AIG, Bailouts and Blame

Every time someone in government mentions AIG I really just want to go postal. Tim "Turbo Tax" Geithner said today in a congressional hearing that he wants the government to have more control over AIG. President Obama later clarified in his Presidential News Conference and said that he simply wants an FDIC type system that would apply to insurance and other companies such as AIG. His exact words were something along the lines of being able to take over any company that has the potential to bring our financial system to its knees.

He also took the opportunity to blame the outrage over the bones on "those evil wall street guys". Now don't get me wrong, I don't think that anyone working for AIG deserves anything, especially those in upper, upper management who essentially drove the company into the ground. That's exactly why AIG should have been allowed to fail, go into chapter 11 and be reorganized/restructured. But it wasn't, so here we are. I fully blame President Bush and the democratically controlled congress for that moronic move. Strings should have been attached to that money right up front. Look at what has happened with the bailout money for the auto companies and for Citigroup. As soon as the government attached strings to the money, GM, Chrysler and Citigroup all went from being in dire need to being able to do just fine without it, literally overnight! When you don't make it easy for a company to fail (by giving them a bailout) then they are forced to face the tough reality of making some changes or facing a difficult fate.

The thing that bothers me the most is the fact that he acted like himself and his entire administration were completely oblivious to the fact that HIS most recent bailout bill included specific language that ALLOWED the AIG executives to keep their bonuses. Actually, it may be completely true that neither him, nor anyone in his administration knew a thing about that specific language. That's because congress rammed one of the largest spending bills ever right down the throats of the American people in record time because things were just so bad that we couldn't even give 48 hours, 2 whole days promised by Obama, for people to read the bill. Maybe had we been given those 48 hours, someone in his administration would have been allowed to read the bill and maybe, just maybe, he would have caught that language. All I really wish is that someone in congress would stand up and say, "You know what, we screwed up. We passed a bill that had way too much in it and no one could have read it in the time we allowed and WE SCRWED UP." Now I don't think anyone in congress will actually be man (or woman) enough to do that. But that's my wish.

Lastly, I really wish that the President would quit blaming past president, the past administration, the republicans in congress. Didn't he want to be bi-partisan? Do you really want to work with someone right after they blame you for causing it? Blaming Bush and the past is not going to do anything.