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Dear Congressman,

As a newly unwitting part-owner of AIG and one of your constituents down here in Florida, I ask that you and the other members of congress block AIG from paying out $100 (or more) in bonuses to their employees, many of whom got us into this financial mess in the first place. The fact that they don’t think that they have to answer to the people that now own 80% of their failing business is a joke.

If I did a really horrible job at my work (which, at the moment isn’t possible, because I was laid off, which is what should happen to many at AIG) and lost my company and the companies that we deal with gigantic quantities of money, I wouldn’t get a bonus (of amounts up to a reported $6.5mil, no less), I’d be fired and out on my ass, and rightly so.

I’ve had to work hard to stomach the fact that we keep bailing out all of these financial giants that nearly brought down our entire economy instead of spending that money on new infrastructure and new businesses that could do a better job. We’re pumping blood into a corpse and hoping that it comes back to life. The best we can hope for with this tack is Frankenstein’s monster, not a healthy banking system. I find it appalling that the companies that we’ve bailed out have been held to virtually no standards of accountability and have been so sanctimonious when asked.

The rest of us, the hard-working everypeople of this country are just supposed to accept that as “the way things are.” That is, excuse my language, a fucking joke. How are we supposed to value hard work and competence when our government is rewarding the exact opposite? So, I ask for you to at least raise the issue. I understand that you are just one member of a large body of representatives, but having one voice standing up and saying “No” is how change gets started. Thank you for your time, Congressman.

State lawmakers who howl about wasteful spending by local governments should have put the brakes on the abuse-ridden Deferred Option Retirement Program years ago.


But they let it ride, including during the January special session when they chopped education and trust funds for children’s health.



That’s called protecting their own.