Madoff to Help U.S. Sell Bad Assets.

Andy Borowitz BorowitzReport.com

Posted March 22, 2009 | 11:56 PM (EST)

The Obama administration, hoping to find investors to buy $1 trillion worth of so-called "toxic" assets from U.S. financial institutions, has turned to confessed swindler Bernie Madoff to mastermind the sales campaign.

While White House officials acknowledged that joining forces with the jail-bound scam artist was likely to raise some eyebrows, privately they are hoping that when it comes to selling bad assets to investors, the "Madoff magic" will carry the day.

"Desperate times call for desperate measures," White House chief of staff Rahm Emanuel said on CNN last night. "If anyone can convince investors to buy a worthless piece of paper, it's Bernie Madoff."

Under the unusual arrangement, Mr. Madoff will be temporarily sprung from his prison cell and permitted to have meetings with prospective investors to sell them on American financial institutions' $1 trillion worth of bad assets, accompanied by a phalanx of armed guards.

"The guards wanted to bring dogs along to chase Madoff if he tries to make a run for it, but we felt that would undercut his credibility with investors," Mr. Emanuel said.

The chief of staff added that having Mr. Madoff spearhead the sale of toxic assets would free up Mr. Obama for more pressing matters, "like appearing on Jimmy Kimmel Live."

In other economic news, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said he would raise much-needed capital for the U.S. Treasury by accepting billboard advertising on his forehead.

Andy Borowitz is a comedian and writer whose work appears in The New Yorker and The New York Times, and at his award-winning humor site, BorowitzReport.com. He is performing at the 92nd St. Y on April 30 at 8 PM with special guests Judy Gold, Hendrik Hertzberg, and Jonathan Alter. For tickets, go to 92y.org.

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A Program of Financial Concentration.

by: PAUL CRAIG ROBERTS

Paul Craig Roberts was Assistant Secretary of the Treasury in the Reagan administration. He is coauthor of The Tyranny of Good Intentions.He can be reached at: PaulCraigRoberts@yahoo.com

Was the Bailout Itself a Scam?

Professor Michael Hudson (CounterPunch, March 18) is correct that the orchestrated outrage over the $165 million AIG bonuses is a diversion from the thousand times greater theft from taxpayers of the approximately $200 billion “bailout” of AIG. Nevertheless, it is a diversion that serves an important purpose. It has taught an inattentive American public that the elites run the government in their own private interests.

Americans are angry that AIG executives are paying themselves millions of dollars in bonuses after having cost the taxpayers an exorbitant sum. Senator Charles Grassley put a proper face on the anger when he suggested that the AIG executives “follow the Japanese example and resign or go commit suicide.”

Yet, Obama’s White House economist, Larry Summers, on whose watch as Treasury Secretary in the Clinton administration financial deregulation got out of control, invoked the “sanctity of contracts” in defense of the AIG bonuses.

But the Obama administration does not regard other contracts as sacred. Specifically: labor unions had to agree to give-backs in order for the auto companies to obtain federal help; CNN reports that “Veterans Affairs Secretary Eric Shinseki confirmed Tuesday [March 10] that the Obama administration is considering a controversial plan to make veterans pay for treatment of service-related injuries with private insurance”; the Washington Post reports that the Obama team has set its sights on downsizing Social Security and Medicare.

According to the Post, Obama said that “it is impossible to separate the country’s financial ills from the long-term need to rein in health-care costs, stabilize Social Security and prevent the Medicare program from bankrupting the government.”

After Washington’s trillion dollar bank bailouts and trillion dollar gratuitous wars for the sake of the military industry’s profits and Israeli territorial expansion, there is no money for Social Security and Medicare.

The US government breaks its contracts with US citizens on a daily basis, but AIG’s bonus contracts are sacrosanct. The Social Security contract was broken when the government decided to tax 85% of the benefits. It was broken again when the Clinton administration rigged the inflation measure in order to beat retirees out of their cost-of-living adjustments. To have any real Medicare coverage, a person has to give up part of his Social Security check to pay Medicare Part B premium and then take out a private supplemental policy. The true cost of Medicare to beneficiaries is about $6,000 annually in premiums, plus deductibles and the Medicare tax if the person is still earning.

