AIG employees make the case for letting them go bankrupt
by Chris in Paris on 3/04/2010 11:25:00 PM
What a bunch of arrogant, self-serving, ungrateful jerks. There's no sense of appreciation for the fact that their entire company - bonuses, salaries, insurance, etc - was saved by taxpayers who were already in trouble due to AIG's behavior. Screw your contracts folks. What kind of contract would they have had if the company no longer existed? The unemployment line doesn't pay quite as well. They still have no idea how angry the rest of the country really is.
But behind closed doors, employees at AIG's Financial Products division -- the very unit whose trading had hastened the insurance giant's collapse -- were defiant, saying they were merely getting what they were due, recoiling at public accusations that they were behind their capitalizing on the company's massive taxpayer bailout.
"I will stand behind every action I have taken in this company from Day One," one employee said, according to a newly obtained transcript of a conference call the division's head held last March with some of his staff.
But when another employee asked whether the staff would be getting a second round of bonuses promised for March 2010, his colleagues burst into laughter, apparently considering this a preposterous notion amid the public outrage.
But of course, those bonuses will be paid after all. None of the pampered Wall Street types felt very much of the financial pain they inflicted on the rest of the world so it's no wonder they have such a sense of entitlement. Not letting more companies fall or at least trashing every last contract before taking them over remains a major mistake of both the Bush and Obama administrations.