Rep. Dennis Kucinich, D-Ohio, announced today that a panel of the House Committee on Oversight and Government Reform will hold a hearing on June 18 to examine whether AIG and other major insurance carriers have inappropriately denied medical claims of contractors injured on the job in Iraq and Afghanistan. (more)

Last week, lawmakers dashed to the podiums of Capitol Hill to condemn AIG and the rest of those bonus-loving scoundrels on Wall Street. But not long before that, some of those same members had been dashing to fundraisers with the very financial bogeymen they were now skewering. Indeed, the line between friend and target is a fine one in Washington, and often the line moves from month to month. Now that the AIG bonus scandal has started to wane--many of the payouts have been returned, and it appears the H... (more)

Listen to Andrew Cuomo’s statement [which sounds strangely like a ransom message], aired on Morning Joe today, about the decision of a number of the AIG bonus babies to return the dough: If the’re doing “the right thing,” it’s at the point of a public-disclosure gun. And don’t you love Cuomo’s concluding statement: “If a person returns the money, I don’t think there’s a public interest in disclosing their name”? Translation: your money or your name. (more)

Yesterday, the House passed a 90% tax on bonuses given to people with household incomes over $250,000 that received more than $5 billion in TARP funds. The big name is "AIG" but this also includes Fannie and Freddy. In addition, Andrew Cuomo has a list of those individuals who received the payouts. He is not yet releasing the list as there have been death threats against those who were "outed" in certain publications in New York, Connecticut and London. (And in case you have any question: murder is WRON... (more)

Congressional Democrats took aim at the Obama administration Wednesday, blaming the president’s economic team for creating a loophole that allowed AIG to pay its employees millions of dollars in bonuses and then not doing enough to stop the bonuses when it could. And their warp-speed effort to get the money back made it clear that congressional Democrats don’t think the White House is moving fast enough to solve the problem now. In an interview with CNN Wednesday evening, Senate Banking Committee... (more)

There is a major push underway -- engineered by Obama's Treasury officials, enabled by a mindless media, and amplified by the right-wing press -- to blame Chris Dodd for the AIG bonus payments. That would be perfectly fine if it were true. But it's completely false, and the scheme to heap the blame on him for the AIG bonus payments is based on demonstrable falsehoods. (more)

(CNN) -- As President Obama speaks out on the AIG debacle, he could be setting himself up for trouble, should his administration move forward with additional bailouts. President Obama says he will try to block bonuses for AIG executives. Echoing the sentiment of taxpayers, the president on Monday called the ailing insurance giant's plans to dole out $165 million in bonuses an "outrage" and said he would attempt to block the additional compensation. AIG, one of the big benefactors of the governme... (more)

I mean, just a couple of weeks ago, Obama spox Robert Gibbs was confident the administration knew where AIG’s money was being spent: From White House press secretary Robert Gibbs’ briefing two weeks ago, when $30 billion in additional funds were announced for AIG. TAPPER: AIG, is the administration confident that it, that it knows what happened to the tens of billions of dollars previously given to AIG? GIBBS: Is it confident — I’m sorry? TAPPER: That they know — that you guys know what happe... (more)

WASHINGTON – Leaders of the White House economic team and the Senate's top Republican bellowed about bonuses at a bailed-out insurance giant and pledged to prevent such payments in the future. From one Sunday talk show to the next, they tore into the contracts that American International Group asserted had to be honored, to the tune of about $165 million and payable to executives by Sunday — part of a larger total payout reportedly valued at $450 million. The company has benefited from more than $170 ... (more)

Former Republican presidential nominee Sen. John McCain (Ariz.) criticized President Obama on Sunday for not letting the world’s biggest insurer, the U.S.’s largest banks and America’s largest automaker fail. “I don’t think they’ve made the hard decision, and that is to let these banks fail,” McCain said on "Fox News Sunday." “I think the best thing that could probably happen to General Motors (GM) in my view is they go into Chapter 11, they reorganize…and come out of it a stronger, better, leaner, an... (more)