Lawmakers Invested in Bailed-Out Firms -- Conflict-of-Interest Questions Arise

[Octafish]

No wonder the Wall Street bailout got passed so fast. News from our friends at BuzzFlash.com...

Lawmakers Invested in Bailed-Out Firms

Conflict-of-Interest Questions Arise

By Paul Kane and Carol D. Leonnig
Washington Post Staff Writers
Thursday, June 11, 2009

Top House lawmakers had considerable holdings in major financial institutions that took billions of dollars in taxpayer bailouts at the end of last year, according to annual financial disclosure reports released yesterday.

From stock holdings to retirement funds to mortgages, more than 20 House leaders and members of the House Financial Services Committee had large personal stakes in the Wall Street powerhouses whose collapse last year led to an unprecedented government intervention in the marketplace. In some instances those lawmakers, like millions of other investors, sold their holdings at steep losses while others retained the stocks at greatly diminished value.

House Speaker Nancy Pelosi (D-Calif.) and her husband lost hundreds of thousands of dollars investing in American International Group, which has received $170 billion in government loans and cash injections, making it by far the largest recipient of federal bailout dollars. Republican Whip Eric Cantor (R-Va.) and his wife held stock, retirement plans and other investments worth at least $183,000 and as much as $495,000 in firms benefiting from federal government rescue efforts, including Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley.

At least 18 members of the House Financial Services Committee -- which oversees the banking and housing industries at the core of the economic meltdown -- held stock last year in firms that received federal bailout assistance, according to a review of the forms that were available yesterday.

The release of the annual disclosure forms was not scheduled to occur until tomorrow, but the House clerk's office briefly posted many of them online yesterday, apparently by accident. A firm called LegiStorm captured the data and posted them on its Web site. The Senate will release its forms tomorrow.

CONTINUED...

http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/06/10/AR2009061002565_pf.html

Bush and Congreff emptied the Treasury and defrauded our nation of its future and all We the People got were two lousy wars, a lot of military-industrial complex hoodoo, and the warning not to count on Social Security in our golden years. That's a "wow!"

[HillbillyBob]

1. I think we need to make sure that those congresscritters

are voted out of office at the very next opportunity.
Maybe we should work to vote out the dlc and see about getting some real progressives in there.

[Octafish]

3. AIG has received more than $182 billion from the U.S. taxpayers.

We the People always seem to be left holding the bag -- usually it's empty, but in the AIG case it was stuck with IOUs we are now liable for.

AIG's Small London Office May Have Lost $500B

Feds, Brits Probe AIG's London Office on $500B Losses

JAY SHAYLOR, LAUREN PEARLE and TINA BABAROVIC
ABC News
March 10, 2009 —

Ground zero for AIG's spectacular implosion, which has soaked up more federal bailout money than any other entity, appears to have been a small London branch office that may have lost nearly half a trillion dollars in bad deals.

The disastrous deals were built up in a decade and, when the crisis hit, the man who ran the unit for the last eight years retired after making $280 million for himself and leaving with a $1 million-a-month consulting contract.

The struggling New York-based insurance giant has avoided collapse with the massive infusion of $160 billion in taxpayer money. The U.S. government has agreed to prop up AIG because it fears that AIG has such extensive financial involvement around the world that its failure would be far more costly.

Britain's serious fraud office and U.S. regulators are combing through the records of AIG's Financial Products Group, formerly located on the fifth floor of an office building in London's Mayfair section.

The unit's small group of traders risked nearly half a trillion dollars to insure U.S. mortgages and other debt using complex financial products called credit default swaps, according to recent congressional testimony.

"AIG financial products was the core, the hottest point of the global financial crisis," freelance investigative reporter Peter Koenig told "Good Morning America" today. "It was the epicenter."

The group's traders "found a crack in the system that was unregulated," Koenig told "GMA."

http://abcnews.go.com/Business/story?id=7045889&page=1

I'm with you, Hillbillybob. Out with the crooks -- all of them. In with the good -- starting with Democrats.

[deaniac21]

9. AIG was also Obama's biggest contributor in the last election.

[Octafish]

10. Obama, AIG And The Economy

Geebus. I knew the financial sector was big, but I didn't know that AIG was the outlier.

Well, at risk of being a trendsetter:

Obama, AIG And The Economy

by Michele Norris and Scott Horsley
NPR
Listen Now <3 min 31 sec> add to playlist | download

All Things Considered, March 16, 2009 · The Obama administration reacts to news that the struggling insurance giant AIG, a major recipient of federal bailout funds, plans to pay tens of millions in bonuses to employees. Meanwhile, White House rhetoric shifts on two contentious campaign issues.

http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=101963178

I love regulation.

Know your BFEE: Phil Gramm, the Meyer Lansky of the War Party, Set-Up the Biggest Bank Heist Ever.

Foamuh sinnator Gramm (R-ENRON) hates it, with reason, or should I say, motive.

[peacetalksforall]

6. Pelosi should resign. Plain. Simple. Obvious. CONFLICT SIREN.

Nancy, I don't admire you anymore and haven't for awhile.

Do you know how much this pains us?

Please go. Get all the way out.