Treasury Secretary Geithner, the fox in charge of the hen house, has resolved the problem for us. He is going to withhold $165 million (the amount of the AIG bonuses) from the next taxpayer payment to AIG of $30,000 million. If someone handed you $30,000 dollars, would you mind if they held back $165?

PR flaks have rechristened the bonus payments “retention payments” necessary if AIG is to retain crucial employees. This lie was shot down by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo, who informed the House Committee on Financial Services that the payments went to members of AIG’s Financial Products subsidiary, “the unit of AIG that was principally responsible for the firm’s meltdown.” As for retention, Cuomo pointed out that ”numerous individuals who received large ‘retention’ bonuses are no longer at the firm” .

Eliot Spitzer, the former New York Governor who was set-up in a sex scandal to prevent him investigating Wall Street’s financial gangsterism, pointed out on March 17 that the real scandal is the billions of taxpayer dollars paid to the counter-parties of AIG’s financial deals. These payments, Spitzer writes, are “a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already.”

Goldman Sachs, for example, had already received a taxpayer cash infusion of $25 billion and was sitting on more than $100 billion in cash when the Wall Street firm received another $13 billion via the AIG bailout.

Moreover, in my opinion, most of the billions of dollars in AIG counter-party payments were unnecessary. They represent gravy paid to firms that had made risk-free bets, the non-payment of which constituted no threat to financial solvency.

Spitzer identifies a conflict of interest that could possibly be criminal self-dealing. According to reports, the AIG bailout decision involved Bush Treasury Secretary Henry Paulson, formerly of Goldman Sachs, Goldman Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein, Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke, and Timothy Geithner, former New York Federal Reserve president and currently Secretary of the Treasury. No doubt the incestuous relationships are the reason the original bailout deal had no oversight or transparency.

The Bush/Obama bailouts require serious investigation. Were these bailouts necessary, or were they a scam, like “weapons of mass destruction,” used to advance a private agenda behind a wall of fear? Recently I heard Harvard Law professor Elizabeth Warren, a member of a congressional bailout oversight panel, say on NPR that the US has far too many banks. Out of the financial crisis, she said, should come consolidation with the financial sector consisting of a few mega-banks. Was the whole point of the bailout to supply taxpayer money for a program of financial concentration?

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Lying Or Incompetent - Either Way, Geithner Needs to Be Fired.

Huffington Post

by: David Sirota, Political journalist, best-selling author & syndicated newspaper columnist

Posted: March 18, 2009 | 02:36 PM (EST)

I've never been a fan of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner - he's a Rubinite who has been too close to Wall Street, and too focused on using government power to protect private shareholders. This is the guy who told the Senate that his primary goal in bailing out the financial industry with public money was not to protect the economy or taxpayers, but instead to use our taxpayer dollars to preserve "a financial system that is run by private shareholders [and] managed by private institutions." Despite my strong disagreements with his ideology, only today have I gotten to the point where I think it's clear he needs to be fired. Why? Because today he proved he's either lying to the public or totally incompetent.

Two stories explain why I say this. Here's the first, showing us how Geithner insists he only found out about AIG's bonuses a week ago:

WASHINGTON (CNN) -- A new time line released by White House officials late Tuesday evening reveals the president first learned about the $165 million in AIG bonuses last Thursday...The new time line was released after White House spokesman Robert Gibbs said he was unaware of when President Barack Obama first learned of the bonus controversy and reporters asked that the White House provide a time line. It also shows that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner first found out about the bonuses from his staff last Tuesday.

