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Both Texas Gov. Rick Perry (R) and former Massachusetts Gov. Mitt Romney (R) will speak before the Mackinac Republican Leadership Conference in Michigan today. Michigan, of course, is the epicenter of the United States automobile industry, which was rescued by the Obama administration.

At the time, both Perry and Romney opposed rescuing the American auto industry, preferring to watch iconic American companies topple into an uncontrolled bankruptcy, not only destroying themselves, but all of the supplier and contractors that depend on them. In a November 2008 op-ed titled “Let Detroit Go Bankrupt,” Romney wrote:

If General Motors, Ford and Chrysler get the bailout that their chief executives asked for yesterday, you can kiss the American automotive industry goodbye. It won’t go overnight, but its demise will be virtually guaranteed.

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The UAW reached a tentative agreement with General Motors Co. (GM) late last night. The union says the new pact, which covers 48,500 employees, achieved some major goals, including significant investments and products for GM plants, creating good new U.S. jobs and bringing back to this country some overseas manufacturing.

UAW President Bob King said in a statement:

First and foremost, as America struggles with record levels of unemployment, we aimed to protect the jobs of our members – to guarantee good American jobs at a good American company. And we have done that. This contract will get our members who have been laid off back to work, will create new jobs in our communities and will bring work back to the United States from other countries.

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By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Congress has an opportunity to put in place essential policies to create jobs, reduce carbon emissions and make America more energy independent. In its clean energy agenda for the remaining weeks of the 111th Congress, released this week, the BlueGreen Alliance outlines seven key policies it says could jump-start the clean energy economy and create hundreds of thousands of jobs across the country.

During a telephone press conference to release the agenda, UAW President Bob King said:

In the remaining weeks of 2010, creating jobs must be our top priority. Congress should move forward with policies that will create jobs for the millions of Americans who are still out of work. Critical to this job-creating effort is investments in green technologies because these are the jobs of the future—the jobs that will maintain our great American middle class.

The agenda, Seven Simple Steps: The Best Job-Creating Policies for What Remains of the 111th Congress, urges Congress to pass seven bills. One would establish a federal renewable electricity standard (RES), that would require utilities to source 15 percent of their electricity from renewable sources by 2021.  Another would support Home Star and Building Star programs, which offers rebates for making homes and commercial buildings energy efficient. To read the entire list of priorities, click here.

United Steelworkers President Leo W. Gerard told reporters:

We can put people back to work with policies like an RES and investments in manufacturing. We cannot afford to sit on the sidelines as China and Europe pull ahead in the race for clean energy. The U.S. is poised to compete in the global clean energy economy, but only if we act soon to create these jobs right here at home.

David Foster, executive director of the BlueGreen Alliance, stressed the importance of Congress acting now and not waiting.

Working people across the country can’t afford to wait, the U.S. economy can’t afford to wait, and Congress can’t afford to wait to embrace clean energy as a strategy for creating jobs.

The BlueGreen Alliance is a national, strategic partnership between labor unions and environmental organizations dedicated to expanding the number and quality of jobs in the green economy.

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Re-posted from the AFL-CIO Now Blog

By James Parks
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

The rest of the banking industry should follow JPMorgan Chase’s example and declare a nationwide moratorium on home foreclosures, AFL-CIO Executive Vice President Arlene Holt Baker said this week. Chase has announced it is temporarily halting the processing of home foreclosures.

In rallies and town hall meetings across the country, union members have demanded that the banks pursue alternatives to foreclosure such as modifying homeowners’ mortgages to more affordable levels. In July, Holt Baker and Atlanta-North Georgia AFL-CIO President Charlie Flemming were part of a panel in Atlanta that listened to area residents about to lose their homes explain the Big Banks’ role in the foreclosure crisis. After the hearing. Holt Baker and others met with Wells Fargo Wachovia officials and urged them to declare a moratorium on foreclosures.

Last week, UAW President Bob King and several faith leaders announced their intention to withdraw hundreds of millions of dollars from JPMorgan Chase, among other reasons, over its refusal to declare a moratorium on foreclosures in Michigan. (more…)

By Mike Hall
AFL-CIO Senior Writer

Some lies are just tiny fibs, reshading the truth just a little bit, something all of us—except for the purest of heart—have done.  Then there is the whopper, the bald-faced lie that completely blots out the truth. Just like what Sen. Bob Corker (R-Tenn.) said the other day.

