I swear you could take a needle and poke the House of Representatives and the building would deflate. With the exception of a few, it's made up of corrupt self-serving douchebags.

This is very significant because it shows the abuse that the House can do. They allowed the bonuses and then when the people got upset about cried and made this. What if they turn around and decide to tax everyone that works in a particular job at 90%? This is a very scary precedent set.

They royally effed up, now they are trying to cover their A in any way possible.

It's not like they didn't know this was going to happen, Chris Dodd admitted he had language in the "stimulus" bill that allowed it, and look at who AIG donated to, starting with who else, Dodd! As for the rest of them, most are either senior members of Congress or, gasp, in the White House.

http://www.watertowndailytimes.com/article/20090326 /OPINION02/303269971/-1/OPINION

This is basically Enron, except the difference is that Enron was allowed to fail. Now we taxpayers are forced with saving AIG.

I think it is clear that virtually the entire handling of this has been atrocious from the word go. A company seeking aid from public purse has to accept that there may be (and frankly should be) a higher level of oversight and interference in their affairs. Conversely, the administrators and legislators of the public purse have a responsibility of due diligence, professionalism, and careful consideration of all factors, including public perception.

I'm impressed by the lack of all three elements from the public trustees (in this case Congress) in this case. Watching the progress of this chain of events has been like watching a drunken teenage boy trying to score with a girl. The folks involved keep coming up with what they think are brilliant ideas, and regularly falling on their face.

While we're throwing outrage around at the either short-sighted or dangerously reactionary measures of legislators, remember that this is in the context of reckless or incompetent management that established a wildly generous self-serving compensation scheme that either incented employees to run the enterprise into the ground for personal gain or was so lax in due diligence that it didn’t monitor the fact that their executives were stealing them blind. When you go to the public purse for assistance you have to accept that the public interest becomes a petty annoyance in the running of your business.

Am I the only one who thinks it's interesting that the people who are the most hysterical about the dangers of government intervention in the current environment are the ones who were completely trusting of the surrender of civil rights to government 8 years ago?

This is truly outrageous. What else will they decide to do? They obviously don't care if it's legal or not to decide to levy a 90% tax on a specific group of people. These idiots should have known all along about the bonuses and trying to go back and retroactively confiscate private citizens contractual bonuses is the height of arrogance. I think they're only trying to make themselves look good and distract from what's really going on up there.

Great, now they can tax anything. Traitors...

UPDATE: Traitors might be a harsh term, but this thing is potentially dangerous and not anything resembling something from the country I grew up in.

It portends what is to come. As this liberal/socialist cabal grows stronger and more arrogant, its reach will increase. American health care will be managed in much the same way the US Postal Service is managed. Take a look at the DMV for a preview, also. The true traitors are the republicans. They were elected with an unspoken promise to stop this movement. They will not only fail, many are already abandoning the fight.

What will be fascinating will be guys like magellan, guys with an entrepreneurial bent, having tasted a bit of success and appropriate rewards, as they shed their ideological armor and realize just how much they've lost, at which point it will likely be too late. Laws like this and policies like Obama's kill individual initiative and with it, the entrepreneurial spirit. This is nothing new. FDR did it. Jimmy Carter did it. But, Bill Clinton did not. He betrayed his far left ideological minions and the economy flourished under his administration. He did have the advantage of a republican majority in both houses of Congress during most of his years in office, and the "Contract With America" as the flag under which they operated. Is there anything like that anywhere in American government today? No, the wealthy are evil, in need of a heavy handed, punitive government to do the dirty work of taking their money and "giving" it to the less fortunate. No welfare programs cuts are even considered.

mag sees all this but allays his own fears by pointing to the hysteria of guys like me, Wise, etc. and pointing out that a handful of republicans actually GO ALONG WITH IT!! He concludes that it could not be so bad, which makes him the bellwether of how bad things will get, how permanent the damage will be, before guys (and women) like him wake up and seek to put the brakes on. It would be fascinating to watch were it not so risky.

The media is focused on the situation in Mexico now. I wonder why?

Posturing by a bunch of incompetent pols caught having voted for an ill concieved 'stimulus' law.

I wouldn't be the least bit surprised to find tax lawyers unearthing loopholes that allow the wealthy to continue to shirk their responsibility to contribute to the very government that enforces their 'right' to exploit working people and suppress unions.

Genghis made an good point. Many financial institutions were already becoming more hesitant about getting TARP funds, due to excessive government intrusion into their operations. Now they will likely try to run away from it.

The real consequences of Obama's bank bill is that now the FDIC and Treasury may actually FORCE banks to sell the toxic assets (now called "legacy assets"), at a price range to be determined by the regulators! I've said it before, and I'll say it again, so much for the free market!

I'm concerned that we're losing something that made America a great wealth generator for generations. The market is being compromised by forces intent on changing how it works. And I'm also concerned that our lawmakers are treating our constitution as a afterthought. This AIG bonus scandal brought that point to light for everyone to see.

Congress is making laws on the fly now, drumming up populist rage to detract away from the real problem we have; an overwhelming debt burden throughout the highest strata of society. The government continues to print money at an unparalleled clip, all to subsidize the losses at failed companies.

It is evident that people are starting to wake up to this reality. Change will come only when we stop empowering politicians who squander away our resources on bad projects and schemes.

This is disturbing to me. If it was written into their contracts that they were to receive these bonuses, I can't blame the executives at AIG for accepting them. I'm not upset with those executives, but with the members of Congress who expressed such outrage about the bonuses after hastily signing off on the stimulus bill.
I'd have more respect for some of our elected officials if they defended the existing contracts and acknowledged that this was a detail they looked over. A 90% tax on any type of earnings just seems ridiculous to me.

This is big. This is going to have consequences. You all know the story. A howling mob of "statesmen" in the U. S. House of Representatives, without committee hearings, or deliberation, passes a punitive 90% tax on bonuses similar to those issued by AIG. Over 300 of the feckless mopes voted for the bill!

Barack Hussein was leading the charge, but then some people in his administration, who can read evidently, started feeding new material into his teleprompter, and so he is starting to change his tune.

This one monumentally stupid act is going to cause many a bank, corporation or other entity to pause, hesitate and probably forgo taking federal largess from all the stimulus, TARP and other fiascoes passed lately and into the future. The key to the bill was the trigger that AIG had taken over a certain amount of federal bailout cash.

Aside from lots of legal problems including constitutional questions, this bill strikes at the very core of our western financial system. That is the sanctity of contractual obligations and the axiom that the government will stand behind them.

This one makes me really uneasy. Any time a government starts passing legislation to take away contractually awarded earnings after the fact, I feel they are overstepping their bounds. Countries like Zimbabwe and Venezuela do this all the time, and their economies are f'd because of it because nobody will invest capital in a place where it might just be seized.

The bonuses are obscene, but we should not be setting the anti-capitalist precedent of using legislation to take people's wealth. It seems to me that public outrage did a pretty good job of getting folks to cough up these bonuses anyway.