AIG Lies; Bonuses for Fannie & Freddie; Fed Explodes Money Supply, Risks Stagflation

It’s not just AIG, being bailed out for $170 billion, that’s using taxpayer money to give fat bonuses to its employees. The same thing is happening at Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, the fraud-ridden “Government-Sponsored Enterprises” that helped spawn the mortgage crisis, and now are being bailed out at a cost of over $200 billion.

Before publicly blasting million-dollar bonuses at AIG, the Obama administration privately signed off on those very bonuses, and included language in the economy-shrinking “stimulus” bill to protect those bonuses. (AIG gave over $100,000 to Obama, and $280,000 to Chris Dodd (D-CT) the head of the Senate Banking Committee, who inserted the language into the bill, and then lied about it). Yet the Administration is trying to deceive the public about when it first became aware of the AIG bonuses, claiming it first learned about them less than a week before they became public. The Washington Times has a story today entitled “White House Cleared Way for AIG Bonuses.”

Yesterday, liberal lawmakers hypocritically blasted the bonuses in front of TV cameras, on the same day that they voted behind closed doors to protect those bonuses. Today, however, lawmakers want to levy a 90 percent tax on bonuses, without limiting them to the AIG bonuses — apparently extending them to healthy banks that took TARP money under federal pressure so that unhealthy banks that sought and received bailout money would not be stigmatized by doing so. Taxing away bonuses at healthy banks would be an economically-destructive mistake.

The Washington Times notes that “The Obama administration and one of its key allies in Congress belatedly acknowledged Wednesday that they were responsible more than a month ago for clearing the way for large bonuses to be paid inside taxpayer-supported companies like AIG, undercutting the White House’s attempts to distance itself from a growing political embarrassment.”

The Federal Reserve is now going to print money to buy up more than a trillion dollars worth of U.S. government debt (which is exploding) and risky mortgage-backed securities (in order to artificially depress mortgage interest rates and bail out irresponsible borrowers). In response, the dollar fell, raising worries about inflation and a return to the “stagflation” of the 1970s.

Meanwhile, the Obama Administration is wasting its time on ideological causes like trying to disarm the nation’s airline pilots, even though Congress, by a broad bipartisan majority, voted in favor of arming pilots to prevent another 9/11.