More Unintended Consequences

Two weeks ago, Congress pulled out the pitchforks and went after AIG over the fact that it was paying out $1.65 million in bonuses to employees who had stuck around (at a greatly reduced salary) to try to clean up the mess at the insurance giant. I'm not going to go into the who knew what when (Geithner knew about the bonuses last fall) here - what I want to do is go into some of the things that have happened to AIG employees since then. Take a look at the picture above....and read the text from the accompanying article.....

"Get the bonus, we will get your children," someone identified only as "Jacob the Killer" hauntingly writes in an e-mail.
His is one of dozens of threats against AIG and its employees that were obtained from Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal's office under a Freedom of Information Act request by NBC Connecticut.

Here are some of the highlights (or rather, low-lights). We've cleaned up some of the nasty language, but you can use your imagination:

-- All you motherf***ers should be shot. Thanks for f***ing up our economy then taking our money.

-- Dear Sir: Ya'll should have the balls and come clean and give back the bonuses. I know you would never do this so the gov't ought to take you out back and shoot everyone of you crooked sonofb****es...I would be very careful when I went out side. This is just a warning. If I were ya'll I would be real afraid. Thanks, Bill.

-- I don't hope that bad things happen to the recipients of those bonuses. I really hope that bad things happen to the children and grandchildren of them! Whatever hurts them the most!!

-- You f***ing suck. Paying bonuses to the d*****s that made bad bets losing your company billions of dollars. I want to f***ing puke. Publish the list of those yankee scumbags so some good old southern boys can take care of them.

-- If the bonuses don't stop, it will be very likely that every CEO @ AIG has a bulls-eye on their backs. (ed - does this person not realize that there can only be ONE Chief Executive Officer? That is kinda what the title CEO means.....)

-- We will hunt you down. Every last penny. We will hunt your children and we will hunt your conscience. We will do whatever we can to get those people getting the bonuses. Give back the money or kill yourselves.

-- All the executives and their families should be executed with piano wire around their necks --- my greatest hope.

-- You mother-f***ing, c***s***ing, d***l****ers need to be taken out one by one and shot in the head. There's a special place in hell for you pond scum. Watch your backs because someone will come to get you, you can be sure.

-- The Revolution is coming. The family members of your executives are not safe. Your blood will run through the streets in the coming months.

THIS is what Congress and the Obama Administration wrot in their rush to demonize people who (for the most part) had nothing to do with the collapse of AIG. Many of these executives (like CEO Liddy) forsook an annual salary in order to clean up the mess and had their "salary" tied up in these bonuses! Many - like Liddy - came out of retirement in order to do THE TAXPAYER a favor and clean up the mess at AIG and how do they get repaid? They get vilified and threatened!

Many have likened the reaction of Congress, the Obama Administration and the thugs who left these messages to Nazi Germany in the days leading up to Kristalnacht and I have to say they make valid points.....Michael Reagan...

When the members of the National Socialist German Workers Party (Nazis) wanted to use anger as a political weapon they burned the Reichstag and blamed it on the Communists.

It's an old tactic -- when you are in trouble, create a crisis and then create a straw man to blame for the crisis. We are now seeing it played out as a giant insurance company, AIG, is given the role of straw man.

It's working. I'm mad, you're mad, and our anger over the mess created by Washington politicians and their Wall Street buddies is now being diverted away from Capitol Hill and toward AIG and a handful of executives, some of whom got huge bonuses as their company was being bailed out by the federal government.

Mitch...

For a dictator to get elected, they need large mobs of uninformed but inchoately angry people to put them into office.

But the mobs are like the soldiers in the first example; the dictator has to keep looking over his shoulder in case the mob turns on him.

So the dictator keeps the mob occupied. Hitler pointed them at the Jews; Kristallnacht sent mobs of young Nazis into the streets to harass Jews, destroy their businesses, and make their lives miserable. 91 died. Stalin kept the mob busy denouncing each other. Hugo Chavez and Ayatollah Khomeini and Fidel Castro and Saddam Hussein all found boogeymen, internal and external, to keep the mob from turning their wrath on them.

Now, Barack Obama is not a dictator. He’s a democratically elected president. In 2012, when he loses in an electoral landslide (provided the GOP can get its act together) he’ll hand power over.

But Obama - the least-vetted, most inexperienced president in American history - was elected by a huge popular groundswell, animated by fatigue with the sitting administration and actively disinformed by a media whose legs tingled at the thought of The One taking office.

Michelle...

If you think there are no consequences to hysterical, anti-corporate grandstanding in Washington, pay attention to what's happening across the pond: "This is just the beginning."

So warned a public letter signed this week by a vigilante group called "Bank Bosses are Criminals." The thugs claimed responsibility for vandalizing a former financial executive's home and car in Edinburgh, Scotland. The bank official, Sir Fred Goodwin, was excoriated by U.K. politicians for refusing to give up company pension benefits dubbed "obscene," "grotesque," "unjustifiable and unacceptable." The vigilantes were stoked by a former newspaper editor, one Max Hastings, who wrote a diatribe exhorting citizens to violence:

"The time has come to address the entire robber banker culture. Investment banks have been run not for the benefit of society, customers or even shareholders, but exclusively for the advantage of the bankers themselves. … This is why we must stand outside their homes throwing rocks through the windows until they do."

We have got to get beyond the politics of "feeling" and get back into the politics of sound rational thought. Feelings are great and where appropriate they are necessary and important. However, when we are talking about creating long term economic and social policy - feelings have to take a back seat to common sense, logic and boring things like research and thought.

The "professional protester class" has it's uses, but now is not the time or the place for Seattle WTO type vandalism and protests. You have made your point quite nicely (and it is a point that I share with you) - greater oversight needs to be had over the companies that are taking taxpayer money! However, these kinds of threats and demonization do not do anyone any good. NOW we need serious people to sit down and create the type of oversight that will benefit the taxpayer, the country AND the businesses that are being bailed out. Threats to the children and families of these execs do nothing more than make you look like a bunch of lawless thugs. Is that the message that you want to convey?