Thanks to the 2009 federal loan agreement to help General Motors and Chrysler stay afloat, both companies have dug themselves out of deep financial holes and are restoring jobs.

Last week at a ceremony at GM’s Spring Hill, Tenn., plant to celebrate the rehiring of 483 workers to build a line of fuel-efficient EcoTec engines, Corker, who ranted and railed against the government help to save the auto industry, took credit for the government help to save the auto industry. Here is what he said. Really.

At the end of the day we all have to feel good about what we did, I contributed to strengthening the auto industry in this country.

Politicians do have a vastly different truth formula than the rest of us use, but even so, Corker’s claim to saving the auto industry is as far from the truth as Saskatchewan is from Rio de Janeiro in miles (6,285) and culture (use your imagination). (more…)

By Tula Connell
AFL-CIO Managing Editor

Higher profits and new fuel-efficient models have put American-made cars back on the road again—with the help of taxpayers and the workers who have worked closely with the Big Three automakers to ensure their success.

In July, Ford posted a stronger-than-expected quarterly profit of $2.6 billion—some $1 billion more than analysts predicted—with promises of more earnings in 2011. Chrysler, which cut its net loss to $197 million from January through March, expects to announce its second-quarter earnings in mid-August. General Motor’s (GM’s) U.S. sales for June rose 11 percent from the year-ago period and the company is again building popular cars.

Says UAW President Bob King:

The commitment, sacrifices and hard work of the men and women at UAW-represented companies is an enormous part of the positive news coming from Ford, GM and Chrysler, where UAW members are producing best-in-class quality results and building vehicles that hands-down beat global competition. (more…)

 

 

 

 

 

 

By Leo W. Gerard
USW International President

Defying popular stereotype, CEOs and labor representatives sat on a panel and largely agreed on major issues confronting industry and working people.

It happened Monday, Nov. 30 as CNBC taped “Meeting of the Minds: Rebuilding America” in a hall at Carnegie Mellon University before an audience of nearly 600 students, businessmen, steelworkers and other trade unionists.

For the broadcast Dec. 2 at 8 p.m., host Maria Bartiromo said the Steel City of Pittsburgh was chosen because:

“It was here that America’s soul was forged.”

She assured the audience that the panel of speakers – Dan DiMicco, President and CEO of Nucor Corp.; Bill Ford Jr., Executive Chairman of Ford Motor Co.; Jeff Immelt, Chairman and CEO of General Electric; John Engler, President and CEO of the National Association of Manufacturers; U.S. Labor Secretary Hilda Solis, and me  — would tell them how to put America back on track.

Since precious few Americans, even those in the same political party, agree on how to realign America, that’s when a typecast smack down between CEOs and unionists might have begun.  

But it didn’t. That’s because on the most crucial issues, like manufacturing strategy and trade policy, the panel pretty much concurred.

Really.

For example, this is the United Steelworkers’ position on manufacturing strategy: America needs one.

The lack of a strategy handicaps the U.S. when it attempts to compete with virtually every other industrialized nation in the world. They have policies. They’ve decided which manufacturing areas they’re going to emphasize and support. And they do that with taxes, tariffs, loans, grants, even higher education guidelines.

As I said that night:

“We need to have a plan. All the other major countries in the world have plans. I am not mad at China. I am mad at us. They are doing what they need for their people.”

Bill Ford and Dan DiMicco joined that position.

Ford said, for example, that he met recently with the president of another country where his company manufacturers cars. That president, who he did not name, asked, “How can I help you?” Ford said that country already had a manufacturing strategy, so he could have a conversation with that government. But, he said, today, in the United States, that same conversation “is almost impossible because there is no policy.”

DiMicco agreed. He stressed that a manufacturing agenda must be designed, and he said he believes that is now being done with the support of President Obama’s administration. “We need to create jobs for 30 to 40 years, not the short term,” he said.

Here’s something else we agreed on: trade laws must be enforced and improved. The failure to do so has led to huge U.S. trade deficits and the migration of millions of good, middle-class manufacturing jobs overseas.

Several USW officers went to Washington, D.C. the day after the CNBC show taping to testify before the U. S. International Trade Commission in an attempt to save the U.S. industry that makes specialized steel pipe that is called oil country tubular goods. Between the end of 2008 and September of 2009, this industry lost 2,421 workers because of a killer cascade of unfair Chinese imports.

