AIG faces the crucible
Jane Hamsher reports for firedoglake that 20,000 signatures from readers of the finance blog have been presented to the House Financial Services Committee in time for the AIG hearing. Like millions of Americans, they’re outraged over the liberties AIG has taken with taxpayer bailout money for executive bonuses. They want increased transparency in President Obama’s bank bailout, and they want it now. The money must stimulate further lending or it will all be for nothing; it must be a cash advance to restart America’s economy.
Hamsher laments that despite wide-ranging media coverage, neither Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and White House Press Secretary Robert Gibbs seemed to know much about what AIG was doing with executive bonuses. Nevertheless, firedoglake has a team in place outside the AIG hearings who will raise awareness for those who lack. They will achieve this via a questionnaire for the House Financial Services Committee. What follows are just a few of the questions from their extensive document. Call it AIG’s luck seven…
The kind of questions they SHOULD be answering
- Please provide a timeline of how bonus contracts were originated and why.
- Did the United States Treasury do their due diligence on these AIG bonus contracts? Was the Treasury aware of contract terms prior to payout?
- Was Treasury Secretary Geithner aware of the terms of the AIG contracts when he was distributing funds as head of the New York Federal Reserve?
- When was President Obama informed AIG’s bonus payout terms?
- Was anyone who negotiated these bonuses on behalf of AIG also recipients of said bonuses?
- Did AIG CEO Edward Liddy, a former employee at Goldman Sachs, ever make contact with current Goldman CEO Lloyd Blankfein, or anyone else at Goldman, about AIG or the $20 billion in bonds Goldman would have lost out on if AIG collapsed?
- Did Mr. Liddy own any Goldman stock whose value would have been protected by the government’s AIG takeover? Did Mr. Liddy have a severance package or personal holdings in Goldman that would have made propping up Goldman Sachs via AIG in his interest?
The AIG hearings will tell us a lot about the intestinal fortitude of the Obama administration. If it can be proven that he and Timothy Geithner knew about this before it happened but didn’t stop it, America’s president and Treasury secretary will have the American taxpayers to answer to.
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I don’t think we’re going to see justice for the American taxpayer on the back of all these bailouts. Our national debt is going to skyrocket, as it already has been, and in the end, what is really going to change about these companies? Probably not much – what’s going to happen is they are going to try and be good for the next few years, and then once the spotlight is off them they’re going to go straight back to trying to figure out the easiest way to make a bunch of rich people even richer, without having to provide valuable services and products to the same taxpayers that kept them in their offices bigger than most people’s apartments, yachts, mistresses, and ivory back scratchers.