There's been a big flap over the executive bonuses recently paid out by bankrupt insurance giant AIG at taxpayer expense. Less has been said about the "bonuses" they paid out to their political friends back in 2008 according to OpenSecrets.org, including:

Obama, Barack (D-IL) $104,332
Dodd, Chris (D-CT) $103,900
McCain, John (R-AZ) $59,499
Clinton, Hillary (D-NY) $37,965

Note that several of the players now on center stage were directly responsible for the deregulation (during the Clinton administration) that allowed the enormous AIG insurance scam to proceed unchecked in the first place.

"Credit Default Swaps purported, in theory, to let banks remove loan risk from their balance sheet onto others such as AIG, an insurer. It was based on a colossal fraud using flawed mathematical risk models... AIG then issued of hundreds of billions of dollars worth of CDS instruments to allow banks to make their balance sheets look safer than they really were... How could that be allowed? The level of venal corruption in the Clinton and then Bush Administration rivals that of the last days of Rome before its fall..." -- William Engdahl

"AIG was essentially collecting huge and steadily climbing premiums by selling [bogus] insurance for the disaster it thought would never come... The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age... " -- Matt Taibbi

"There's no question that the bonuses are sickening, a moral outrage. While some of the benefactors may have done little or nothing wrong, many are known to have worked in the specialised London unit whose creative trading gimmickry effectively ruined the company. Those people are more worthy of jail cells alongside Bernie Madoff, the loathsome Ponzi king, than new vacation homes." -- Michael Crowley

"Here's the problem with all the hoopla over the $135 million in AIG bonuses: This sum is only less than 0.1% -- one thousandth -- of the $183 BILLION that the U.S. Treasury gave to AIG as a "pass-through" to its counterparties. This sum, over a thousand times the magnitude of the bonuses on which public attention is conveniently being focused by Wall Street promoters, did not stay with AIG. For over six months, the public media and Congressmen have been trying to find out just where this money DID go. Bloomberg brought a lawsuit to find out. Only to be met with a wall of silence." -- Michael Hudson

All of the articles above are worth reading in their entirety.