You know what you get when you mix the arrogance of Simon Cowell, the incompetence and obliviousness of Paula Abdul, and the tone deafness of William Hung?
During the national furor that erupted last year after American International Group paid more than $165 million in bonuses, the voices of those vilified for receiving the payments remained silent, at least in public.
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.
***The employees said that the corporate leaders who had driven the firm into the ground were already gone from the company. Those who had remained behind to help clean up the mess and repay the taxpayer bailout were due their compensation, they told Pasciucco.
“You made a commitment to us, and we made a commitment to you. And for anybody to look beyond that, as the politics and the media are at the moment, is missing the point,” said an employee. “You can’t expect us to just roll over and ignore that commitment because there is a bunch of immoral bigots that intend us to do something different. It’s not going to happen.”
Another was even more irate, lashing out at the public for scapegoating AIG employees. “To be honest with you, I really hope it blows up. I think the U.S. taxpayer deserves to lose a trillion dollars over this thing for the way they have behaved.”
The worst usage of the word “bigot” in the history of spoken language.
Seriously. Quit. Everyone of you who feels betrayed, just quit. Take it away, Bradrocket:
My general reaction: Just quit, you assholes. Try taking around your résumés to other firms if you’re so convinced in your own inflated sense of self-worth. But this is just a guess — when you go in for an interview with another company, having five years’ experience of selling credit default swaps in AIG’s Financial Products division isn’t going to help you get a job. Shit, I wouldn’t hire you to vacuum my rugs or take out my garbage. Because in the end I don’t think that you guys possess any real skills that are useful outside of your own little bubble world.
Also, like the Bradrocket, any donations to paypal will be split evenly to save the banksters. Not.
4tehlulz
Maybe AIG should change its name to BAW.
Pangloss
Sometimes I like to dance real slow in my underwear in front of the mirror and imagine AIG Financial Products Division employees insulting me with an audible sense of entitlement in their voices.
Comrade Dread
I made a commitment to not care so much about massive Wall St. salaries and bonuses (despite my own increasingly stagnant middle class income), and a commitment not to complain about bank policies, and a commitment to holding free market principles, with the expectation that banks and their employees would make a commitment to abide by existing laws, look out for the best long term interests of their companies, and give a shit about how their actions influenced society.
Since you broke your side of the social bargain, fuck you. Regulate the hell out them, Democrats.
Chyron HR
Oh, shit, I think they’re Going Galt! You hippies have done it now!
Comrade javafascist
I wish I shared Brad’s conviction these titans of making really bad bets on pieces of paper would not find work but they’ll land on their feet, making obscene loads of cash because they know the right people and go to the right clubs. The meritocracy is teh awesome. And we are all so lucky to have them skimming the scream off the top instead of going Galt on us. Thank you, oh geniuses of wall street.
Ed Drone
@Chyron HR:
Oh, please, oh, please. I can help them pack! When do they leave? I’ll call the cab!
Ed
The Moar You Know
The only commitment I can ever recall making to AIG was to not saw their heads off and place them on pikes in front of the White House, and that’s more of a “human decency” thing than a “business” thing.
Banksters better wrap their heads around the real terms of their employment with a quickness. If you lose some peon’s life savings you might end up paying with your life.
eemom
not quite true. One of them wrote a whiny-ass op ed which the NYT saw fit to publish.
bemused
Two year olds who never grew up seem be the norm in the bankster trading biz.
drkrick
I’m all for Bradrocket’s take on this, but is that really how the rest of the industry sees the matter? Given the self pity that’s been attributed to some of the other banksters (Jamie Dimon comes to mind), I don’t know why we should expect a resume with a stint at AIG to be the career-killer it ought to be.
I continue to make a standing offer to manage any financial services institution into insolvency for only 10% of whatever they’re paying their current management to do it. I mean really, do these people think it would even be possible to find someone to do a worse job at any price?
JGabriel
If I could afford it I’d hire the AIG guys to clean toilets, but only for the joy of mocking and belittling them.
.
freelancer
OT- Sheesh, but is Breitbart not a panic-stricken rabid ferret on meth?
eemom
oh, and by the way……pitchforks. And guillotines. Now.
Zifnab
Are you kidding? No one is going to quit so long as these bitches keep getting paid.
That’s the true bottom line here. AIG is staffed with incompetent entitled brats. In a company that needed a $180 billion payday loan, you’d think we would be seeing more turn-over. Instead, everyone gets a giant high five and a sack of cash because the company has successfully performed a dead-cat bounce.
They’ll whine and they’ll scream and they’ll throw their toys, but they’re never going to leave if you keep giving them ice cream.
Mark S.