Now here's the Associated Press, refuting this time line:

For months, the Obama administration and members of Congress have known that insurance giant AIG was getting ready to pay huge bonuses while living off government bailouts. It wasn't until the money was flowing and news was trickling out to the public that official Washington rose up in anger and vowed to yank the money back...The situation has the White House and Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner on the defensive. The administration was caught off guard Tuesday trying to explain why Geithner had waited until last Wednesday to call AIG chief executive Edward M. Liddy and demand that the bonus payments be restructured. Publicly, the White House expressed confidence in Geithner _ but still made it clear he was the one responsible for how the matter was handled.

For the willfully ignorant who would like to pretend that AP is cooking up this story, recall that AP's story isn't even really "news" in that it is merely corroborating what we already know and what has already been widely reported: the AIG bonus contracts being cited by the administration were signed in 2008, and as the 80 percent owner of AIG, the federal government (ie. the Treasury Department and the Obama administration) have had access to the company's books and contracts for many months. Indeed, even if you believe that only the Federal Reserve bank was told about the AIG bonus contracts, recall that Geithner was a top official at the Federal Reserve bank when the AIG bailout was crafted and when AIG was telling the Federal Reserve about its finances and obligations - and the Wall Street Journal reported that Geithner was intimately involved in the AIG bailout (meaning he had access to their books/contracts months ago).

That means either Geithner is lying to the public by pretending he never knew about the AIG bonuses when, in fact he did.* Or, he's egregiously uninformed/incompetent and therefore absolutely unfit to hold one of the most important economic offices in our country.

This comes on top of Geithner and Summers dishonestly insisting that they are unable to stop the AIG bonuses because of Sen. Chris Dodd's (D-CT) executive compensation legislation that exempted AIG-style bonuses from limits. In fact, as the Wall Street Journal and Hill newspaper long ago reported, Dodd's original bill would have limited such bonuses, but Geithner and Summers specifically forced him to water down his bill because it was "too aggressive." And yet somehow, Geithner and Summers would have us believe the weakening of that legislation - and thus the AIG bonuses - is Dodd's fault, not theirs.

When looked at in sum, what you see is a Treasury Secretary that is creating a huge economic credibility gap for the Obama administration. He is, in short, undermining Obama's presidency - and it's time for Geithner to go.

* Arguably even worse is the fact that Obama himself knew about the bonuses before the checks were cut, and did absolutely nothing to stop those checks from being cut - but that's fodder for another post altogether.

UPDATE: AP notes that in January 2009, "Reps. Joseph E. Crowley of New York and Paul E. Kanjorski of Pennsylvania wrote to the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department pressing the administration to scrutinize AIG's bonus plans and take steps against excessive payments." So even if you believe Geithner didn't know about the bonuses from his previous work, he was specifically asked to do the work that would have revealed those planned bonuses as far back as January. He either obliged and did the due diligence that would have revealed the bonus contracts, or he ignored the request. That means, as I said earlier in this post, he's either lying about having just found out, or he's incompetent and didn't fulfill what should be the minimum amount of due diligence when a Treasury Secretary hands over billions to what is effectively a government-owned company.

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Treasury Will Make Grab to Recoup Bonus Funds.

March 18, 2009.
by: JONATHAN WEISMAN, NAFTALI BENDAVID and DEBORAH SOLOMON

WASHINGTON -- The Obama administration said Tuesday it would seek to recoup from American International Group Inc. the $165 million in bonuses paid to employees of the bailed-out insurance titan as it tried to contain a national furor over the payments. White House officials are looking to use an executive-pay provision inserted into the recently passed stimulus law. The administration has seized on language that would allow the Treasury secretary to claw back payments if they were "inconsistent with the purpose" of the Troubled Asset Relief Program or "otherwise contrary to public interest."

In a letter to Congress Tuesday, Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner said the Treasury planned to use the law to deduct the cost of the bonuses from the government's pending $30 billion cash infusion, and will also extract additional penalties from AIG operating funds.

With angry emails and letters pouring into Congress, a number of legislators had earlier expressed support for a special tax on the so-called retention bonuses paid to 73 AIG employees. Recipients of the funds, at AIG's financial-products subsidiary, include 11 people who no longer work for the company.

