Author: Cynthia Samuels

I can't stand this.  As usual, and I covered politics most of my life and still write about it, our cheesy Congress, instead of being moral and sane leaders, are going off in vicious, reflexive and pandering responses to the AIG bonus mess.  If you saw today's papers you know that AIG employees, even those with NO relationship to the unit that lost all the money, are being harassed in their offices and driveways.  Kids run into crowds when they go home from school.  Listen to this from the New York Times:

The A.I.G.
executive who was nicknamed “Jackpot Jimmy” by a New York tabloid
walked up the driveway toward his bay-windowed house in Fairfield,
Conn., on Thursday afternoon. "How do I feel?” said the executive,
James Haas, repeating the question he had just been asked. “I feel
horrible. This has been a complete invasion of privacy."

Mr. Haas walked on, his pink
shirt a burst of color on a slate-gray afternoon. The words came
haltingly. "You have to understand,” he said, “there are kids involved, there have been death threats. …" His voice trailed off. It looked as if he was fighting back tears.

"I didn’t have anything to do with those credit problems,” said Mr. Haas, 47. “I told Mr. Liddy” — Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G., the insurance giant — “I would rescind my retention contract.”

He ended the conversation with a request: “Leave my neighbors alone.”

Too
late. Jean Wieson, who has lived down the block for 24 years, had
stopped her car in front of Mr. Haas’s house before he arrived home.
She was angry about the millions of dollars in bonuses paid to its
executives, the credit-default swaps that brought American International Group
to its knees, the $170 billion the federal government has spent to prop
it up. "It makes me absolutely sick," she said. "It’s despicable. It’s
disgusting what these people have done. They should be forced to give
every cent back."

Those bonuses in years past helped make A.I.G.
executives into prominent local citizens. They own big houses like Mr.
Haas’s, with its three chimneys and its views of Southport Harbor and
Long Island Sound in the distance. Some are well-known contributors to
arts groups and private schools in Connecticut communities not far from
the office park in Wilton that is the workplace of many of the
employees in A.I.G.’s Financial Products division, which is at the
center of the storm over bonus payments.

Now these executives are
toxic, and those communities are rattled and divided. Private security
guards have been stationed outside their houses, and sometimes the
local police drive by. A.I.G. employees at the company’s office tower
in Lower Manhattan were told to avoid leaving the building while a
demonstration was going on outside. The memo also advised them to avoid
displaying company-issued ID cards when they left the office and to
abandon tote bags or other items with the A.I.G. logo.

One A.I.G.
executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared
the consequences of identifying himself, said many workers felt
demonized and betrayed. “It is as bad if not worse than McCarthyism,”
he said. Everyone has sacrificed the employees of A.I.G.’s financial
products division, he said, “for their own political agenda.”

The
public’s anger, he said, “is coming from bad facts as a result of
someone else’s agenda — or just bad facts period.” Instead, he said,
the so-called bonuses were in fact just payments that had been promised
long ago to workers, including technical and administrative assistants.

A.I.G. employees are not the only ones seeking protection: An executive at Merrill Lynch,
where bonuses have also come under fire, said that some employees had
asked whether the firm would cover the cost of private security for
them.

We all know how much more there is to this thing. We all know that bonuses are a tiny part of the money spent and that only a tiny part of those working on Wall Street even got them. Instead of reminding people of that and preventing the frenzy that will affect both bonus recipients and the future of the country, as politicians slam dumb laws into being to satisfy instead of lead their constituents, they should be showing some guts and discernment. They haven't so far though, so I guess we just have to ride it out and hope that their pandering to their voters doesn't take us all farther over the edge than we already are.