Moral: Don’t buy a former meth lab, if you can help it

By Walker Duncan Posted on July 14, 2009 at 10:27 am

Interesting article on the physical and financial dangers of winding up in the former ome of a meth lab, which is apparently easier than one might assume, cites a handful of Tennessee examples. We’re bubbling over with pride!

Winchester, Tenn. » The spacious home where the newly wed Rhonda and Jason Holt began their family in 2005 was plagued by mysterious illnesses. The Holts’ three babies were ghostlike and listless, with breathing problems that called for respirators, repeated trips to the emergency room and, for the middle child, Anna, the heaviest dose of steroids a toddler can take.

Rhonda Holt, a nurse, developed migraines. She and her husband, a factory worker, had kidney ailments.

It was not until February, more than five years after they moved in, that the couple discovered the root of their troubles: their house, across the road from a cornfield in this town some 70 miles south of Nashville, was contaminated with high levels of methamphetamine left by the previous occupant, who had been dragged from the attic by the police.

The Holts’ next realization was almost as devastating: it was up to them to spend the $30,000 or more that cleanup would require.

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Tags: D'oh  

AIG paying out a couple million more

By Walker Duncan Posted on July 10, 2009 at 7:38 am

The Washington Post reports that troubled insurance giant AIG plans to pay out millions more in bonuses to senior executives just months after a similar move caused a public outrage.

American International Group is preparing to pay millions of dollars more in bonuses to several dozen top corporate executives after an earlier round of payments four months ago set off a national furor.

The troubled insurance giant has been pressing the federal government to bless the payments in hopes of shielding itself from renewed public outrage.

The request puts the administration’s new compensation czar on the spot by seeking his opinion about bonuses that were promised long before he took his post.

AIG doesn’t actually need the permission of Kenneth R. Feinberg, who President Obama appointed last month to oversee the compensation of top executives at seven firms that have received large federal bailouts. But officials at AIG, whose federal rescue package stands at $180 billion, have been reluctant to move forward without political cover from the government.

“Anytime we write a check to anybody” it is highly scrutinized, said an AIG official, who declined to speak on the record because the negotiations with Feinberg are ongoing. “We would want to feel comfortable that the government is comfortable with what we are doing.”

The payments coming due next week include $2.4 million in bonuses for about 40 high-ranking executives at AIG, according to administration documents from earlier this year. Though the actual sum may have changed since then, the payments are much smaller than those that caused the upheaval in March.

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Tags: American Insurance Group, D'oh, government stimulus