A few Dems in Congress are talking about slapping AIG fatcats and their feline brethren with an excessive pay surtax. The sponsor of the bill wants to tax the bonuses at 100 percent.
This move puts Obi in a place where he can't negotiate. He must support (and possibly sign) this bill or he must act against it. If he does not support it, then we know that his recent denunciation of the AIG bonuses amounted to "just words."
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Somebody in Congress gets a Gold Star for Political Maneuvering and Weasel Wrangling.
Eliot Spitzer at SLATE:
"The Real AIG Scandal--It's not the bonuses. It's that AIG's counterparties are getting paid back in full."
"Everybody is rushing to condemn AIG's bonuses, but this simple scandal is obscuring the real disgrace at the insurance giant: Why are AIG's counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?
"For the answer to this question, we need to go back to the very first decision to bail out AIG, made, we are told, by then-Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, then-New York Fed official Timothy Geithner, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke last fall. Post-Lehman's collapse, they feared a systemic failure could be triggered by AIG's inability to pay the counterparties to all the sophisticated instruments AIG had sold. And who were AIG's trading partners? No shock here: Goldman, Bank of America, Merrill Lynch, UBS, JPMorgan Chase, Morgan Stanley, Deutsche Bank, Barclays, and on it goes. So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The AIG bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already."
I will continue to speculate if Spitzer's knowledge of this as well as other affairs was one of the reasons he was recently shittered in the MSM.
Peter of Lone Tree~
There is a famous quote:
"It's not even a question." ~Joseph Cannon
Well, I love the idea of getting the money back, but it is a little too ex post facto for my tastes.
Off topic: do you have an archive? I wanted to read that article you wrote how you compared Obots to those 9-11 nuts that used to write you. For example, you would spend time to rebut a crazy point and then another ant would later ask the same question and if you did not keep answering, the new ant would say, "See? See? You cannot explain that!" Anyway, it had me in STITCHES. If no archive, how about a repost??
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