Senate Finance Committee Chairman Max Baucus (D., Mont.) and Sen. Charles Grassley (R., Iowa), the committee's top Republican, proposed a 35% tax on employees receiving bonuses and another 35% on the firm that paid it. In a move likely to further unnerve banks, the bill would apply to bonuses earned or paid after Jan. 1, 2009, and would cover not just AIG but all companies that received funds from the government's financial bailout fund.

An AIG spokeswoman has repeatedly declined to comment, except to point to AIG CEO Edward Liddy's letter Saturday to Mr. Geithner, in which he said he found the payments "distasteful." Mr. Liddy was appointed by the Bush administration last year.

The bonuses have crystallized public anxiety over the economic downturn and frustration at the government bailouts, creating a firestorm for the White House. President Barack Obama knew he had little power to stop AIG from issuing the bonuses, even as he stood before television cameras and vowed Monday to "block these bonuses," White House officials said.

By the end of the day, the White House acknowledged its limited options. Its back-and-forth response to the scandal poses a potential threat to Mr. Obama's broad agenda -- especially his ability to wrest fresh bailout funds from Congress, lawmakers say. The bonus flap is also another blow to Mr. Geithner, following criticisms concerning his tax history and the launch of his bank bailout revamp.

White House officials say the president's comments Monday reflected his intention to express personal outrage, even if nothing more could be done to block the payouts. He also wanted to start a new legal review of the AIG contracts, the officials say.

Lawmakers received thousands of calls and emails Tuesday about the bonuses paid to executives in the unit that caused AIG's near collapsed. "It smacks of greed, arrogance and worse," said Sen. Sherrod Brown (D., Ohio).

Mike Markey, an electrician in Swanzey, N.H., emailed his representative and both senators to express frustration that lawmakers hadn't acted sooner. "Why don't you people look into these things before you make a law?" he wrote.

"It's not like we're getting a bailout," says Dana Meier, 46 years old, of Rogue River, Ore., who works out of her home for a company that sells supplements for horses and other animals. "Why is AIG allowed to get away with this?"

Some Republicans, while just as angry as Democrats at the bonuses, were less enthusiastic about a tax penalty, with some questioning the propriety and even the legality of interfering with private contracts.

The law generally allows high taxes on bonuses, even for narrowly defined groups of executives, according to legal experts. Directly singling out executives of AIG in legislation might raise a constitutional issue, however, said Robert Cudd, a partner with Morrison & Foerster LLP in San Francisco.

The fact that AIG was set to pay bonuses to employees at the financial-products division wasn't a secret. AIG disclosed the retention payments in May 2008 in a securities filing, and lawmakers routinely criticized them.

"Fed and Treasury officials have coordinated closely on all aspects of the U.S. government's support for AIG during this extraordinary period," a New York Fed spokesman said.

Though the U.S. government controls AIG through an 80% equity stake and as a major lender, it doesn't have legal authority to freeze payments on its own. The U.S. has committed $173.3 billion to AIG, including $70 billion from Treasury's rescue fund.

In negotiating rescues of AIG late last year, some within the government argued the bonuses should be curtailed. Others said that such a move could cause employees to flee and prompt the firm's collapse. Instead, the government looked for other ways to limit executive compensation, including capping severance pay.

AIG set up a committee in November to examine the bonus issue, says one person familiar with the committee. The group included representatives from the Federal Reserve and Ernst & Young, the Fed's auditor. "If they had wanted to reject the bonuses, they had four months to do so," said this person.

Created in 1987, the financial-products business sold insurance-like contracts to cover a variety of risks using the insurer's triple-A credit rating. In 2007, the business recorded a $10.6 billion operating loss, reflecting the falling value of contracts protecting other firms against losses on assets backed by mortgages. The retention packages in question were tied to levels of pay in 2007 that didn't reflect certain losses incurred by the unit, according to company disclosures.

An administration official said that despite having engineered the first two rescues of AIG while president of the New York Fed, Mr. Geithner didn't know about the pending bonuses until last week.