Do these two sentences make sense together?
blah, blah, blah. And
Why do they need to pay retention bonuses if they are winding the fucking thing down? And how long does it take to wind one fricking division? They should be in fucking bankruptcy court, and while that can be a long process, these assholes sure as hell wouldn’t still have a job.
DonkeyKong
Well with their pathology if they were not at AIG, they’d be chopping up hookers in the back of a widowless van. So that’s kind of a good defense of sorts.
dr. bloor
They should shut up, lest someone decide to fly a plane into their building as well.
FormerSwingVoter
How would it not be an improvement if every single one of these guys were shot in the face with a harpoon gun?
Arclite
And now for something completely different:
Dogs at 1000FPS. Yeah, it’s a dog food commercial, but it’s pretty cool, nonetheless.
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=mUCRZzhbHH0
Rommie
@drkrick: That was my reaction as well. Knowing how the process works is more important to the Employer than whether or not you were any good at said process. It wouldn’t surprise me one bit if any ex-AIG people find it easy to land somewhere else.
It’s more valuable to have the experience of driving a car (being a banker insider) than how well you drive one (set the bank’s money on fire), so Toonces keeps getting hired to drive.
drkrick
Banksters better wrap their heads around the real terms of their employment with a quickness.
Actually, we better understand the real terms of our employment. We can’t touch these people. If the wake of 2008 wasn’t enough to see some of them jailed, it’s over. The country is being run by extreme wealth, with strategic deployment and hate and fear to ensure that the populace is distracted enough to keep in line. We’re past the point of no return, and the only way out will be a catastrophic collapse, after which the surviving wealthy will decamp to some other functional country leaving us proles to
clean uplive with the wreckage.But you should hear me on a day when I’m pessimistic.
Rick Massimo
Hmm. I was under the impression that AIG employees were U.S. taxpayers. Thanks for clearing that up.
OK, seriously, Mr. Indignant AIG Guy, here’s the deal: Go ahead. Do whatever you want. Pay yourself whatever you want. Go Galt. Whatever.
You know who else is going Galt? Me.
I’m going Galt from the high-rolling investment world that it has become an article of American faith that we’re supposed to all get into.
This expansion of the stock market over the past 20 years? It’s because more people got involved in investing. Because they thought it was safe. It isn’t, so fuck it. No stocks. No “financial products” (a euphemism to make you feel better about the fact that you don’t produce anything). No contributions to my 401k. Nothing. T-bills, maybe. That’s it. See how much money you “make” without people forehosing money into your pockets.
Yeah, that’s what I thought.
artem1s
we need a ‘let them eat cake’ tag for this shit. Srsly, have any of these goons ever read A Tale of Two Cities?
josephdietrich
Lamp posts, nooses. Are they as ignorant of history as they are of ethics?
Rick Taylor
__
I may have this wrong, but I thought the people who made that commitment to you were the former people who ran the company into the ground. We’re not them, we’re the American taxpayers, who came along after the fact because we were informed if we didn’t we’d be experiencing great-depression two. I don’t see why we should be responsible for someone else’s commitment to you.
__
But then I think that applies to Goldman Sachs even more than it does to you; and they got 100 cents on the dollar.
burnspbesq
@eemom:
Umm, you do realize that at some point these torch-and-ptichfork types are going to figure out that the Goldmans and AIGs of the world can’t do what they do without lawyers – right? And that “wait, I had nothing to do with the bad stuff – I’m just a lowly (insert name of specialty) lawyer” isn’t likely to be a winning argument.
Riding the tiger carries a non-trivial risk of becoming tiger food.
Tom65
The idea that they’re lucky to even have a fucking job just never enters their conciousness, does it?
No Joy in Mudville
I’d like to believe that to be true, but somehow I doubt it. How else can one explain the way failed CEOs move seamlessly from one failure to another never unemployed for long? There are a number of positions in the US economy today that don’t seem sensitive to performance. What matters is better a member of the club.
Think of financial world execs who helped trash the system and then move into government positions, ostensibly to fix what they’ve just wrecked.
And this isn’t something new. It’s been going on for years.
Mark S.
Sorry, but this just brings this up in my mind:
We’ve entered into a sacred trust with these cocksuckers.
eemom
@burnspbesq:
speak fer yerself, Counselor — my practice is LIMITED to widows & orphans.
Corner Stone
@Comrade javafascist:
Damn right.
This is not a blip on their resume it’s a golden key to their next job.
The government isn’t going to punish or regulate these banksters not even one little bit so the same dirty shit is still being pulled – but probably called something new and innovative now.
Potential new employers will see that these people cleared $XXX millions of dollars by doing this innovation and the company had $XXX billions in revenue or cash flow or whatever, and they will salivate to hire this douchebags at millions a year plus bonus plus the blood of virgins if that’s what it takes.
