Several more employees are leaving the controversial financial products unit that brought American International Group Inc to its knees last year, according to a person with knowledge of developments there.

The resignations are in addition to the “handful” of senior AIG Financial Products executives who have already given notice, said the person, who could not quantify the total number of departures.

To date, AIG said the situation at the financial products unit remains “manageable,” despite the departures. But if too many employees quit, Chief Executive Edward Liddy has warned it could be disastrous for AIG and, ultimately, for U.S. taxpayers who are the insurer’s majority owners. Employees there were promised retention payments more than a year ago, on condition they stayed long enough to wind down their areas of business, effectively working themselves out of a job.

But now some have changed their minds, fed up after 10 days of ridicule and scorn from lawmakers who broadly derided the bonuses, demonstrators picketing outside AIG offices and a threat by New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo to publicly name anyone who did not return the bonuses.

The employees still working are not the ones who caused the large losses and “are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials,” wrote Jake DeSantis, an executive vice-president for the Wilton, Connecticut-based financial products unit, in a resignation letter printed by the New York Times on Wednesday.

This is the problem with the mob mentality and an over eager congress and administration that wishes to hide their real problems. They don’t pay attention to the facts, or worse, the consequences of their actions.

Kiss your billions dumped into AIG good bye.

From The Latin American Herald Tribune:

SAO PAULO — General Motors plans to invest $1 billion in Brazil to avoid the kind of problems the U.S. automaker is facing in its home market, said the beleaguered car maker.

According to the president of GM Brazil-Mercosur, Jaime Ardila, the funding will come from the package of financial aid that the manufacturer will receive from the U.S. government and will be used to “complete the renovation of the line of products up to 2012.”

“It wouldn’t be logical to withdraw the investment from where we’re growing, and our goal is to protect investments in emerging markets,” he said in a statement published by the business daily Gazeta Mercantil.

While I don’t relish the thought of my tax dollars going to investment in another country, it isn’t like they spent $50 million on a new jet or something stupid like that. If anything it might help the US company stay afloat in the future, which is good for the US economy.

H/T Gateway Pundit

Today he issued two memorandums. One is for the Transportation Department to work with the automakers on improving fuel economy, up to 35mpg by 2011. And he says this will help the auto industry produce viable products. How the hell does he know that? Has he ever owned a business let alone built autos? They have a viable product now, the problem is cost and this surely isn’t going to help reduce costs.

By mandating this memorandum alone he is going to either increase the R&D costs of vehicles drastically, or force auto makers to stop producing vehicles that Americans actually want.

He just signed their death certificates.

But, it gets better. The second memorandum requests that California gets the waiver they are seeking to increase emissions standards by a further 30 percent. Consumers are really going to love it when their special California vehicles are much higher than the national average.

He actually says:

This is an energy triple play that will cut global warming pollution, increase innovation, and reduce our dependence on foreign oil. It show what a visionary president is capable of doing, and the faith he has in the economic revival that America’s automotive and energy industries can produce

This is visionary? Killing off the automakers could be considered visionary I suppose. Some might call it a nightmare more than anything else. He sure thinks a lot of himself doesn’t he?

So much for democracy.

In seeking to duplicate those great times, Obama is hiring most of Clinton’s old staff. As usual though, they seem to forget history or just choose to ignore the facts. So let’s look at how Clinton’s two terms really went.

Before Clinton took office, several innovations were in the works that were prepping the economy for lift off. For the most part, personal computing was really starting to come into its own. That lead to an enormous internet boom.

But let us back up just a minute. For the first three years of his office, the economy pretty much went nowhere. It wasn’t until the GOP took office, combined with Hillary’s failure to get her health care plan through and Greenspan’s loosening of monetary policy did the economy take off. The chart below says it all.

Source IBD.

What about that budget surplus?

As for the budget surpluses, they came as a complete surprise to Clinton economic forecasters, whose static models only predicted their tax hikes on the rich would narrow the budget gap, not get it into the black.

