The recent AIG fiasco has lead to many outraged Americans in Washington and back at home. The international insurance company AIG ran into financial trouble late last year and came to the United States government for a bailout to help them recover from risky investments that had put them in jeopardy. Last week it was reported that AIG paid out millions of dollars in retention bonuses from contracts that were made before the collapse of the company.

During his congressional hearing the acting CEO for AIG Edward Liddy saw it to be a bigger risk to break these contracts then to pay them the bonuses. This led many in congress to criticizes Liddy’s actions as CEO. Most people do not understand Liddy’s patriotism and good will in taking on the task of helping AIG get out of trouble. He just entered retirement when the treasury department asked him to help head the recovery of the insurance company. And he is only getting paid a dollar a year for his services that are mostly getting unnoticed. To make things worse, in the late fall bailout bill that the House of Representatives and the Senate passed, there was a clause that said “exception for contractually obligated bonuses agreed on before Feb. 11, 2009” according to foxbusiness.com.

This is an amendment that Senator Chris Dodd of Connecticut admitted to putting into the bill that gave AIG an easy loophole in dealing with these contracts. This leads me to ask the question, how many people read this bill? The answer is not many. Someone from AIG must have read it because they knew these kinds of loopholes existed, but not many of the men and women in Congress knew. It seems very hypocritical for the people who vote on this legislation to vote for the bill and then come back pounding on their podiums and yelling at the Senate floor about these bonuses. If they actually read the bill this would not have happened. But these actions are not new to Washington.

For example, take what happened after the terrorist attacks of 9/11. Congress rushed through the passing of the PATRIOT Act because there was a crisis. Only one senator voted against the legislation and that was Wisconsin’s own Russ Feingold. He said that he would not vote for it because he actually read it and saw many flaws and infringements on our freedoms. Many people tried to paint Feingold as un-American because of his lack of support for the Act, but a couple of years later the same Congress men and women who passed the PATRIOT Act went on the Senate floor ranting and raving about how it infringes on our civil liberties. These are two classic examples of how the Congress men and women we elect to run our country have failed because they simply don’t fully read the bills they vote upon.