Anyone who thinks these guys give a shit or are scared or shamed or will ever suffer the slightest bit in *actual reality* is crazy. Sure, they’ll whine about being disliked but then they’ll take the helicopter to their $8,000,000 3rd home.
PurpleGirl
(Haven’t read the comments yet…but)
The reason they don’t just quit is that there aren’t very many companies that do what they were doing. They ain’t gonna get another job very quickly and they’re cowards who don’t what to go without salary and benefits. Screw their damn bonuses… they should be grateful to still jobs.
In a comment in another thread a few days ago I detailed the various mergers that got Chase to being the company it is now — five companies are now one. That line of mergers entailed a lot of layoffs and positions being cut over a 15-20 year period. The AIG folks know that the jobs aren’t out there.
Makewi
Yeah! You tell em. Legal contracts don’t mean shit if you have an angry mob or government employee who says otherwise.
Mnemosyne
@Mark S.:
That’s actually the only part that makes sense. If you’re closing a division but you need people to wind it down, most companies will pay bonuses to the people who agree to stay rather than going out immediately to find a new job. That way, they’re not trying to do it with a skeleton crew or with a bunch of contract workers.
Otherwise, you end up doing stupid shit like my former company who announced to the warehouse staff that the warehouse was being closed and moved to Tennessee in three months, laid off the entire warehouse staff, and brought in temps to run things until the move was done. It was pretty much exactly as much of a clusterfuck as it sounds.
Mnemosyne
@Makewi:
This from the same person who was calling for legal UAW contracts to be broken when GM was going under?
I guess it’s only illegal to break contracts with rich people. Poor people with contracts can get bent.
Makewi
@Mnemosyne:
You have an active imagination. Provide a link to me saying that.
kay
@Makewi:
Because they wouldn’t have had jobs, let alone bonuses, had the taxpayers not propped them up. If AIG had failed, they would have lost all of it.
UAW understood this basic fact. Why can’t the Titans of Finance?
Because they’ve been coddled and stroked for 20 years. They’re not paid on merit. Who are we kidding here? They tanked their whole sector.
They suck at this job.
Mark S.
@Mnemosyne:
Good point. But also, didn’t the govt already pay off everything AIG owed to the banks? I’m not clear on what these guys are doing.
Makewi
UAW got paid first. You will get no argument from me that they should have lost their jobs, or absent that, that as a condition of the bailout the bonuses were off the table.
Which is not the way it happened. In fact, those giving AIG the bailout cash knew about the bonuses. It was only when the angry mob became aware that it became something that the government was concerned with.
asiangrrlMN
@Rick Massimo: I agree with you. I made no commitment to these asshats. I had no say in the matter. However, I do think they all will end up in clover in five years, which really fucking sucks.
kay
@Makewi:
Oh, baloney.
UAW renegotiated contracts, facing reality, like big boys and girls.
The crybabies in finance stood around whining a lot. They have done nothing but whine. Have any of these geniuses offered one solution, one concession, one admission without a federal order? Nope. They take personal responsibility for nothing. Unless federal government orders them to take a reasonable deal, they won’t even consider a pay cut. They’re the polar opposite of what they pretend to be. They need CONSTANT federal babysitting.
AIG almost brought down the whole financial system. They want credit for sticking around to fix the mess they made?
They are hoping the taxpayers lose money because their feelings are hurt?
“We’ll show you, generous taxpayers! We’ll tank our own sector AGAIN”
How old are these people? Twelve?
Gary K
Just to remind everybody of the incredible sum of money forked over to AIG in the October 2008 bailout: 85 billion dollars. In effect, each man, woman, and child in the country handed over $280 to these guys.
Tax Analyst
To top things off, I just recently saw an article about plans for “new investment vehicles” that sounded a whole lot like the old investment vehicles that just threw the world economy into the toilet. I wish I could remember what they were called because I couldn’t find it when I googled.
Sorry to be so vague – I’m sort of hoping someone else who might have seen it could point us in the right direction.
CS Lewis Jr.
Someone just start shooting these assholes in the head. Snipers, where are you?
Island in Alabama
@artem1s:
Thanks to Rush I think it’s now “let them eat applesauce”
Makewi
They shouldn’t have been bailed out at all kay. Either of them. I do like your assertion that UAW renegotiated their deal, as if this sort of thing was just commonplace, when in fact by the normal order of things they would have been much lower in the pecking order to get theirs.
Reality777
Let me fix that for you:
It was only when citizens pointed out the lunacy of the undeserved bonuses to their clueless, paid-off Legislators that it became something that the government was concerned with.
postmodernprimate
We own 80% of AIG, hired the current CEO and paid out huge retention bonuses to have this company safely wound down but our CEO has decided to publicly mock us, re-open the derivatives book and throw all our chips down for a couple spins at the roulette wheel.
Respek.