Obama: Fire Geithner

American International Group is giving its executives tens of millions of dollars in new bonuses even though it received a taxpayer bailout of more than $170 billion dollars.

AIG is totally bankrupt. We knew that they were financially bankrupt, now we know they are morally bankrupt too.

AIG is paying out the executive bonuses to meet a Sunday deadline, but the troubled insurance giant has agreed to administration requests to restrain future payments. The Treasury Department determined that the government did not have the legal authority to block the current payments by the company. AIG declared earlier this month that it had suffered a loss of $61.7 billion for the fourth quarter of last year, the largest corporate loss in history.

Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner has asked that the company scale back future bonus payments where legally possible, an administration official said Saturday.

LEGAL AUTHORITY???

HEY CAPITALISTS!!! These guys are destroying your utopian vision. You had better stand up and fight for your dream otherwise these monopolist guys are going to burn your house down too!

If AIG is "contractually obligated" to pay the "bonuses", then AIG needs to file for bankruptcy. The resulting contractual claims become unsecured liabilities, which have the lowest priority for actually being paid in the restructure - and they will likely not be paid out. These guys are only able to pay themselves out because of the bailout. This is fraud - bonuses for success not earned. But this is a fraud on a pre-Armageddon scale, destroying everything it its path.

Business is a leveraged expansion of society. And there are pitfalls, and consequences for getting it WRONG. And this is way past "getting it wrong." This is such a non-remote possibility that every American kid learned it playing the game Monopoly. "GO STRAIGHT TO JAIL, DO NOT PASS GO, DO NOT COLLECT $200." In fact, playing the Parker Brothers board game, a future monopolist received more ethics training just in getting sent to pretend jail than they ever got in business school.

What did Jesus say about putting new wine in old bottles? This thing is going down. No one trusts it.