So the outrage continues to build and boil over at the recent bonuses paid to AIG employees after the firm had accepted nearly $200 billion in tax payer funded bailout money from the government.
The whole financial situation continues to be a terrible mess and most likely a scarier one than we can, or care to, understand. While the amount of cash that AIG just paid out is minuscule in the big picture it is so emblematic of the fact that the people who burned the economy to the ground and essentially gave the lie to free market capitalism don't understand what they have done or that things are necessarily different now, in the wake of the destruction that they have wrought.
The AIG bonus fiasco has been all over the place of late (Nate Silver used Memeorandum to track its rise) and Talking Points Memo has been doing yeoman's work on the story, I recommend their coverage highly.
A few other comments that are worth a look include Steven Pearlstein in today's WaPo on what we could and should have done with regard to AIG specifically but to much of the banking industry as a whole as well. Writing at HuffPo Aaron Zelinsky says that we don't need new legislation to go after the bonuses that the IRS can simply declare them unreasonable. And Eliot Spitzer (not so smart in his personal life, but the man does know from financial regulation) writes about the more important questions that the bonuses are distracting us from in Slate.
AIG's recently installed chairman Ed Liddy will be testifying on the hill at any moment and wrote an op-ed in the WaPo this morning, it seems as though Pearlstein is exactly right when he suggests that Liddy was and continues to be the wrong man for the job.
You know who did a great job of summing this one up though, Stephen Colbert...
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
You Bet I'm Angry
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