Bush knew about the bonuses. He kept that information secret for our own good. Congress pases tougher bailout legislation later to cover it. but apparrently not?
Because silly. This stimulus is only a way to pump so much extra money into the markets that by the end of this recession… Oops, daym we’ll be in another inflation driven recession…
I honestly don’t think Congress thinks at all anymore. They just react.
Obama’s people knew about it and the contracts were legal and binding and under no conditions could the bail out of AIG changed the legal pay out of bonus. The outrage by Obama is an attempt to avert the anger that is spilling into the streets with Tea`d off protest by thousands of people. These protest go unreported by the mainstream media yet in 2003 if 1 guy had a poster board protesting the war he was front and center on the evening news.
Tiny Tim Geithner didn’t do anything about the bonuses, claims he didn’t know about it, and now he is acting outraged. Also, have you noticed Obama and congress acting so outraged and surprised, but today we learn that he signed the very bill that quite clearly made those bonuses legal — the $787 billion stimulus package he had traveled around the nation promoting.
The bill includes restrictions on executive compensation, but creates an exception for bonuses contractually obligated before February 11 of this year. The provision, and the exception, were inserted into the bill by the chairman of the Senate Banking Committee, Chris Dodd (D, Conn.), who has received more than $100,000 from AIG employees in the last 20 years, had written and inserted the relevant provision, with the relevant loophole. —time/
How can he, the president, or anyone else who voted for the stimulus, suddenly act surprised? Don’t tell us they didn’t read the bill. The presence of this loophole, in black and white, certainly gives the lie to all of this phony outrage — by the senator who created the loophole, by the president who signed it into law, and by everyone else who voted for the stimulus package. o_O