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AIG needs to pay employees to stay?
January 27, 2009 8:05 PM

Are you kidding me?

American International Group Inc., the insurer saved from collapse by government money after losses on credit-default swaps, offered about $450 million in retention pay to employees of the unit that sold the derivatives, according to two people familiar with the situation.

About 400 workers at the financial products unit may get the money in two installments, said the people, who declined to be named because details of the payments were confidential. The business was responsible for about $34 billion in writedowns since 2007 as the market value of swaps AIG sold to banks plunged amid the subprime mortgage market collapse.

Does AIG really need to pay their employees $1,000,000 each to keep them from quitting? Where the hell are they going to flee? To become servers at Starbucks? Us taxpayers should be furious about this:

The payments bring to more than $1 billion the amount AIG has committed to keep its employees from leaving. The New York- based insurer in September took a federal bailout to avoid bankruptcy and is selling subsidiaries to repay the government. AIG said the program was disclosed before the government rescue, which is now valued at $150 billion.
Some of our representatives are on this, but is there enough of this sort of outrage?
“I was extremely disappointed -- but not surprised -- to learn that AIG will be awarding bonuses to the very division that drove the company into the ground,” said Representative Elijah Cummings, a member of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform, in an e-mail. AIG shouldn’t be awarding “millions of unmerited dollars to employees while at the same time begging the U.S. government for financial life support.”

Amen to that!

And then there's Republican Senator Shelby from Alabama:

“I feel just like I did about the Merrill Lynch bonuses,” said Senator Richard Shelby, 74, in an interview on Bloomberg Television today when asked about AIG. “It has been a waste of taxpayers’ money.”

Shelby's been against the entire bailout from the beginning. The only problem is that we don't know how bad it would be without the money to the banking sector. That said, we have de facto nationalization of the banks, and with that, we - the tax payers - are in charge of these banks now, so we should start acting like the boss!

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