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A Day at the Spa with AIG - White House Press Briefing by Dana Perino 10/8/08
— Wednesday, October 08, 2008 —
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Q Is the President following any of the financial hearings that are going on, on the Hill, specifically at AIG executives? When the White House hears about these executives taking a spa vacation, spending thousands of dollars on massages and treatments -- I mean, do they think that there should be any kind of action taken against these executives, considering how much taxpayer money was put into that company to rescue it?

MS. PERINO: I don't know how much he's been able to actually watch those. As you know, yesterday we were traveling out to Chantilly, Virginia. But certainly we've seen coverage of it. And I understand why the American people would be outraged -- I am. It's pretty despicable to realize how callous somebody might be as they go through this -- as some might be reacting to this crisis.

And the President did not want to move forward on this rescue package to help anybody in the top positions in Wall Street. He was concerned about everybody -- everyday people like you and me in America and people all across this country who have worked so hard to put money into their retirement accounts, to pay their mortgages on time, who have been responsible in the loans that they've taken out.

Not everybody has, and there were risky lenders -- lenders who gave people loans that they knew they weren't going to be able to pay, and borrowers who took out loans that they probably knew they didn't have the income in order to pay but thought maybe that eventually that they would. Now, Americans are not the type of people who fault success. When people succeed we like that, we think that that's good, and we aspire to be successful ourselves. But rewarding failure is something that we have a very hard time swallowing.

And President Bush has said that his first instinct was absolutely not to go down this road. What he wanted was to make sure that we were asking all the right questions to prevent this financial market collapse and that we take the actions necessary on Capitol Hill, or anywhere else -- at the Fed, or the SEC, wherever we could independently -- to help save the system. But he didn't do that to help top executives and certainly not to help executives go to a spa. President Bush did that in order to try to help everybody save their accounts.

Q Should some of that money be taken back from those individuals? Is there a way to do that?

MS. PERINO: I don't know how it was all paid for or anything. I just know that I can understand that people would question the judgment of executives who would take that kind of action.


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