Waker-Upper
Eight days ago a brilliant dissection of the current financial apocalypse by Rolling Stone‘s Matt Taibbi appeared. I ran a link-and-excerpt last Monday. Today I read an evasively worded, self-justifying whine piece by former AIG financial products unit exec vp Jake DeSantis about why he resigned three days ago. Then I re-read Taibbi’s piece and went into one of my quiet-seething modes.
Then, for mild comic relief, I re-watched the above South Park “Bailout!” clip, which ran a day after DeSantis resigned.
Then I started re-focusing on Joseph Cassano, the ultimate AIG bad guy.
“Then, in January 2009, AIG did it again,” Taibbi’s piece reads at one point. “After all those years letting financial products division president Joseph Cassano run wild, and after already getting caught paying out insane bonuses while on the public till, AIG decided to pay out another $450 million in bonuses. And to whom? To the 400 or so employees in Cassano’s old unit, AIGFP, which is due to go out of business shortly!
“Yes, that’s right, an average of $1.1 million in taxpayer-backed money apiece, to the very people who spent the past decade or so punching a hole in the fabric of the universe!
“‘We, uh, needed to keep these highly expert people in their seats,’ AIG spokeswoman Christina Pretto says to me in early February.
“‘But didn’t these ‘highly expert people’ basically destroy your company?’ I ask.
“Pretto protests, says this isn’t fair. The employees at AIGFP have already taken pay cuts, she says. Not retaining them would dilute the value of the company even further, make it harder to wrap up the unit’s operations in an orderly fashion.
Joseph Cassano, former CFO of AIG’s Financial Products divison, said to be currently “hiding out in his lavish town house near Harrods in London.”
“The bonuses are a nice comic touch highlighting one of the more outrageous tangents of the bailout age, namely the fact that, even with the planet in flames, some members of the Wall Street class can’t even get used to the tragedy of having to fly coach. ”
These people need their trips to Baja, their spa treatments, their hand jobs,” says an official involved in the AIG bailout, a serious look on his face, apparently not even half-kidding. “They don’t function well without them.”
And I haven’t had my coffee or taken a shower yet.
Those AIG bastards should be dropped into my father’s remote village in northeastern India and then they’ll see how many people can live a simple life without running water, electricity, or corporate products.
bloody pigs.
And we bailed them out why, exactly? It’s popular right now to harp on capitalism, but capitalism is exactly what would have fixed this had it been allowed to run its course.
I think the whole AIG mess stinks to high heaven but I thought the DeSantis resignation letter was a good viewpoint from the other side of the fence and if anything further exposes Congress as the grandstanding buffoons they are.
It’s also important for people to remember that the majority of the people aren’t the ones who caused the mess at AIG (who are already gone) — they’re the people who are trying to *FIX* the mess. That’s a big distinction and if we start shitting all over the brightest people at AIG we’re just further dooming them to failure (and more taxpayer money).
Never let the facts get in the way of what feels “right”….
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB123793914378932263.html
Punish them!! PUNISH THEM! Crucify THEM!!!
It all stinks to high heaven. Scarier to me than some greedy bankers are self-serving emotive opportunists on the hill and elsewhere who woo so many with their populist pleas while being as dirty and/or responsible as the people they’re seeking to crucify. That they are so willing to trample these banker’s civil liberties should disgust and frighten everyone much, much more than bankers being, well, bankers. Even the the most passionate civil rights “champions” have no integrity when it comes to currying favor with an angry public.
Thanks for the South Park clip. It’s fantastic. As for DeSantis, guilty by association I say. He’s just as accountable, as part of the AIG team, taking the pay check/bonus or not. He also worked in the division that bankrolled of AIG.
If you go through life with your head up your butt then pull it out only to discover your on the wrong side – oops – so sorry. He made a mistake, by working for a company with no ethics. Had he been conscience, he could of had the opportunity to report the behavior before it was too late.
Here’s a good rendition from a Wall St broker on the meltdown:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Nay4VbUJl3E
I can’t be the only one who’s heard the rumor that China will stop underwriting the American dollar if AIG is allowed to fail. Has that urban legend already been debunked? It’s about the only fathomable reason why we’re still propping AIG up.
Those AIG bastards should be dropped into my father’s remote village in northeastern India and then they’ll see how many people can live a simple life without running water, electricity, or corporate products.
bloody pigs.
I’m not condoning the bailout or even begin to understand all of the complexities of the issue, but it’s been said that if AIG goes under it will destroy our financial system and also bring down the world financial system. Frightening to contemplate if it’s true.
Randy Marsh is the best.
Josh Massey
Are you an expert on this subject? Or just another conservative hoping the plan fails?
Mccool, just so you understand, there’s nothing inherently “factual” about that link. It’s called an opinion piece. Hence it’s inclusion in the “Opinion Journal”
“but capitalism is exactly what would have fixed this had it been allowed to run its course.”
Capitalism — or, more specifically, the sort of unregulated capitalism we’ve been running — is what put the company in a position where they’re so big that, if they fail, it will destroy our economy.
Or haven’t you been paying attention?
This article is weird. I understand a Rolling Stone writer aping Hunter Thompson, but why ape latter-day Hunter Thompson?
Josh: “capitalism is exactly what would have fixed this had it been allowed to run its course.”
Um, no, capitalism would have basically been destroyed, if the banks went under. But then that’s the flaw in capitalism in general. It uses variables to determine its constants. http://www.salon.com/comics/tomo/2009/03/24/tomo/index.html
mccool: “That they are so willing to trample these banker’s civil liberties should disgust and frighten everyone much, much more than bankers being, well, bankers.”
Considering they financed a President who eroded our own civil liberties, I think turnabout is fair play.
Oh, just shut the fuck up, DZ.
The amazing thing is the legs the AIG bonus thing has, it’s slightly less important than about a couple of dozen other stories about the crisis. Here’s two recent broadcasts of far more significance than the AIG shite.
http://www.npr.org/templates/story/story.php?storyId=102325715
http://www.pbs.org/wgbh/pages/frontline/tentrillion/
Check out that whole South Park episode. It’s brilliant.
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