I’m proud to be a Gary Peters supporter.

OT re AIG …auditor St.Denis’letter to Waxman 10=4-08
Rentention Bonus is euphemism for bribe:

Note that retention bonuses apparently NOT paid to ensure continued employment; they were paid for having stayed at AIG thru the prior year [and behaving].

The bonus “carrot”, bec it was in a “guaranteed” amount, depended only on his staying, not his production. High production, which would be known only AFTER the yearly results, whs rewarded separately and additionally.

If the employee stayed, he got the “guaranteed” bonus…in an amount known to the employed concurrently while he obediently toiled, not in advance of future employment.

http://oversight.house.gov/doc…..102452.pdf

These seem to be the were “guaranteed bonus” spelled-out by St.Denis, who resigned in protest of obstructed by Cassano,etc in his responsibility to monitor AIGFP accounting ops for parent AIG.

I watched part of Liddy’s testimony this morning. He said that the “retention bonuses” were needed so that these 70+ managers in AIGFP would “wind down” their portfolios– he said there were 24 “books”. He implied that they had expert knowledge about these accounts that was necessary for their successful closure.

My question is, if their books are in such shape that only they could close them out, then there’s something fishy going on that needs to be exposed.

I also think I heard the hint that these “financial products” were based in part on personal relationships between the AIG manager and the purchaser of those financial products. I guess the most favorable way of putting that is that the relationship is like that of a life insurance agent with a client, which used to be a relationship of trust. The actuality probably is that a good bit of these financial transactions is to some degree “off the books.” If so, then it would be better if some new person was put in charge of closing those books. By letting the original actors close the books, don’t we allow them to hide for all eternity the possibly fraudulent aspects of those transactions?

Bob in HI

Workers are expendable, not part of the privileged class. The capitalist system takes care of its own. It’s really pretty simple.

From my article on AIG at my blog today:

The ingrown nature of the capitalist class, which latter has united to unleash a frenzy of greed and stealing, is no better illustrated than by the biography of Obama’s Treasury Secretary Geithner. Born to a scion of the capitalist class — his father was a prominent leader of the Ford Foundation — Geithner’s early career (after attending the best Ivy League schools) was working for Kissinger and Associates in Washington, D.C. He began working for various divisions of the Treasury Department as early as 1988, when he was 27 years old. He was close to two former Treasury secretaries, Robert Rubin and Lawrence Summers. During the George W years he worked at the Council of Foreign Relations and the International Monetary Fund. In October 2003, he became president of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York, and a few years later joined the elite, Rockefeller Foundation organized “Group of Thirty.”

In March 2008, he arranged the rescue and sale of Bear Stearns… in the same year, he is believed to have played a pivotal role in both the decision to bail out AIG as well as the government decision not to save Lehman Brothers from bankruptcy.

Hmmm… the same guy who organized the AIG bailout, with its non-regulation of monies, including millions for “bonuses” to the same execs who helped manufacture the crisis… naw, that can’t be true, can it? (It is.)

Oh, and he “forgot” to pay $35,000 in self-employment taxes over several years.

CNBC’s Santelli thinks he was calling for a Boston Tea Party revolt. He may get it. But it is coming from the mean streets, not from the Streets of Wall or La Salle which are controlled by the privileged Red Coats.