Senator Warner did a series of interviews with local television stations around Virginia this afternoon to discuss how we can fix the mess over the AIG rentention payments and make sure it doesn't happen again in the future.  

Here's what he said:  

What AIG did was morally wrong, I believe was potentially legally wrong... and it's just plain stupid.  We as Americans have invested $170 billion in this company to try to get it through these hard times so it wouldn't fail and have a detrimental effect to the financial sector.  ... I absolutely share folks' outrage and the one thing I can tell you there's not a member of Congress that I've talked to yet, that doesn't say we're going to get this money back.  If they don't give it back, we're going to put in place something pretty extraordinary: a tax rate north of 90 percent on these specific retention benefits.  This money is going to come back to the American taxpayer.  

He said that he hopes that Congress' actions to recoup the government's money will send a message to other companies who are receiving government bailout money: 

I hope it will send a signal to the other companies that have received public assistance that these are extraordinary times.  An awful lot of Virginia families are hurting right now all across the Commonwealth.  They've had to cut back.  Don't give me the excuse that, "Hey, we've done well in the past and that means we're going to be able to continue the same kind of pay and benefits we've had in the past."  If you are currently receiving federal benefits, you need to cut back on... the kind of executive compensations that have been so outrageous in this AIG case. 

He also talked about his role as a member of the Senate Banking Committee in fixing the financial crisis and putting in a new regulatory system to prevent another crisis in the future:

We've got to not only stabilize the existing crisis, you've got to put in place a new financial regulatory oversight system so that this doesn't happen in the future.  This time around it was derivatives and credit default swaps and obligations.  We've got to put in place a regulatory system that doesn't allow basically half of the financial system to go unregulated.  Over the last eight years, in this period of "deregulation at any cost," we've allowed companies like AIG to have all of these activities go on that nobody had any oversight on.  I've got to tell you, as a new senator here, shame on all of us, but going forward, if I've got anything to say about it, that's not going to happen again in the future.