[Octafish]

8. Maybe impeachment was off the table because Bush had the wiretap transcripts?

Remember how Jane Harman got pressured?

Harman, AIPAC and NSA Wiretaps - Are Members of Congress Being Blackmailed?

Posted By hyperbola 1 month, 2 weeks ago in Politics

For some time now, many Americans have wondered how Congress, the elected body that the nation’s Founding Fathers saw as the bulwark of liberty, could have been so thoroughly unwilling to, or incapable of challenging the dictatorial power-grabs and the eight-year Constitution wrecking campaign of the Bush/Cheney administration.

There has been speculation on both the left and the right, and even among some in the apolitical, cynical middle of the political spectrum, that somehow the Bush/Cheney administration must have been blackmailing key members of the Congressional leadership, most likely through the use of electronic monitoring by the National Security Agency (NSA).

.... the NSA in 2006 recorded Rep. Harman negotiating with an alleged Israeli agent about helping Israel win a reduction in the espionage charges filed by the US in 2005 against two members of the AIPAC lobby accused of providing US intelligence information to the Israeli government. .... Attorney General Alberto Gonzales subsequently intervened with the FBI to prevent any prosecution of Harman, a key member of Congress on whom the administration was relying to help it persuade the NY Times to withhold its NSA wiretapping exposé until after the 2006 election. In the event, Rep. Harman did later make calls to a Times editor, the paper did hold its story until after the election, and Harman later was a leading backer of the administration’s controversial (and illegal) NSA spying program. ...

There are several serious issues here. One is the extraordinary glimpse it offers into the extent to which Israel has penetrated the centers of power in Washington. It is illegal for foreign governments to directly lobby and to offer to arrange financial contributions for members of the US government, but here, clearly, Israeli agents were doing just that. The role of AIPAC as a front for the Israeli government in Washington, as exposed here, is simply stomach-turning, and should make it a toxic organization to politicians. ...

A second issue is the NSA’s spying activities themselves..... Back in 1978, Congress passed the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act (FISA) in direct response to the disclosure during the Watergate hearings and subsequent investigations that the Nixon Administration had been using the NSA to conduct illegal monitoring of the communications of anti-war activists, and of members of Congress.

Now that we have seen proof that the Bush administration was not above using its NSA-acquired knowledge to pressure a member of Congress, it becomes absolutely essential that Congress and the Justice Department investigate to see whether other members of Congress were also victims of agency spying, and whether others besides Rep. Harman were similarly extorted or otherwise compromised.

CONTINUED...

http://www.propeller.com/story/2009/04/25/harman-aipac-and-nsa-wiretaps-are-members-of-congress-being-blackmailed/

The same could be done for someone with a financial stake in a bailout or warplan, say.

[leftstreet]

2. waaaaah....the Duke and Duchess of Pelosi lost over a million

:nopity:

[Octafish]

4. Cooking the Insurance Books -- A Decade of Lax Regulation Lays Groundwork for Scandal

Real losers are We the People.
AIG backed a lot of bad insurance for credit default swaps
and tried to make it up on derivatives and who-knows-what-else.
Couldn't happen to a nicer bunch of conmen.

Weird. We were warned, but The New York Times, Washington Post
and ABCNNBCBSFauxNoiseNutwork must've missed the story.
From Lucy Komisar ... in 2004

Cooking the Insurance Books

A Decade of Lax Regulation Lays Groundwork for Scandal

by Lucy Komisar, Special to CorpWatch
November 17th, 2004

In October, New York Attorney General Eliot Spitzer filed suit against the world’s largest insurance broker, Marsh, accusing it of rigging bids and receiving kickbacks in order to defraud clients such as other corporations, city governments, school districts and individuals of billions of dollars through inflated premiums.

“Greedy trial lawyers were the usual excuse for premium increases. Now we know that greedy corporations also have a starring role," Spitzer said, accusing several insurance companies as co-conspirators in making phony or inflated bids and paying kickbacks to the brokerage to get business.

Spitzer also announced that two executives from the insurance conglomerate American International Group (AIG) had already confessed to related criminal charges. But his investigations into AIG may have only scratched the surface. A paper trail stretching back a decade reveals that AIG used offshore shell companies to skirt the law.

The current scam which Spitzer has uncovered works like this: Marsh, an insurance broker, is supposed to find the best insurance policies for its clients from a wide range of companies. Instead it steered the policies to companies such as AIG that agreed to pay kickbacks. It solicited phony competitive bids for insurance contracts to deceive customers into thinking there was real competition for their business. Marsh made $800 million on kickbacks in 2003 alone – over half its $1.5 billion profit. With a 40-percent share of the global insurance brokerage market, its fraud drove up prices for everyone.

AIG announced that its senior managers were not aware of the bid-rigging. But the family ties of three of the alleged co-conspirators make the claim hard to believe. The head of the Marsh brokerage was Jeffrey Greenberg, 53, the head of AIG is his father Maurice (Hank) Greenberg. A former AIG staffer told CorpWatch, "Greenberg is legendary as a hands-on person. Nothing happens in the company without him dealing with it. He knows the names of the elevator operators.”

