The Shell Game: AIG and the USA

 

I understand that when I write this it will be evident that I’m clearly not an ordinary American.  And I’m completely OK with that.  Here goes… I don’t believe that the AIG CEO should have been drawn in front of the cameras and skewered by Congressmen.  I don’t believe that AIG honoring contracts to pay $165 million in bonuses is a heinous act.  In fact, I feel that this whole parade of finger pointing at AIG is simply an effort to take the focus off of who is truly at fault in the first place.  This whole debacle is merely the result of a government gone bad—publicly—making even more horrible mistakes as they try to fix their egregious errors, and getting caught with the consequences. 

 

AIG is completely responsible for the debacle they created in the first place.  Clearly they got carried away with their own sense of power and influence and wrote too many checks they could not cover.  And they talked a good talk to many other key financial institutions worldwide to get them to play in their power game as well.  So what did that get us?  Financial ruin.  Now let’s look at this for a moment…  These people are supposedly uber-giants of expertise in financial management and yet they could not manage their own house!  They got completely drunk with their power and just like an inebriated lug of a giant they lost their reasoning and functionality abilities and stumbled—hard!  OK.  So we’ve got a giant who’s in a drunken stupor about to self-destruct and take down questionably innocent bystanders in his wake.  What do we do?  Well, yeah, we give the alcoholic lush MORE power.  No, we don’t take his license or privilege away.  No, we don’t put him into any kind of treatment.  Instead, we find him an even better “dealer” to work with (a.k.a. the Federal Reserve and U.S. Treasury) who can simply bail them out.  We give him an even more audacious privilege of using the tax payer dollars and that of several generations to come to “get him back on his feet.”  And then when he functions the same way he did previously, and even has the audacity to honor contracts, we react to publicly condemn him?  Condemn the giant so that nobody is wise to the “dealer” who feeds and encourages his misbehavior.  Now that’s quite the deception isn’t it?  (Side bar: It’s interesting to note that Congress doesn’t really care about the legality of contracts.  They don’t even enforce the most significant contract we Americans have to protect us, that of the U.S. Constitution.)

 

Here’s the perfect part of this deception, folks.  If (and I’m SOOO inclined to say “when”) AIG can’t pay us all back, what happens to them?  If they go bankrupt, what recourse do we, the tax payers who’ve been yoked with indentured servitude in order to lift this giant’s sorry caboose back up, get back?  What’s our collateral on this loan we’ve been forced to issue at the risk of death, jail time, or social and emotional ruin?  Not one blasted thing!  Nothing.  We probably won’t even get a sincere apology from a public official when it does go belly up.  Adding insult to injury is the fact that the primary people making these decisions are themselves so completely disconnected from the real picture due to their own wanton consumption habits.  They are endowed with their salary for the rest of their life, benefit from a royal health plan, and yet some even fail to pay their own taxes.  

 

AIG clearly has their own problems.  But just as I shake my head in disbelief when women refuse to leave their abusive husbands, I just can’t figure out what kind of maniacal plan the Secretary of Treasury and the Federal Reserve had in mind on this one.  Who gave them the authority to determine that one business gets bailed out above another?  That one business is any more important to our social fabric than another?  That the consequences called Real Life don’t apply to these companies?  Even worse, IF you’re going to perform such an unprecedented act, aren’t you at least willing to go through the homework of everything that act entails, i.e. reading all of the contracts that are presently in place, properly appraising just how much their other assets really are worth, etc?!  Gentlemen, don’t approve the act of an AIG bailout 100% and then get mad when something happens that you didn’t know about – i.e.: the AIG bonuses.  You had every opportunity to know everything there was to know.  It’s called a test.  A real life test.  You know, the kind of real life testing that all of your schooling and life experiences are supposed to prepare you for so that you’re actually competent enough to take the job that the American people pay you to do!  And clearly you screwed up!  It’s your own freaking fault that you didn’t know about it!  Just as it’s your own freaking fault that you overpaid for assets in the tens of billions of dollars!  So let’s be perfectly clear about this… whoever closed the bail out deal with AIG in the first place is 100% responsible and should be FIRED and perhaps even have charges filed for willful negligence at best, or treasonous acts at worst. 

 

How dare our government condemn Madoff when they are doing the EXACT same thing with all of our money?  And lest anyone forget, yes – it’s OUR money, not the government’s.  We earn it while we work on the frontlines while we simultaneously are shown how little responsibility and accountability means to those who are in power.  And yet we still provide our tax dollars for the purposes of paying for a government to protect our freedoms.

 

The U.S. Government is mismanaging funds.

 

They are playing a shell game. 

 

The Federal Reserve just keeps printing money and yet REFUSES to provide our country with an accounting of just how much money (via the M3 report) they are printing, thus we are unable to define for ourselves what our currency is really worth.  How in the world is that any different than Madoff having his CPA send out false solubility reports to his investors?!

 

Oh, and one last point I’d like to make here.  So, you have a government who has totally screwed up publicly enough that even the mainstream media can’t ignore it, and so what do the do to truly fix the problem?  They paint every recipient of that $165 million bonus share as some kind of a criminal—even a terrorist if you will—against the sovereignty of this American people.  And to show you just how big and powerful they are, they actually draft a bill which would directly tax all of these financial terrorists with a 90% tax!  Using taxes as a weapon, you say?  How can they do that?  They can’t.  It’s called a direct unapportioned tax, and it’s 100% illegal and completely unconstitutional, for the very same reasons why your present federal income tax is illegal.  You don’t believe that our wonderful U.S. government would commit such an illegal act?  Really?  You just watched them try to do it right in front of your eyes against the AIG bonus recipients! 

