President Obama has instructed the Treasury secretary to try to stop the faltering insurance giant American International Group from paying out hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to executives, as the administration scrambled to avert a populist backlash against banks and Wall Street that could complicate Mr. Obama’s economic recovery agenda.
This needed to get done. Geithner’s got to make it so, or the administration will look terrible. I can’t imagine that anyone really believes the BS about contracts (um, the UAW renegotiates them all the time, right? And those revised contracts force people who—whatever you think of their labors—are just hanging in to the ‘middle class’ to cut back on things like college for their kids and food on their tables.), or about ‘talent retention’ lol. AIG clearly needed ‘talent expulsion’. Why would we need the credit-default-swap gurus on board? Don’t we want to get rid of the lot of them and bring in auditors and accountants to sort out the mess their talent wrought?
