Super Starr

Hank Greenberg plans to sell his shares in AIG -- or, rather sell them to his own company. Not me. Hope springs eternal. Onward and upward from $1.25!

Hat tip to Andy Schuh

AIGgh

Did New York's crusading anti-AIG attorney general, Andrew Cuomo, know about the AIG bonuses all along?

Harbinger of 2010

Sen. Chris Dodd and AIG. Oh-oh.

Will He Or Won't He?

Republicans don't want Hank Greenberg to testify about AIG before a congressional committee. Neither does AIG.

Paging Ambassador Holbrooke

Norm Scheiber argues that AIG went south after its board drove out Hank Greenberg in 2005.

One Thing AIG Got Right

Perhaps members of Congress would work for $1 a year, with bonuses awarded for good performance. From BBC News:

[Jake] DeSantis, who worked in the insurer's financial products division, said after 11 years of service to AIG, he could "no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so".

"We in the financial products division unit have been betrayed by AIG and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials," he added.

Mr DeSantis had agreed to an annual salary of $1 (£0.68; 0.74 euros), but said he had been "promised many times we would be rewarded in March 2009", referring to a bonus.

"I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down," he explained.

He said he would donate his entire bonus to those suffering in the global economic downturn. "My intent is to keep none of the money myself," he said.

Stop And Listen, Fox And MSNBC

Walter Shapiro:

In the most provocative sound bite of the evening, Obama responded to a question about why was he slow to voice outrage over the AIG bonuses by snapping, "Well, it took a couple of days because I like to know what I'm talking about before I speak." Of course, if cable television news and talk radio followed the Obama Doctrine, there would be long intervals of gape-jawed silence during the broadcast day.

Amen and (forgive me, fellow Lenten walkers) alleluia.

Cool Hand Barack

The "Economist" doesn't like Barack Obama's handling of the AIG scandal, urging him to be a calming, teaching President. And yet the magazine leaves out his calm, teaching criticism, during his "60 Minutes" appearance Sunday, of the House's hysterical and possibly unconstitutional bonus-confiscation measure.

RN always wanted to be the coolest person in the room. These days, Obama appears to be the coolest in the country.

Calming Down The House

Saying that he doesn't want to govern out of anger, President Obama tells "60 Minutes" that he opposes the House bill to confiscate bonuses paid to AIG executives:

I think that as a general proposition, you don't wanna be passing laws that are just targeting a handful of individuals. You wanna pass laws that have some broad applicability. And as a general proposition, I think you certainly don't wanna use the tax code to punish people. I think that you've got an pretty egregious situation here that people are understandably upset about. And so let's see if there are ways of doing this that are both legal, that are constitutional, that upholds our basic principles of fairness, but don't hamper us from getting the banking system back on track.

The Nexis Of Reporting And Blogging

This paragraph, in a New York Times analysis of President Obama's week of improvisational responses to the AIG story, seemed strange:

It is not clear whether the spasm of anger set off by news of the bonuses paid to A.I.G. executives was a one-week affair or a sign of a larger political shift driven by a sense that American-style capitalism in the last several decades has become fundamentally unfair.

What is reporter Jeff Zeleny getting at? If "the last several decades" means three or four, then he's suggesting that the fundamental unfairness of capitalism had been rampant since 1) 1969, when the stock market was in the doldrums or 2) 1979, when American capitalism was languishing at the end of the Carter administration.

Or maybe his "several" stands for "two or three," thus bracketing in the Reagan era, when income disparities between the rich and poor became more pronounced and Oliver Stone provided Gordon Gecko as a convenient archetype for rapacious business practices. If so, beyond the fact that everyone just kind of knows and thinks that about the Reagan and Clinton years, does Zeleny have anything more to go on? At the same time, more and more Americans got their own stake on Wall Street through pension funds and individual investing. Millions are reeling now from the loss of value in portfolios that they might not have owned several decades ago. Is that part of the fundamental unfairness, too?

What about Zeleny's "it is not clear"? Does it mean he had an authoritative source who injected the possibility of a sea change in people's attitudes about their economic system into a conversation but asked not to be quoted or described? Does it mean that he really tried to see if there's any polling on shifting attitudes toward capitalism but couldn't track anything down in time? Does it mean that he didn't try but definitely thinks there's something in the wind based on what his family, friends, and colleagues say and stuff like that? Or does it mean, "I sure hope so, so let me see if I can shoehorn it into this story"?

Spitzer Rising?

As rage at AIG persists, its nemesis, former New York Gov. Eliot Spitzer, grasps for redemption.

Madame Defarge, Call Your Wine Shop

E. J. Dionne, Jr. hopes populist outrage over the AIG bonuses and other corporate welfare schemes will lead to better public policy -- and not, one hopes, bonus recipients having to continue to worry about their and their families' safety. The fiercely eloquent anonymous poster at "Body Parts" wonders if Congress's probably unconstitutional confiscation of the bonuses could be seen as affirming vigilantism.

Blink, And You're Broke

Listing him as No. 9 in its April 2 list of the 50 most important, creative, brilliant people in the universe, "Rolling Stone" praises White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel for his "balletic" political talents:

Emanuel started the [Obama stimulus] bill not with an our-way-or-the-highway proposal but with broad outlines and a dollar figure -- letting Congress take ownership of the details.

Would that include details such as the AIG bonuses? So now we know that neither the White House nor members of Congress read the bill. Talk about blinkered leadership.

AIG's Good Money Going After Bad?

In his weekly e-newsletter, Rep. John Campbell (R-Newport Beach) totes up the full AIG bill:

All the ire surrounding AIG right now is about the bonuses. But frankly I’m more worried about the $1.6 TRILLION of assets that AIG needs to liquidate from their financial products division. Mismanagement there could easily cost the taxpayers $100 billion or more. And I am worried about their formerly profitable property and casualty as well as life insurance divisions. Taxpayers have invested $80 billion in AIG. We will never get it all back. And we will almost certainly put in more. But any hope of getting any of it back requires the sale of those “good” divisions. But they are sinking fast.

Following Taxpayers' Money To UBS

Meghan Clyne, an aggressive young journalist writing today in the New York Post, knows how to get her readers' attention:

Americans are justifiably furious about the $165 million in bonuses paid at AIG. But what if, instead of subsidizing only incompetence, AIG had also sent billions of your tax dollars to people who'd laundered money for terrorist states, helped Americans cheat on their taxes and banked for the Nazis?

Well, it did. Earlier this week, AIG revealed that it had paid $5 billion of its bailout money to the Swiss bank UBS.

Hat tip to John Barr

gAggInG On The Potomac

Who let the disgraceful AIG bonuses go though? No mystery whatsoever: The Obama administration and Congress. Officials' high dudgeon this week -- especially the abuse heaped on the company's diligent, dollar-a-year CEO, who inherited the bonus agreements, by the hapless Rep. Frank and his congressional colleagues, who spend billions without reading the bills -- was impossible to stomach.

Hank Greenberg On Deck?

Former AIG chairman and CEO (and Nixon Center chairman) Maurice R. Greenberg offers an alternative narrative for the company's last few months (and perhaps a glimpse of the Starr at the end of the tunnel).