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:<\/p>\n<\/p>\n
\n\nThe A.I.G.<\/a>
\nexecutive who was nicknamed \u201cJackpot Jimmy\u201d by a New York tabloid
\nwalked up the driveway toward his bay-windowed house in Fairfield,
\nConn., on Thursday afternoon. "How do I feel?\u201d said the executive,
\nJames Haas, repeating the question he had just been asked. \u201cI feel
\nhorrible. This has been a complete invasion of privacy."
\n<\/a>\n<\/p>\nMr. Haas walked on, his pink
\nshirt a burst of color on a slate-gray afternoon. The words came
\nhaltingly. "You have to understand,\u201d he said, \u201cthere are kids involved, there have been death threats. …" His voice trailed off. It looked as if he was fighting back tears.<\/p>\n"I didn\u2019t have anything to do with those credit problems,\u201d said Mr. Haas, 47. \u201cI told Mr. Liddy\u201d \u2014 Edward M. Liddy<\/a>, the chief executive of A.I.G., the insurance giant \u2014 \u201cI would rescind my retention contract.\u201d <\/p>\n
He ended the conversation with a request: \u201cLeave my neighbors alone.\u201d<\/p>\n
Too
\nlate. Jean Wieson, who has lived down the block for 24 years, had
\nstopped her car in front of Mr. Haas\u2019s house before he arrived home.
\nShe was angry about the millions of dollars in bonuses paid to its
\nexecutives, the credit-default swaps<\/a> that brought American International Group<\/a>
\nto its knees, the $170 billion the federal government has spent to prop
\nit up. "It makes me absolutely sick," she said. "It\u2019s despicable. It\u2019s
\ndisgusting what these people have done. They should be forced to give
\nevery cent back."<\/p>\nThose bonuses in years past helped make A.I.G.
\nexecutives into prominent local citizens. They own big houses like Mr.
\nHaas\u2019s, with its three chimneys and its views of Southport Harbor and
\nLong Island Sound in the distance. Some are well-known contributors to
\narts groups and private schools in Connecticut communities not far from
\nthe office park in Wilton that is the workplace of many of the
\nemployees in A.I.G.\u2019s Financial Products division, which is at the
\ncenter of the storm over bonus payments.<\/p>\nNow these executives are
\ntoxic, and those communities are rattled and divided. Private security
\nguards have been stationed outside their houses, and sometimes the
\nlocal police drive by. A.I.G. employees at the company\u2019s office tower
\nin Lower Manhattan were told to avoid leaving the building while a
\ndemonstration was going on outside. The memo also advised them to avoid
\ndisplaying company-issued ID cards when they left the office and to
\nabandon tote bags or other items with the A.I.G. logo.<\/p>\nOne A.I.G.
\nexecutive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared
\nthe consequences of identifying himself, said many workers felt
\ndemonized and betrayed. \u201cIt is as bad if not worse than McCarthyism,\u201d
\nhe said. Everyone has sacrificed the employees of A.I.G.\u2019s financial
\nproducts division, he said, \u201cfor their own political agenda.\u201d<\/p>\nThe
\npublic\u2019s anger, he said, \u201cis coming from bad facts as a result of
\nsomeone else\u2019s agenda \u2014 or just bad facts period.\u201d Instead, he said,
\nthe so-called bonuses were in fact just payments that had been promised
\nlong ago to workers, including technical and administrative assistants.\n<\/p>\nA.I.G. employees are not the only ones seeking protection: An executive at Merrill Lynch<\/a>,
\nwhere bonuses have also come under fire, said that some employees had
\nasked whether the firm would cover the cost of private security for
\nthem.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\nWe 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.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
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 … Continue reading Congress, AIG, Bonuses and Mob Rule<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[1],"tags":[756,757,760,759,21,758],"class_list":["post-1334","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-aig","tag-bonuses","tag-congress","tag-death-threats","tag-politics-2","tag-threats-against-aig"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_featured_media_url":"","jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p4gBq8-lw","jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1334"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1334\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1334"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1334"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/cynthiasamuels.com\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1334"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}