he said.

“I suggest, you know, obviously maybe they ought to be removed, but I would suggest that the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better towards them [is] if they would follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say I’m sorry and then either do one of [two] things: resign or go commit suicide.”

Grassley added, “In the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.”

Personally, I think he doesn’t go far enough.  I’d like to see this applied to failed politicians, too.

How about all currently active Senators and Representatives, who were in office before the 2008 elections, line up on the steps of Capital Hill and follow Senator Grassley’s advice?

None of them seem to ever want to take responsibility for anything that goes wrong, but all of them were in Congress while everything went to Hell in a handbasket.

If we are going to clean things up, we might as well make a clean sweep, no?

Link:

Political Punch: GOP Senator: AIG Execs Should Follow Japanese Model — Suicide or Apology.

Here’s the new reality my friends. Government can seize and spend as much as it wants where it wants and when it wants. The private sector? Not so much. God forbid a company should reward performance. Rewarding performance is something very foreign to politicians and they don’t like it. They’re used to punishing performance, not rewarding it. The private sector rewards performance and punishes failure .. just the opposite for Barney and his clown circus.

I don’t really think you want to use AIG, which lost nearly $100 billion ($99,289,000,000) last year, as the poster child for the statement “the private sector rewards performance and punishes failure.”

I understand that the bonuses/retention payments may only be going to people in divisions that were profitable for AIG, but as far as I’ve seen, AIG hasn’t provided any information indicating that this is the case, so I have to go on the assumption that executives in the parts of the business that tanked are getting a nice government provided bonus.  I didn’t want the government to bail them out to begin with and I sure as heck don’t want to give bonuses to the people who  lost $100 billion dollars.

I guess those “employee-retention payments” that AIG Chairman Edward Liddy talks about could have been tied to how much money AIG was able to lose in a year.  If that is the case, then all those AIG executives really performed well last year.

Huzzah, AIG Execs!

Link:

THE AIG BONUSES – Nealz Nuze on boortz.com.