3/21/2009

AIG Financial Products Executives
50 Danbury Road
Wilton, CT 06897

Dear AIG Financial Products Executives,

We hope you enjoy living in Connecticut, and we’re glad you decided to make our state the home for your Financial Products Division.

Having said that, you might have noticed that things are not going very well for the rest of us. We’ve seen skyrocketing unemployment, thousands of Connecticut residents losing their health insurance, and thousands more losing their homes to foreclosure. Retirement and college savings have been wiped out. It’s not a pretty picture.

Some of our cities are really struggling. Teachers and social workers are being laid off by the hundreds in Bridgeport, New Haven, and Hartford. These cities’ children deserve a decent education and the opportunity to make something of their lives, and lay-offs will directly impact those children’s chances.

Here’s the point: $165 million may not seem like an enormous amount of money for AIG or it’s top executives. But for Connecticut families struggling to make ends meet, for those of us who are losing our homes, losing our healthcare, losing our jobs, or our life savings, that much money could do tremendous good.

In these troubled times, we believe there are more important ways to use $165 million to help get our economy back on track. Like funding for the universal healthcare plan that has been proposed in the Connecticut legislature. Or support for non-profit housing counseling agencies that help struggling homeowners avoid foreclosure. Or preventing thousands of layoffs of public service employees in healthcare and education. Or funding an earned income tax credit to help low-wage workers keep up with the rising cost of living.  These initiatives could make a real difference for Connecticut’s working families.

It has been reported that you intend to return your bonus. This is a good start, and we applaud this step. Most of us will never know what it feels like to turn down millions of dollars.

But in recognition of the growing disparities in our state and in our country, we believe more can be done. You have a wonderful opportunity to help your neighbors in  Connecticut. We ask you to consider the experiences of families struggling in this economy and to join us in urging elected officials to pursue a policy agenda that focuses first and foremost on the needs of working class and middle class families.

We ask you to consider whether our state budget should be balanced, as Governor Rell has proposed, by making low-income families and senior citizens pay more for their healthcare and prescriptions without asking families earning over $500,000 to pay just a few percentage points more in income taxes.

We ask you to consider whether our financial regulations should allow homeowners in danger of foreclosure the chance to have their loan terms modified through bankruptcy courts, just as loans for vacation homes and privately owned business property can be.

Now that we have had a chance to see your community, we would like to invite you to visit ours. You can meet with some of the people who have experienced the brunt of the economic downturn first hand: people like Willie Alice Huguley of Hartford who at the age of 83 is worried about losing the only home she has known to foreclosure; or Asaad Jackson, 24, who faces thousands of dollars in medical debt as a result of emergency cardiac care he received two years ago during which time he lacked medical insurance. Or people like Mark Dziubek, a father of five who was recently laid off from the manufacturing job he held for nineteen years.

We would truly appreciate the opportunity to show you how hard our communities been hit, and we would sincerely welcome your support for proposals to create a more broadly shared prosperity.

Thank you.