The USW union is joined in this petition by U.S. Steel Corp., Maverick Tube Corp., Evraz Rocky Mountain Steel, TMK IPSCO, V&M Star LLP, V&M TCA, and Wheatland Tube Corp.  Now there are a few more CEOs who agree with the USW.

During the CNBC taping, Immelt conceded that the policy of trying to put factories on barges to ship them overseas in search of the lowest labor costs, “has turned out to be not such a good idea.” For manufacturers like GE, and the  U.S. workers who lost those jobs, America must enforce trade laws and create a manufacturing policy to establish the  incentives essential to keep those factories at home in the U.S.

I have been ranting about trade for a long time. Rarely have I heard someone as angry about it as I am. But DiMicco clearly is. Listen to what he told the CNBC audience: 

“You should be a lot ticked off about the failed trade policies in Washington, D.C. . . . That has destroyed the middle class in this country.”

One of those from the audience permitted to ask the panel questions seemed more ticked off about the trade union movement than failed trade policies. She asked Ford if shedding the United Auto Workers would enhance his bottom line.

He said no:

“We are very happy with our union work force. There is a misconception that we want to get rid of the union.”

He said Ford collaborates with its union workers. He noted that he is a fourth generation Ford and walks through plants greeting many fourth generation UAW workers who are committed to Ford’s success. “Together we have gotten a lot done,” he said.

Union leaders have no qualms about negotiating with CEOs like Bill Ford for a fair split of the profit-pie in collective bargaining. But first, working together, we must make sure – with a manufacturing strategy and strong, enforced trade laws – that there is a pie.

Even as unemployment rates soar in longtime GM-centered communities hit by shutdowns, such as Janesville, Wis. (14.7 percent), and Flint, Mich. (15.3 percent), Obama and his task force pressed GM and Chrysler for more cuts. GM plans to shut down at least 14 factories and discard some 21,000 workers. Chrysler is closing eight U.S. plants, though it claims that somehow its merger with Fiat will result in a new increase of 5,000 jobs. In a telling observation that carried unsettling echoes of Bill Clinton’s push for NAFTA, the New York Times called the job cuts and other worker sacrifices “steps that most analysts thought could never be pushed through by a Democratic president allied with organized labor.”

The most recent version of GM’s recovery plan-closely tailored to the demands of the task force-calls for a stunning 98 percent increase in autos produced in Mexico, China, South Korea and Japan for the U.S. market. In May, the United Auto Workers (UAW) and United Steelworkers launched a 36-city campaign to prevent GM “from importing small cars from China, a move that would have increased GM’s profits while very likely reducing the number of domestic automobile jobs,” the New York Times reported June 2. This last-minute drive was successful, but it’s still unclear exactly what modifications GM will make.

For its part, Chrysler announced May 1 (the day after it filed Chapter 11 bankruptcy) the closing of its Kenosha, Wis., engine plant and the transfer of many of the plant’s 850 jobs to Mexico. As recently as the day before, top Obama administration and Chrysler officials had assured Wisconsin legislators that the Kenosha plant would be preserved. Faced with a firestorm of protest for using federal dollars to transfer jobs to Mexico, Chrysler now says that Fiat will consider keeping the plant open.

On top of all that, job losses will balloon with the closing of more than 1,100 GM and 789 Chrysler dealerships, eliminating tens of thousands more jobs.

Although Obama hasn’t ordered auto industry cuts himself, “the revamping of the nation’s largest car company is being guided by the administration’s auto-industry task force, and it follows the president’s calls for a leaner, healthier industry,” DowJones.com reported on May 12. The Obama administration’s downsizing of the auto industry, established as a precondition for approximately $30.5 billion extended thus far in loans to GM and Chrysler (with another $20 billion in the pipeline), sharply contrasts with the lightly-conditioned, larger bailout of Wall Street. Nomi Prins, author of It Takes a Pillage, a forthcoming book on the Wall Street meltdown and its roots in Washington, estimated that Wall Street has received $12.5 trillion-nearly 400 times more-in loans, loan guarantees and taxpayer subsidies for the sale of risky loans.

Contradictory policies

Only three of the Auto Task Force’s members were notably pro-labor, despite protests from labor and auto-state lawmakers. “The Auto Task Force members are basically red-pencil types who looked at saving the auto industry on the cheap without much consideration to social costs, let alone generating green alternative jobs for auto,” says economist and author William K. Tabb. “They have the narrowest business criteria for auto, unlike the banks that got capital and loan guarantees worth trillions. So their focus was to save the auto companies but not the auto workers.” Essentially, Obama and the task force wanted a quick and cheap solution to the Big Three’s ailing finances rather than providing an endless flow of resources, as the government did to the “too-big-to-fail” financial sector.

