Wednesday, March 18, 2009

Never underestimate our government

its capacity for hypocrisy and bogosity is simply unparalleled. After all the bitching and whining and soapboxing about the outrage of the AIG bonuses, it turns out that Senator Chris Dodd (D -Conn and friend of Angelo) wrote language in the stimulus bill that specifically allows the AIG bonuses to be paid out. Here, let Politico tell it:

Sen. Chris Dodd (D-Conn.) looks like he may be facing a fresh political firestorm.

Dodd just admitted on CNN that he inserted a loophole in the stimulus legislation that allowed million-dollar bonuses to insurance giant AIG to go forward – after previously denying any involvement in writing the controversial provision. .

“We wrote the language in the bill, the deal with bonuses, golden parachutes, excessive executive compensation that was adopted unanimously by the United States Senate in the stimulus bill,” Dodd told CNN’s Wolf Blitzer this afternoon.

“But for that language, there would have been no language to deal with this at all.”

Dodd had previously said that he played no role in writing the controversial language, and was not a part of the conference committee that inserted the language in the bill. As late as today, Dodd’s spokeswoman denied the senator’s involvement.

Oh yeah, he lied about it for days before coming clean. Of course the AIG employees who served their time in order to collect their contracted payments will continue to get pilloried, while this bum will probably survive unscathed just like he did the mortgage fiasco.

People, I think we are getting close to the horse here.



5 comments:

Norman said...

I'm curious, what does "the horse" look like in this situation, do you think?

Anonymous said...

Not sure about the whole horse, but I'm betting its backside looks a lot like Chris Dodd.

Anonymous said...

http://www.salon.com/opinion/greenwald/2009/03/17/dodd/

Looks like the Administration fed this story to the NYTimes, when it was actually the Administration (fearing lawsuits) that pressured Dodd to include the language in the bill, while Dodd wanted to remove the exemption.

Angus said...

well the horse is like porno; we know it when we see it, but here maybe a Congressionally mandated national pay scale would fill the bill?

Barnacle Bill said...

Spitzer's piece says it all: the real con is not the bonuses, the real con is that SocGen, GS, Wachovia, et al were bailed out when Treasury gave AIG all those 'loans'. Seriously, it boggles my mind. The real looting are the 'loans' to pay out counterparties of AIG. BANGBANGBANG! Wake up people! ...Eh, the beast is too slow.

(And I don't much care for Spitzer, not because he likes hookers -- fine with me, whatever suits your pleasure, pal -- but because he's a hypocrite on the subject who boosted his career busting flesh-trade folk.)