 

Of course the government did nothing to preemptively thwart the payment of the bonuses to AIG executives.  That’s because, very much like the ridiculous stimulus bill, they didn’t even bother to comprehend the entire picture of their actions.  This is the same government who overpaid by over $70 billion dollars for the assets it purchased from the companies it bailed out!  Whether or not there was a senator who acknowledged and attempted to keep the bonuses in the contract is beside the point.

 

I say kudos to the AIG Executive who resigned in the New York Times today!  And I don’t care whether or not he does donate any of his money to charity.  Legally, contractually, it’s his money.  The U.S. Government simply bought into a Lion’s Zoo and is now whining when they got bit!  And now they are claiming foul because many of the vital AIG personnel refuse to work under such circumstances.  Can you blame them?  Sure you can’t relate to such a huge bonus in your own life.  I get that.  But it’s what the guy signed on for.  It was part of the reason why he left his previous job to take a position with AIG 11 years ago.  And now he’s being asked to work for free for an undetermined period of time while AIG fixes all of their screw ups and be persecuted by nearly an entire country in the meantime.  Does that sound like a job you’d want to keep?  Heck, when I heard during the live Congressional questioning that the CEO was working for $1 and taking all of the crap from Congress, I would have quit on the spot and told Congress that they can fix their own mess and not use me as a whipping boy.

 

Here’s some wisdom my mother taught me.  “Be very aware of what people say about other people, because they are likely to be saying the same thing about you when you’re not around.”  You’ve seen what the U.S. Government is willing to do when we are looking.  Now, get a clue as to what they are doing when we’re not watching!

Copyright 2009 Kellene Bishop. All rights reserved. You are welcome to repost this information so long as it is credited to Kellene Bishop.

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Bail Out Means…

When we used to hear the words “bail out” we would usually associate it with a sentence like, “I just had to bail out my crack addict cousin from jail.”  I find myself wondering if it isn’t a coincidence that such a pairing of words is considered appropriate for what we find being implemented by our government today.

 

Based on the information that we’ve been fed by the media, yes, I believe it was a crime what Bernie Madoff did to his investors. Clearly he was derelict in his duties.  However, I’m wondering why Madoff is a criminal and yet the heads of Goldman Sachs, AIG, Countrywide, and so many others aren’t considered a member of the criminal league? While Madoff is accused of abusing $50 billion, Goldman Sachs, AIG and others are truly guilty of abusing significantly more!  And yet there are no criminal charges brought against these leaders.  Were these professionals derelict in their duties?  Yes.  Were they apathetic towards their handling of others money?  Yes.  In such a world that we live in, there’s simply no excuse NOT to make money with so much money.  Madoff was an idiot not to have succeeded in making a return on investments of over $50 billion as are the heads of so many of these Wall Street companies and banks. Yes, indeed these criminals are being bailed out at the expense of the honest tax paying citizens of this nation.  And all for naught.  Think about it.  Does the bailout for these banks and investment companies do any good financially?  I mean really!  Does anyone think that once the nation has seen how such companies mismanage funds that any sane person is really going to trust these same companies with their retirement money?  This bail out is as insane as throwing money at the Diamond Pet Food company who poisoned so many pets due to dereliction and apathy just so that they could recover from the financial hardship such an error created!  Hey, while were at it, let’s go back in time and bailout all of the dot com companies that caused such a financial hardship for so many investors!

 

Of course we have politicians in favor of such payouts.  Apparently many of them have a problem even acknowledging that such monies are coming from their tax dollars as many of them have not even paid their taxes!

 

General Motors and Chrysler just received a portion of this criminal action reward in the form of billions of dollars.  Even more ridiculous is that these companies are already anticipating failure in spite of such a bail out, as they are already projecting a need for another $14 billion!  I’m sorry.  Would that kind of strategy work for any homeowner in the U.S. today?  “Hey. I know you just gave me a loan of $1 million for a home I can’t currently afford.  So in order to make up for the shortfall I need to borrow another $2 million.”

 

Here’s the even more insane aspect of this bailout.  General Motors and Chrysler can STILL declare bankruptcy somewhere down the road and the American taxpayers will never be paid back.  And yet the American people do not have the luxury of declaring bankruptcy as a result of our tax burden.  Nope.  You can file bankruptcy and be relieved of debt for everyone else in the world except the U.S. Government.  You don’t pay them.  You go to jail. 

 

Perhaps if these automakers didn’t promote aggressive price haggling and foreign outsourcing of some of their production process they could have enjoyed more long-term customer loyalty.  While I did not get the opportunity to vote against my tax dollars being used in such a criminally insane manner, I can vote now.  And so should you.  I intend to “vote” by solely rewarding automakers who are fiscally responsible with their companies.  If money can be handled so haphazardly by these automakers, then I can’t help but wonder how conscientious these same automakers are in making my vehicle safe enough to transport my family in.  I vote no more GM or Chrysler.  If GM and Chrysler are willing to sell their soul to the devil (ie: government control in exchange for the money they received) then what are they willing to sell my safety for?

 

Does failure really deserve a reward such as those given on the backs of the taxpayers?  In that case, perhaps the British should still rule our nation.  NOT!

Copyright 2009 Kellene Bishop. All rights reserved.
You are welcome to repost this information so long as it is credited to Kellene Bishop.  

 

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