Bizarrely, the Auto Task Force’s policy direction dramatically undercuts Obama’s $787 billion economic stimulus program. “The problem with GM’s new Washington-mandated restructuring plan is that it steps on the gas in the wrong direction,” UC Berkeley professor Harley Shaiken told NPR’s “Marketplace.” “The stimulus package spends $800 billion to create jobs, while billions in loans to GM are conditioned on eliminating them.”

In addition to the factory job and dealership cuts, GM will unload its Pontiac, Saturn and Hummer brands. By contrast, the Italian government provided $1.7 billion in aid to Fiat as long as Italian plants stay open, noted Robert L. Borosage of the progressive coalition Campaign for America’s Future. Also, France loaned $8.5 billion to its big three automakers, in exchange for pledges to keep jobs in France.

Labor advocates fight back

After months of the UAW trying to avoid a fight with Obama, in early May it began openly challenging the use of taxpayer loan money to finance the outsourcing of jobs. “We believe (GM) should have an obligation to build in this country the vehicles it will be selling in the U.S. market, thereby maintaining the maximum number of jobs in the United States,” UAW legislative director Alan Reuther wrote to the Senate.

Former Clinton Secretary of Labor Robert Reich blasted the notion of paying billions of taxpayer dollars to keep companies afloat while they cut tens of thousands of jobs and wages. “We’re transferring money from taxpayers to Big Three shareholders for no apparent reason other than the Big Three are headquartered in America,” he said. “Why should taxpayers foot any of this bill unless the Big Three agree to keep their workers employed while they try to turn themselves around?”

The full answer to that question remains unanswered at this moment, as the two corporations’ plans for future outsourcing are unavailable. But significantly, the Auto Task Force didn’t explicitly require that federal assistance be directed to renewing production in the United States. Furthermore, following conventional management wisdom, “the Obama administration structured the GM and Chrysler plans to lessen the union’s voice in management,” the New York Times stated.

But so far, the mainstream media hasn’t much noticed or criticized the contradictions between Obama’s plans to simultaneously stimulate job growth and shrink GM and Chrysler. With all the attention on unwarranted Wall Street bonuses, major media lump Wall Street brokers’ compensation and CEO pay with autoworkers wages as part of the same culture of “excess.” Reports that autoworkers were paid as much as $73 an hour quickly spread through the media.

Actually, the typical wage is $26 to $28 an hour, plus an additional $10 or so in benefits, according to the Center for Automotive Research. UAW’s agreement to accept a new starting wage of $14.20 an hour with vastly reduced benefits received little attention. Neither did the fact that UAW-represented plants ranked “very favorably” on quality and productivity compared to Japanese “transplants” in the United States, according to independent industry assessments.

Shielded by a lack of accurate and coherent media analysis, the Auto Task Force used a narrow and conventional single-firm turnaraound framework to create a strategy for GM and Chrysler. “A hedge fund wants to make money fast for its client-in this case, the taxpayer-without regard to social cost,” Shaiken says. “Unlike most clients, however, the taxpayer picks up the social cost. Longer unemployment lines and more foreclosures are devastating for the victims, not cheap for the rest of us.”

But the Auto Task Force seemed largely oblivious to the human costs of eliminating thousands of U.S. auto jobs. Obama and his task force withheld billions of dollars in new loans requested by GM until after the company came up with a more aggressive program of job cuts, plant closing and outsourcing. The Auto Task Force rapidly divorced the reinvigoration of GM and Chrysler from a longer-term shift to a fuel-efficient economy and production not just of high-mileage cars, but also of mass-transit equipment for buses and high-speed rail.

Ironically, GM’s ruthless downsizing of its U.S. workforce and outsourcing of jobs over the last 25 years diminished its leverage with the Obama team. GM has discarded 85 percent of its domestic production since 1990-and that was before it hit the current recession and the resultant nosedive in sales. It was no longer “too big to fail.”