On March 5, just days after AIG received its fourth round of government aid, the New York Fed informed a Treasury official the payments would be made on March 15, according to an administration official. That information wasn't conveyed to Mr. Geithner until last Tuesday, the official said. The next day, Mr. Geithner called Mr. Liddy and had him perform a legal analysis about whether the payments had to be made. Treasury began its own review of whether it could break the contracts.

On Friday, Messrs. Geithner and Liddy conferred again, and the Treasury secretary didn't protest when the AIG chief said the contracts were inviolable.

By the time National Economic Council Director Lawrence Summers appeared on the Sunday morning talk shows, the bonuses were already in the works, said White House spokesman Robert Gibbs. Government lawyers concluded abrogating the contracts would cost more in legal fees than letting the bonuses go forward.

White House officials say the economic team was reflecting the administration's position. But news of the AIG retention bonuses had hit the newspapers that morning, and anger was building. Some Obama advisers said the economists' language needed to be translated into plainer English. On Sunday evening, the president met with his economic and legal team and told them to keep looking for options on the bonuses.

—Sudeep Reddy, John McKinnon, Michael Crittenden and Kelly Evans contributed to this article.

Write to Jonathan Weisman at jonathan.weisman@wsj.com, Naftali Bendavid at naftali.bendavid@wsj.com and Deborah Solomon at deborah.solomon@wsj.com

LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.

Bailout King AIG Still to Pay Millions In Bonuses

Geithner Gets Firm To Make Revisions

by: David Cho and Brady Dennis

Washington Post Staff Writers
Sunday, March 15, 2009; Page A01

Insurance giant American International Group will award hundreds of millions of dollars in employee bonuses and retention pay despite a confrontation Wednesday between the chief executive and Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner.

But the company agreed to revise some executive payments after what AIG's leader, Edward M. Liddy, called a "difficult" conversation.

The bonuses and other payments have been exasperating government officials, who have committed $170 billion to keep the company afloat -- far more than has been offered to any other financial firm.

The issue came to a head when Geithner called Liddy and told him the payments were unacceptable and had to be renegotiated, said an administration official who was not authorized to comment on the Geithner conversation.

In a letter to Geithner yesterday, Liddy agreed to restructure some of the payments. But Liddy said he had "grave concerns" about the impact on the firm's ability to retain talented staff "if employees believe that their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury."

Lawyers at both the Treasury Department and AIG have concluded that the firm would risk a lawsuit if it scrapped the retention payments at the AIG Financial Products subsidiary, whose troublesome derivative trading nearly sank AIG. The company promised before the government started bailing out the firm in September that employees would be awarded more than $400 million in retention pay this year and next.

"I do not like these arrangements and find it distasteful and difficult to recommend to you that we must proceed with them," Liddy wrote.

At the same time, the company said in documents provided to the Treasury, any steps that encourage specialists at AIG Financial Products to leave could open the U.S. government to further risk because of the hazards still posed by the $1.6 trillion portfolio of complex derivatives those employees are working to dispose.

AIG's top seven executives, including Liddy, already agreed in November to forgo their bonuses through this year. Last week, AIG agreed to restructure bonuses for the next 43 highest ranking officers at the company, who are to receive half of their bonuses -- which total $9.6 million -- immediately, the administration official said. Another quarter of that would be disbursed on July 15 and the rest on Sept. 15. But these last two payments would depend on whether the company makes progress in restructuring its business and paying back taxpayers.

In addition, federal officials plan to recoup some of this bonus and retention pay in restructuring the company, an administration official said.

Officials at the Treasury Department and the Federal Reserve took over AIG in the fall, fearing one of the world's most successful conglomerates had grown so intertwined with the global economy that the firm's impending failure could have disastrous consequences.

In return for the bailout, the government took an 80 percent ownership stake in the company. Liddy was recruited by former Treasury secretary Henry M. Paulson Jr. to run the company. Since then, the rescue package has ballooned. But both the Bush and Obama administrations have been reluctant to completely and explicitly nationalize the company, though this could have avoided the current flap over bonus payments, first reported by The Washington Post.

