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() When the news of these AIG bonus payments first surfaced a couple weeks ago, Obama was on television declaring he didn't know about them until after they had come to light. How could that be? Senator Dodd (D-Conn) submitted an amendment to the Stimulus Bill which explicitly excluded AIG from any limits on bonuses, retention awards, and incentive compensation agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009. If every part of this legislation had been read by, or explained to, every Congressman and Senator, surely the President knew of this amendment, an amendment that became part of the Stimulus Bill that he took four days to sign into law. Or, was Obama lying? I say he was, and he wasn't the only one.
After lying for two days, denying that he had anything to do with adding the language to the federal Stimulus Bill to make sure that already-existing contracts for bonuses at companies receiving federal bailout money were honored, on 18 March Senator Chris Dodd (D-Conn) admitted that he was, in fact, responsible for the amendment and the language. Both Dodd and a Treasury Department official, who asked not to be named, said the amendment was added, because Obama administration officials were afraid the government would face numerous lawsuits without the new language.
What you won't see on MSNBC or CNN or NBC or CBS or ABC is this. Senator Olympia Snow (R-Maine) submitted an amendment to the same Stimulus Bill which would have mandated that companies paying bonuses over $100,000 would face either a 35% excise tax on the money or would have to return the cash. Unlike the Dodd-Amendment, the Snow-Amendment was dropped during "negotiations". IOW, it never saw the light of day prior to the passage of the so-called Stimulus Bill.
Now, Democrats, expressing false outrage, are calling for a full return of the bonuses, or a 90% excise tax on them. Where were they when the Dodd amendment was proposed and added (did they know about it, or was it explained to them?) and/or Snow amendment was proposed and dropped? A clue...Chris Dodd was the largest recipient of campaign contributions from AIG's PAC during the 2008 election cycle - over $100k. ACORN is organizing public protests in front of the private homes of some AIG employees who received bonus payments - something else you won't see on the main stream media. This is not just the radical left reacting their typical radical manor, it is the leadership (and the rank and file) of both the Legislative and Executive branches of our current Federal Government exposing their collective hypocrisy. They didn't "know" about it, but they voted for it.
Given that we the people now own 80% of AIG, I would think keeping the best and brightest of their employees on the job is a good idea. The last thing I'd want to see is for the feds to start appointing people to take their places. That would be a sure recipe even more failure.
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