So Obama and the Auto Task Force felt free to promote a recovery strategy for the two ailing auto firms that stands in appalling contrast to the generosity shown Wall Street. GM and Chrysler headquarters will remain intact, but thousands of U.S. workers will be vaporized, retiree health benefits could be put on the chopping block (especially at Chrysler) and numerous industrial communities will suffer permanent damage. And the Obama team has forfeited the opportunity to recast the current crisis into a fuel-efficient re-industrialization of America-right when the country needs the stimulus of  high-wage green jobs the most.

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• First published in In These Times. To subscribe, click here.

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Roger Bybee is a Milwaukee-based freelance writer and progressive publicity consultant whose work has appeared in numerous national publications and websites.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

The proposition General Motors has presented to the United Auto Workers and American taxpayers in its latest restructuring plan is simple: You must pay for your own execution.

GM, which already took $15.4 billion in bailout money, wants another $11.6 billion and is offering in return this deal: It will close 16 of its American manufacturing plants, terminate 21,000 of its factory workers and double the cars it builds in low-wage Mexico, China and South Korea and ships back to the U.S. to sell.

There it is: GM is demanding that Americans pay to send their own jobs overseas.

In the world where corporate executives live, the one in which boards of directors grant CEOs multi-million dollar bonuses even after companies tank, maybe that’s not a perverse proposition.

But in the world where real Americans live, we’ve had enough of this crap. Decades of foolish tax and other federal policies that encouraged American manufacturing firms to throw Americans out of work and expatriate were bad enough. To expect American taxpayers to bankroll GM’s plans to layoff American workers and move their jobs overseas goes too far.

We’re taking a stand. It’s gotta stop here. The United Steelworkers (USW), the Alliance for American Manufacturing (AAM) and the Mayors and Municipalities Automotive Coalition (MMAC) are conducting an 11-state, 32-city protest bus tour. At each stop so far, hundreds of people have cheered our message: “Keep it Made in America.” And they’ve signed our petition calling for support of a simple idea: Buy it here; build it here.      We will present the petitions at a teach-in conference in Washington, D.C. on May 19 when we will explain to elected officials why GM’s plan fails America and why they must require GM to submit a new plan supporting American jobs.

As much as for the UAW, this is a life and death struggle for the USW, American manufacturing, and for millions of Americans in good-paying jobs. Without manufacturing, America is in danger of attempting to subsist on an economy based on nothing more than amorphous derivatives, credit default swaps and Ponzi schemes. The Steelworkers represent hundreds of thousands of workers whose jobs depend on the auto industry, from steelworkers who make the steel, to the rubber workers who make the tires, to the glass workers who make the windshields, to the paper workers who make the glossy pamphlets.

Altogether, more than 7 million paychecks depend on the U.S. auto industry, including healthcare, education, service, retail and other jobs. This bus tour is about preserving those jobs, all of those jobs.

In just the past eight months of this recession, caused in huge part by recklessness on Wall Street, this country has lost 1.2 million manufacturing jobs, according to the U.S. Department of Labor. GM cannot take tax dollars to slash more. Former U.S. Labor Secretary Robert B. Reich agrees. Here’s what he told the Washington Post, “. . . it raises fundamental questions about the purpose of bailing out these big companies. If GM is going to do more of its production overseas, then why exactly are we saving GM?”

It’s not as if it’s impossible for a U.S. auto company to manufacture here. Ford Motor Co., which is not taking any bailout money, is investing $500 million in retooling its Michigan Truck plant outside Detroit so that it can make small cars that it will sell worldwide, including its next-generation, battery-electric Focus. And Chrysler, which is getting bailout money, has made a deal with Fiat under which the Italian car company will manufacture a small car in one of Chrysler’s U.S. assembly facilities, which, along with other long-term commitments, will eventually create 4,000 U.S. jobs.

On the first day of the bus tour, I was joined by the Rev. Jesse Jackson, actor Danny Glover, the angriest mayor in the U.S., Virg Bernero of Lansing, and U.S. Sen. Debbie Stabenow, among others.

The Rev. Jackson drew cheers as he remarked that somehow we’ve given billions to the “banksters,” yet somehow we’re still hemorrhaging hundreds of thousands of jobs and homes each month. He called for a moratorium on foreclosures and plant closings, and I’m with him.

Bernero is tired of Wall Street describing his father, a retired auto worker, as a legacy cost. His father is a human being, a senior citizen, who worked hard every day of his life and returned home exhausted from an honest day’s work. Now, however, Wall Street thinks it’s fine to reduce him to a sub-human term and cheat him out of the retirement benefits he earned.