CONTINUED...

http://www.corpwatch.org/article.php?id=11657aig

Not to worry. This is a case for tax write-offs.

Please play a song for me and my country, leftstreet. We're both broke.

[leftstreet]

5. (hehe irony alert? - "arms-length deals")

Though it is an American company listed on the New York Stock Exchange, AIG makes extensive use of offshore jurisdictions such as Barbados, Bermuda and Luxembourg that are immune from U.S. regulatory and tax scrutiny. They help the company launder profits to evade U.S. taxes and hide insider connections in supposedly "arms-length" deals. This is especially important as the company has moved into financial services and asset management, handling the wealth of “high net-worth” clients -- the mega-rich.

Strikes the funny bone.

Thanks for the link - interesting stuff about AIG/Kissinger - he who perennially turns up like a bad penny

Greenberg has enviable political clout, never so much in evidence as when, with the help of Henry Kissinger -- chair of AIG's international advisory committee and a paid consultant via Kissinger Associates – AIG became in 1995, the first company licensed to sell insurance in China. AIG was the only foreign firm that owned 100 percent of its license there.

The American International Group at its origins was linked to the OSS (Office of Strategic Services) the forerunner of the CIA. It grew from the Asia Life/C. V. Starr companies founded by Cornelius Starr who started his insurance empire in Shanghai in 1919, the first westerner to market insurance in China.

Starr served with the OSS during World War II, and the Starr Corporation, located in the same building as the OSS in New York, provided intelligence on shipping, manufacturing and industrial bombing targets in Asia and Germany. The companies' biggest shareholder was Starr International Company (SICO), a private holding company incorporated in offshore Panama and with principal executive offices in offshore Bermuda, to avoid U.S. regulation and taxes. Starr left Greenberg a large block of Starr International stock.

[Octafish]

7. Lucy Komisar rocks the tax cheats' world.

Mr. Starr is a name that comes up frequently on behalf of the Right.

And we know how much the Right hates progress because it might mean they have to pay a tax.

An important resource for tracking the cheats and traitors:

The Komisar Scoop.

It's not so easy a caveman can do it.

[Karenina]

11. I'm SHOCKED, I tell you! JUST SHOCKED!!!

Off to GP now! :kick:

[Octafish]

14. The Real Scandal of AIG

Robert Reich spells it out nicely:

The Real Scandal of AIG

By Robert Reich
Posted March 15, 2009 | 03:33 PM (EST)

The real scandal of AIG isn't just that American taxpayers have so far committed $170 billion to the giant insurer because it is thought to be too big to fail -- the most money ever funneled to a single company by a government since the dawn of capitalism -- nor even that AIG's notoriously failing executives, at the very unit responsible for the catastrophic credit-default swaps at the very center of the debacle -- are planning to give themselves $100 million in bonuses. It's that even at this late date, even in a new administration dedicated to doing it all differently, Americans still have so little say over what is happening with our money.

The administration is said to have been outraged when it heard of the bonus plan last week. Apparently Secretary of the Treasury Tim Geithner told AIG's chairman, Edward Liddy (who was installed at the insistence of the Treasury, in the first place) that the bonuses should not be paid. But most will be paid anyway, because, according to AIG, the firm is legally obligated to do so. The bonuses are part of employee contracts negotiated before the bailouts. And, in any event, Liddy explained, AIG needed to be able to retain talent.

AIG's arguments are absurd on their face. Had AIG gone into chapter 11 bankruptcy or been liquidated, as it would have without government aid, no bonuses would ever be paid; indeed, AIG's executives would have long ago been on the street. And any mention of the word "talent" in the same sentence as "AIG" or "credit default swaps" would be laughable if it weren't already so expensive.

Apart from AIG's sophistry is a much larger point. This sordid story of government helplessness in the face of massive taxpayer commitments illustrates better than anything to date why the government should take over any institution that's "too big to fail" and which has cost taxpayers dearly. Such institutions are no longer within the capitalist system because they are no longer accountable to the market. So to whom should they be accountable? When taxpayers have put up, and essentially own, a large portion of their assets, AIG and other behemoths should be accountable to taxpayers. When our very own Secretary of the Treasury cannot make stick his decision that AIG's bonuses should not be paid, only one conclusion can be drawn: AIG is accountable to no one. Our democracy is seriously broken.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/robert-reich/the-real-scandal-of-aig_b_175105.html

Of course, because you like to read, this is old news to you.



Thank you, Karenina!

[Karenina]

15. I looked this up some years ago. Whatsisname? Hank Greenberg?

Stuck my head down this rabbit hole that went all the way through to China but backed out quick due to the stench. ;-)

[conscious evolution]

12. Zell Millers Wife

You should look into what she owns sometime.
Also,ask Zell about georgias VFW and bags full of money

[Wilms]

13. They're just investors who wish to control their own portfolios.

No? :shrug:

[Karenina]

16. Such CONFLICTS of INTEREST!!! EVERYWHERE!!!

(I'm having the vapors, Octafish! The smelling salts are right next to the Grappa on the silver tray in the corner there! Do hurry!)

http://www.democraticunderground.com/discuss/duboard.php?az=view_all&address=102x3920139