AIG officials said debate over the bonuses and retention pay has been simmering for months. During the past year, the company has repeatedly disclosed these payments in public financial filings. But as lawmakers increasingly clamored for details of their size, outrage grew in Congress and beyond.

Although the AIG Financial Products unit is proceeding with the payments, Liddy said the company would try to reduce future retention pay by at least 30 percent. In addition, the 25 highest-paid employees at Financial Products have agreed to reduce their salary to $1 for the remainder of 2009, Liddy wrote. Salaries for the rest of the firm's employees will be cut by 10 percent.

The Obama administration has been sensitive to how companies receiving government bailout money indulge their employees. Spending on jets, extravagant office furniture and bonus checks -- while not always a significant portion of corporate spending -- sours the public's view of the financial rescue effort at a time when the administration is considering asking Congress for billions of dollars more to help banks.

AIG officials say that some of the upcoming bonuses are relatively modest once they are divided among employees. About 4,700 people in the company's global insurance units are receiving $600 million in retention pay. In addition, about $121 million in corporate bonuses will go to more than 6,400 people, for an average payout of about $19,000, according to AIG.

"These are not Wall Street bonuses," said one AIG executive, who was not authorized to speak on the record. "This is an insurance company." That executive also noted that the retention bonuses at AIG Financial Products were put in place in early 2008 at a time when it hadn't yet melted down. "They knew that the book was running into trouble," the executive said. "They thought they could weather the storm. But they thought they needed to keep people in their seats. They were worried."

Then, of course, everything changed. Financial Products kept posting bigger and bigger losses, burying AIG under a cash crunch from which it has not recovered.

Since that collapse, company officials say, many Financial Products employees have lost nearly two-thirds of their compensation under the firm's deferred payment plan, in which bonuses are doled out over several years based on the firm's profitability.

The new cutbacks raise the risk that more employees will depart before the firm can be wound down and closed.

"These employees are highly specialized and/or are part of businesses that control billions of dollars of revenue and value that will be needed to repay the U.S. taxpayer," Liddy wrote in a letter last month. "Our competitors understand how valuable our top executives are, and we are acutely aware that they would like to siphon off our most talented leaders."

Over time, both the amount of retention pay and the number of recipients throughout AIG have grown.

Since taking over the rescue effort of AIG, the Obama administration has imposed stricter compensation rules, banning golden parachute payments for executives leaving firms and barring executive compensation above $500,000, except in the form of stock that cannot be cashed in until the government's loans are paid back.

But the government could not revoke bonuses promised before the government's rescue efforts began, officials said.

Sen. Christopher J. Dodd (D-Conn.), a leading critic of excessive executive compensation, backed a measure earlier this year to curb the practices but it included an exception for bonuses agreed to before Feb. 11, 2009.

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SIGN THE MOVE ON "Stop the AIG Bonuses" PETITION HERE.

"The people in AIG's financial products division are perhaps more responsible for the severity of our economic meltdown than anyone else.

And yet, they're getting $450 million in bonuses.

That's just plain unacceptable. We have to tell Secretary Geithner and Congress that they need to do everything in their power to cancel these bonuses.

A compiled petition with your individual comment will be presented to Secretary Geithner and Congress"

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LET THE REVOLUTION BEGIN!

Thanks for all you do!
Live your values. Love your country.
And, remember: TOGETHER, We can make a DIFFERENCE!

FAIR USE NOTICE: This blog may contain copyrighted material. Such material is made available for educational purposes, to advance understanding of human rights, democracy, scientific, moral, ethical, and social justice issues, etc. This constitutes a ‘fair use’ of any such copyrighted material as provided for in Title 17 U.S.C. section 107 of the US Copyright Law. In accordance with Title 17 U.S.C. Section 107, the material on this site is distributed without profit to those who have expressed a prior interest in receiving the included information for research and educational purposes. If you wish to use copyrighted material from this site for purposes of your own that go beyond ‘fair use’, you must obtain permission from the copyright owner.