Their “deficit-reduction plan” didn’t create the surpluses at all. They were a direct result of a tidal wave of capital-gains revenues generated by the GOP-led stock boom.

Relieved that Washington would no longer threaten to take over 14% of the economy by socializing medicine or raise taxes even higher, the market took off like a shot at that point. And capital gains tax receipts exploded, flooding federal coffers.

Clinton’s own long-term budgets predicted no surpluses of any kind during his administration and beyond.

In 1993, Clinton made his first five-year budget projections based on the new tax and spending programs he was proposing. He forecast a budget deficit of $202 billion in fiscal year 2000. In fact, the Treasury produced a record surplus that year of $236 billion.

That’s a swing of more than $400 billion. So much for central planning.

Clinton either must admit to some of the worst forecasting in history or acknowledge that some other factors besides his record tax hike closed the budget gap. But he’s copped to neither.

So, if Obama wants to duplicate the “success” of Bill Clinton, he needs to wait until 2010 and pray that the GOP takes over congress and gets things straightened out.

Of course this means closing all U.S. plants in the process. However, instead of just putting hundreds of thousands of people out on the street, I would offer to relocate them to their country of choice and continue building cars for us. Naturally that means no unions and no viagra, but hey, you won’t lose your job. Look at the bright side, you may not make as much but the standard of living will be far less as well.

It is far better than letting the government take control of my company and run it into the ground, as the British did in the 60’s, I would be free of the gestapo unions and might actually turn the company around. Sure I would have to build some great cars in the process that people really want to buy, but that should be the easy part.

Given that I figured I would start off with this new auto bailout that is being talked about in congress and elsewhere. As many people have mentioned, this is going to be a big mess no matter how you look at it.

To start with we have three companies that are failing in U.S. sales. Some are saying let them fail. If they can’t manage their business then the company should fail like any other company. In principal I agree with that. However in GM’s case they are doing quite well overseas and are profitable, especially in the Asian markets. So they are doing something right, just not here.

Either way, I would give them two choices.

Option One

First if we are to bail you out, then I would require what Neil Cavuto said, the CEO and the Chairman must resign. Then I would bring in the top 20 or so non-employee stock holders (which means basically mutual fund companies) and have them search for a new board. The stock holders then vote in new management.

At the same time I would require the UAW to renegotiate their contracts and cut labor costs. They are out of control and it is killing these companies. The only problem with that of course is that the UAW has already said they won’t budge.

Option Two

The government does nothing and lets the companies fail. As bad as that sounds it doesn’t necessarily mean they shut their doors and all is lost. It means they file chapter 11 bankruptcy and the courts can reduce their debt. Possibly even force the unions to the negotiating table.

Yes, some jobs will be lost and that is the sad fact. However you cannot keep a person employed just for the sake of that person. Labor is almost always the largest expenditure of any company and why it is usually the first to go when the company needs to stay a float. Some must sacrifice so that other may go on.

So that is my view. However with a democrat congress and a democrat president there will be neither. They will hand them billions of dollars of our money and they will probably fail anyway. All the while the unions will keep their strangle hold on the companies.

So for all those people that were doing horribly and Obama told you you were, here is the data:

• In 2004, 8 percent of the electorate earned $15k or less; that dropped to 6 percent in 2008
• In 2004, 15 percent made between $15k-$30K; that dropped to 12 percent in 2008
• In 2004, 23 percent made $30k or less; that dropped to 18 percent in 2008
• In 2004, 11 percent made $100k-$150k; that rose to 14 percent in 2008
• In 2004, 4 percent made $150k-$200k; that rose to 6 percent in 2008
• In 2004, 3 percent made $200k or more; that rose to 6 percent in 2008
• In 2004, 18 percent made $100k or more; that rose to 26 percent in 2008

So much for the “bad economy” we had huh?