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no, they are private citizens and we already seeing these people being mobbed at their homes. The people that should be punished are the politicians who gave AIG the money in the first place.


Too much, the bonuses were in the contract, Geitner knew about them, congress knew about them and should've known better than to give AIG the money.


This is socialism. We should allow them to collapse, congress should have never bailed out any of the companies in the first place. In order for capitilism to succeed, failing companies ought to be allowed to collapse, to make room for more successful company.

BTW, while we were so focused on congress's anger toward AIG bonuses, congress printed trillions of dollars, causing our dollar to sink even more.

Absolutely not. It's a public safety issue. They're incompetant workers, that doesn't mean they deserve to be the targets of public reprisals.



It's a bad idea for a number of reasons. First, it would be a bill of attainder and would, therefore, violate the Constitutional limits on Congressional power. Second, it would be an ex post facto law, also a violation of the Constitution. Finally, even if you could adjust the law to target everybody rather than just AIG execs, you would be punishing numerous innocent people for AIG's transgression.



So far government hasn't acted in an ownership capacity. When it does, it will be socialism. So far this is just a massive subsidy bill with poor oversight.



You haven't seen control yet. Control will be when TARP money is used as a pretext for requiring approval from Congress for business decisions. Right now this is a case of AIG taking TARP money and using it as they see fit, and Congress throwing a fit over it.



Morality has nothing to do with it. The question is whether or not it's better to let large financial institutions collapse, or to try to subsidize them through the crisis. Neither option is good. TARP was an attempt to prevent the collapse of the financial sector of the economy. With manufacturing already in a shambles the loss of finance would leave us with another gutted sector of the economy. Particularly, we would be worse off when our shattered financial system is gobbled up by foreign banking institutions and systems. The would leave our manufacturing base in China and our credit base in some mixture of Europe and the Middle East. On the other hand more TARP money is basically paying to keep a dysfunctional financial system in operation without meaningful reform. Not to mention, we'll be making a very small, select class of incompetant people rich in spite of their own incompetance. If I had to choose, I'd rather save a major sector of the economy than see it placed into the hands of geopolitical rivals.