AIG Bailout

I sent this to my Colorado representatives today:

[representative name],

As a Colorado resident, I am asking you to please increase the oversight on federal spending, especially with regard to the bailout money being distributed to companies. AIG should not be giving out large bonuses, of which I would consider anything approaching $100,000 to be large.

This article: http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aaron-zelinsky/larry-summers-stop-the-ai_b_175151.html showcases how this can be done.

And if these are retention bonuses, I would argue those people ought not to be retained. They have not run the company well, and while it is relatively few people that made mistakes with managing AIG, if we as taxpayers suffer, so should they as employees.

Steve Jones


I saw this article yesterday on the AIG bonuses, which says that they are legally bound to pay bonuses, and these help with retention.

First, none of the AIG execs deserve to be retained. They aren't the "best and brightest" and they haven't done a good job. On what measure of performance could you say that they've achieved anything?

I'm sure it's relatively few people that mismanaged things, but with the rest of the country suffering, so should employees of AIG. I bet that bonuses would not be paid if people were fired. So fire them.