No wonder that the AIG CEO wanted to keep executives who received those bonuses secret! If this is any examples of the emails that have been sent to AIG.....
I was really riled up that the bonuses were paid out of "my" tax money
, but really, to send death threats...that's beyond the pale
Kate
NOTEBOOK: AIG chief warns bashing out of control
By LAURIE KELLMAN, Associated Press Writer
WASHINGTON – Members of a House subcommittee lined up Tuesday to administer AIG chairman Edward Liddy a public flogging for allowing his executives to accept more in post-bailout bonuses than most Americans earn in a lifetime.
Liddy responded with a warning to cool the rhetoric.
He told the lawmakers he wants the executives to give the money back, an answer that took much of the sting out of lawmakers' criticism. But then he unloaded the text of ghoulish threats the bonus-taking AIG executives have received.
"I'm just really concerned about the safety of our people," Liddy said.
Public shaming and Congress' hyperbolic outrage had failed to inspire all of the bonus-receiving executives to return the money. So House Financial Services Committee Chairman Barney Frank demanded their names. And if Liddy doesn't provide them, Frank said, he'll subpoena them.
Liddy was ready. He paused in his general assessment of AIG amounting to good capitalism gone bad and pulled several sheets of paper from a stack of notebooks. From them, he read what he said were ghoulish threats made against those executives by members of the public.
Naming the executives wouldn't just jeopardize their lives, Liddy said, but those of their innocent children. Surely, he said, no one's in favor of that.
"'All of the executives and their families should be executed with piano wire around their necks,'" Liddy read into the microphone, apparently from the text of one of the threats his company had received since news of the bonus payments exploded into the headlines over the weekend.
Liddy solemnly read from another:
"'My greatest hope: If the government can't do this properly, we, the people, will take it in our own hands and see that justice is done. I'm looking for all the CEOs names, kids, where they live, etc.'"
Frank had a legitimate request, Liddy said. If AIG is required by the force of a subpoena to reveal the names, he added, AIG will do it.
"But I want to protect the well-being of our employees," he said.
It was a damage-control tour de force, a lesson in how to humanize public pariahs — in this case, 418 bonus-taking executives of AIG, according to New York State Attorney General Andrew Cuomo.
These executives, Liddy was suggesting, are people who had made mistakes, people with families.
Liddy succeeded somewhat in calming the hysteria.
Frank appeared genuinely surprised by the existence and tone of the threats Liddy described. He immediately called them "despicable" and warned his colleagues to be conscious of the effects of their rhetoric.