Bernero’s father made things, real things that could be touched, held in the hand – not derivatives, not figments of the imagination that turned out to have less than no value at all.

Now Wall Street and GM must be made to understand that Main Street isn’t going to take it anymore. We’re not going to continue allowing corporate America to outsource the American dream. Bernero said it right: “This is America’s fight.”

Join us. Sign the petition. We have no intention of buying our own noose. We intend to win this fight.

By Leo W. Gerard
International President

AIG Chairman Edward M. Liddy gets the Creep of the Week award for his stunning, overwhelming, dumbfounding display of cluelessness.

Liddy not only awarded $165 million in bonuses to the very AIG employees whose risky speculation in credit default swaps bankrupted the once-great insurance giant, forcing it to beg for $170 billion in taxpayer bailouts, he then claimed he was a helpless victim of retention bonus contracts written before he took over in September. Here’s exactly what he said: “Quite frankly, AIG’s hands are tied.”

No other contender for this week’s Creep prize awarded by the USW sunk close to those depths of obtuseness. And in so many diverse areas! Let’s count the ways:

First, there’s Liddy’s claim that he just can’t squirm out of contracts. Boy, he’d be the first CEO on God’s green earth to be too feeble to break a contract. Think about it: Congress insisted that the Big Three auto companies crack open their contracts with the United Auto Workers to qualify for federal bailout money. Union contracts at all sorts of companies across this country have been broken, bent, re-opened and renegotiated by cooperative labor organizations willing to accept a variety of cuts to preserve employment during an economic crisis caused by the likes of, well, let’s face it, reckless speculators at AIG! But, somehow, Liddy couldn’t find a way to break, bend, re-open or renegotiate contracts with the white collar workers who caused the mess taxpayers are both suffering and cleaning up.

Second, there’s Liddy’s claim that he had to honor the bonus contracts or he’d be sued by his employees. With a straight face, Liddy asserted that the employees in AIG’s Financial Products subsidiary who neglected to account for the possibility of a decline in real estate prices would actually list their names on court documents contending they deserved extra money after bankrupting the company. If Liddy thinks there’s a jury in America that would buy that argument and award the bonuses, I’ve got some credit default swaps I’d like to sell him. It’s clear, in fact, even Liddy doesn’t buy the argument since he’s declined to publicly release the names, though he has given a great deal of information – under duress – to New York Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo who is working on a lawsuit to recover the bonuses for taxpayers.

Third, there’s Liddy’s failure to understand these simple facts: people who caused a company’s demise don’t get bonuses and neither do employees of companies getting bailouts with federal tax dollars. The average AIG bonus payment was $395,000 – though 51 employees got more than $1 million and the winner of the fattest bonus got $6.4 million. Liddy told Congress he has asked some of the 418 recipients to return half of their bumps. If all 418 complied, the average would decline to a mere $197,500. That may be chump change to a Wall Streeter, but it is a life-saving sum to a middle class worker who has lost his job or can’t pay his mortgage because of Wall Street’s greed and  recklessness. In addition, there’s an important reciprocal issue Liddy failed to understand: the fury he has provoked by paying those bonuses has made the middle class even less willing to invest their tax dollars in any future bailouts that Congress may claim AIG or Wall Street banks desperately need.

Fourth, there’s Liddy’s ability to treat with reverence those who caused the financial meltdown while regarding with disdain those who suffer as a result of it. It was Liddy’s contention that his white collar workers were special. He had to give them the bumps, or they would abandon AIG, refusing to clean up the mess they’d made. That didn’t apply to auto workers, though. No one cared what happened to them. They could be furloughed as a result of Wall Street’s misbehavior — and pay taxes to clean it up as their bonus. But what’s worse is the level of continued boldfaced, outright deception from Liddy and his like. The bumps were crucial for retention, he said, right? Wrong. Cuomo discovered that 11 big time bonus beneficiaries – those who got $1 million or more – had already left AIG.

Fifth, Liddy acted as if the American people didn’t already own 80 percent of his company. Earlier this month, after AIG reported a $61.7 billion quarterly loss, the largest in corporate history, the federal government promised to help prop it up by giving it another $30 billion in taxpayer dollars. The solution here is simple, as the Washington Post pointed out in a story last week. If the feds simply insist on a 100 percent share of the company, which, frankly, the American people deserve for that kind of investment, the bonuses stop.

In addition to Creep of the Week, Liddy gets a special bonus award: Clueless of the Week.