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AIG Planning New Round of Bonuses

AP
posted: 138 DAYS 6 HOURS AGO
filed under: Financial Crisis
Text SizeAAA
After its bonus payments ignited a firestorm of criticism earlier this year, American International Group Inc. is asking the federal government to weigh in on the insurer's plan to resume paying millions in promised retention incentives next week, according to media reports.
AIG, once the world's largest insurer, has asked the Obama administration's compensation czar, Kenneth R. Feinberg, to approve the payments in order to head off any public outrage, The Washington Post reported Thursday evening.
While the company isn't required to get the government's blessing because the payments are actually for 2008 employment contracts, the newspaper said executives are reluctant to move forward with installments coming due next week without official approval.
Feinberg has the power to reject pay plans he deems excessive at companies which benefited from large infusions from the government's $700 billion bank bailout fund. Feinberg also has authority to review compensation for the top 100 salaried employees at those firms. AIG is among the companies whose pay practices the government now oversees.
New York-based AIG remains the focus of intense scrutiny, after becoming one in a string of corporate calamities and a touchstone for public fury. The huge volume of credit default swaps - a form of insurance against bond defaults - sold by AIG, coupled with rising levels of defaulted mortgage and other debt, threatened the company's existence and prompted the government to step in.
Government aid to AIG totals about $180 billion.
The $450 million in bonuses that AIG allocated in 2008 for employees, including to traders in the financial products unit that brought it to the brink of collapse, fueled public and congressional outrage. The first installment of those payments earlier this year sparked legislation in Congress to slap punishing taxes on big bonuses at AIG and other companies bailed out by taxpayers, though the Senate didn't act on that plan.
Copyright 2009 The Associated Press. The information contained in the AP news report may not be published, broadcast, rewritten or otherwise distributed without the prior written authority of The Associated Press. Active hyperlinks have been inserted by AOL.
2009-07-10 06:26:48
COMMENTS ( 44 )
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Tommytortugam
9:12AM Jul 12 2009 
What is happening to our country was planned long ago. The incremental reduction of our standard of living over the past 35 years was done on purpose. It will continue until our living standards are comparable to the average mexican peasant. That's one reason the borders remain wide open. The huge influx of mexican workers has served the purpose of reducing middle class and lower middle class wages. The North American Union, bringing Mexico, Canada and the USA into a European Union style federation is nearly complete. The economy could only recover from this continuing depression by manufacturing and exporting our way out of it. The capacity to do this has been exported to other low wage countries. The global ruling oligarchy (super rich families) control all the flow of money in the world through the private central banks, like our Federal Reserve, that they control. The Bank of International Settlements in Switzerland sits at the apex of this tightly controlled world banking syndicate. It is the central bank of all central banks. The ultimate goal is a one world currency, a one world government, a vastly reduced human population and total control of the remaining population by the use of a high tech surveillance grid incorporating implantable chips. The world's population is being herded into a system of feudal totalitarian dictatorship that is more horrific than anything imaginable. Mass psychological manipulation of the human population is a science that is used expertly to herd the people. Like 9-11, and other so called terrorist attacks. Weapons of mass destruction? No, weapons of mass fear. Fear is the primary emotion that is generated to steer the world into the hellish dictatorship that is the final goal of the megalomaniacal satanists who rule this world. The major parties and politicians are bought and paid for by the central banks and their proxies, the multinational corporations. Their job is to keep us placated until the trap door is finally dropped. Bottom line....things are going to get real ugly, soon.
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TradersTraffic
2:55PM Jul 11 2009 
I think I want my tax money back. All Of It
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TradersTraffic
2:54PM Jul 11 2009 
We are tired of hearing about their bonus money. Why not give them every cent the Amecican public has. Get it over with. Why dont we just mail our paychecks every week to the government and let them do as they please they do anyway. Insurance = Scam. You have to have Insuracnce for your car, house. It is required. Just try to make a claim. What a joke. Insuracne is just another overblownn tax.
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Tommytortugam
7:46PM Jul 10 2009 
SALON

THURSDAY APRIL 30, 2009 05:35 EDT

Top Senate Democrat: bankers...... "own"....... the U.S. Congress.

Sen. Dick Durbin, on a local Chicago radio station this week, blurted
out an obvious truth about Congress that, despite being blindingly
obvious, is rarely spoken:

"And the banks -- hard to believe in a time when we're facing a
banking crisis that many of the banks created -- are still the most
powerful lobby on Capitol Hill. And they frankly own the place."

The blunt acknowledgment that the same banks that caused the
financial crisis "own" the U.S. Congress -- according to one of that
institution's most powerful members -- demonstrates just how extreme
this institutional corruption is.

The ownership of the federal government by banks and other large
corporations is effectuated in literally countless ways, none more
effective than the endless and increasingly sleazy overlap between
government and corporate officials.

Here is just one random item this week announcing a couple of
standard personnel moves:

Former Barney Frank staffer now top Goldman Sachs lobbyist
Goldman Sachs' new top lobbyist was recently the top staffer to Rep.
Barney Frank, D-Mass., on the House Financial Services Committee
chaired by Frank. Michael Paese, a registered lobbyist for the
Securities Industries and Financial Markets Association since he left
Frank's committee in September, will join Goldman as director of
government affairs, a role held last year by former Tom Daschle
intimate, Mark Patterson, now the chief of staff at the Treasury
Department. This is not Paese's first swing through the Wall
Street-Congress revolving door: he previously worked at JP Morgan and
Mercantile Bankshares, and in between served as senior minority
counsel at the Financial Services Committee.
So: Paese went from Chairman Frank's office to be the top lobbyist at
Goldman, and shortly before that, Goldman dispatched Paese's
predecessor, close Tom Daschle associate Mark Patterson, to be Chief
of Staff to Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner, himself a protege of
former Goldman CEO Robert Rubin and a virtually wholly owned
subsidiary of the banking industry. That's all part of what Desmond
Lachman -- American Enterprise Institute fellow, former chief
emerging market strategist at Salomon Smith Barney and top IMF
official (no socialist he) -- recently described as "Goldman Sachs's
seeming lock on high-level U.S. Treasury jobs."
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RTCRAW
4:48PM Jul 10 2009 
The entire public is outraged by this obvious scam of taxpayer money, bailouts, AIG needs to be shut down, assets taken over by the govt., no bonuses paid at all, liquidate the assets, other insurers will step up and continue on with business as usual, those who lose their jobs when AIG is gone will be absorbed into the system, we taxpayers will be much better off.
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