While You Were In The Airport Security Line...

The latest bailout came as AIG admitted to having just posted the largest quarterly loss in American corporate history — some $61.7 billion. In the final three months of last year, the company lost more than $27 million every hour. That's $465,000 a minute, a yearly income for a median American household every six seconds, roughly $7,750 a second. And all this happened at the end of eight straight years that America devoted to frantically chasing the shadow of a terrorist threat to no avail, eight years spent stopping every citizen at every airport to search every purse, bag, crotch and briefcase for juice boxes and explosive tubes of toothpaste. Yet in the end, our government had no mechanism for searching the balance sheets of companies that held life-or-death power over our society and was unable to spot holes in the national economy the size of Libya (whose entire GDP last year was smaller than AIG's 2008 losses).

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Live AIG Hearing

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Ross Williams Lays It Down

Just read Andrew Ross Sorkin's article supporting AIG bonuses after hearing him on The Takeaway this morning. Does he honestly believe what he's saying or is he just trying to get attention?

I challenge you to read the article without becoming nauseous.

Best comment:

Its really very simple. Without government intervention, AIG would be bankrupt and none of those bonuses would have been paid.

The government breaks contracts in bankruptcy all the time. Of course it does set a precedent for people who loot their companies and the taxpayers. Even if the goovernment bails out the company, they may not get all the loot they expected. I don't know that is such a bad thing.

The truth is, the government ought to be going after many of these employees with criminal fraud charges. Its pretty obvious they sold more credit default swaps than their company could afford to pay off. Those were contracts too.

— Ross Williams, Minnesota

Sign the Move On Petition to Block AIG Bonuses

The people at AIG who are most responsible the severity of the financial crisis should be in jail. But instead, they're slated to get $450 million in bonuses. Unbelievable, right?

I signed a petition urging Secretary Geithner and Congress to do whatever it takes to cancel these bonuses. Can you join me at the link below?

http://pol.moveon.org/aigbonus/?r_by=15739-9243232-DFWIhzx&rc=paste

Thanks!

*This post obviously written by MoveOn.org

Guess What? You Paid an AIG Exec's Bonus!

The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

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