After the economy hit bottom in 2008, Congress acted quickly to bail out the big banks.
But when executives at AIG Financial Products, located in Wilton, CT were slated to receive enormous bonuses — despite selling many of the complicated financial instruments that did so much damage to our economy — the public was rightly outrages.
Connecticut Working Families participated in a ‘Lifestyles of the Rich and Shameless” bus tour. The goal was to put average people — many of whom were at risk of losing their healthcare, their jobs or their homes — in the spotlight, and to urge our elected leaders to start looking at policies to help get average Americans back on their feat, not powerful titans of finance.
We delivered a letter to the homes of those AIG Executives to invite them to join us in our neighborhoods, and see the damage they had done to the Main Street economy. Unsurprisingly, we got no response. And while many AIG Execs announced their intention to return those bonuses, it turns out that most of the bonuses were never actually returned.
However, our little bus tour garnered local, national and international press attention, and helped to bring focus in the media to the stories of the real people who were really suffering in the recession and whose lives were negatively impacted by the economic collapse.