Eliot Spitzer must miss his glory days when he was the scourge of Wall Street as New York's attorney general. With the bonus battle exploding at the American International Group, Mr. Spitzer has jumped into the fray - and dismissed the bonus scandal, arguing that it is obscuring the real disgrace" at A.I.G. "Why are A.I.G.'s counterparties getting paid back in full, to the tune of tens of billions of taxpayer dollars?" he asks in an article on Slate. Mr. Spitzer notes that A.I.G.'s trading parties were all the big banks including Goldman Sachs, many of which received billions of dollars from the government's Troubled Asset Relief Program. "So now we know for sure what we already surmised: The A.I.G. bailout has been a way to hide an enormous second round of cash to the same group that had received TARP money already," he writes. "It all appears, once again, to be the same insiders protecting themselves against sharing the pain and risk of their own bad adventure," Mr. Spitzer writes. Recounting how the economic crisis is affecting workers, with tax increases, pay cuts and layoffs, Mr. Spitzer asks: "Why can't Wall Street royalty shoulder some of the burden? Why did Goldman have to get back 100 cents on the dollar? Didn't we already give Goldman a $25 billion capital infusion, and aren't they sitting on more than $100 billion in cash? What is the deeper relationship between Goldman and A.I.G.?"
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