Poor Little Rich Boys: AIG, Merrill Executives Harrassed at Home
At least they have homes to go to.
The A.I.G. executive who was nicknamed “Jackpot Jimmy” by a New York tabloid walked up the driveway toward his bay-windowed house in Fairfield, Conn., on Thursday afternoon. “How do I feel?” said the executive, James Haas, repeating the question he had just been asked. “I feel horrible. This has been a complete invasion of privacy.”
Mr. Haas walked on, his pink shirt a burst of color on a slate-gray afternoon. The words came haltingly. “You have to understand,” he said, “there are kids involved, there have been death threats. …” His voice trailed off. It looked as if he was fighting back tears.
OH BOO HOO HOO. AIG’s role in the collapse of the economy has people losing their homes and their life savings, and they have the nerve, the sheer audacity, to blame those who destroyed their nest egg. Mr. Haas: if you’re so worried about your kids, why don’t you use some of your substantial personal wealth to send them on vacation in the Caymans, the Bahamas, or one of those other wonderful Carribean islands people in your income bracket can afford to vacation?
“I didn’t have anything to do with those credit problems,” said Mr. Haas, 47. “I told Mr. Liddy” — Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G., the insurance giant — “I would rescind my retention contract.”
Yeah, well neither did poor children in Philadelphia, and until a few days ago they had to lose their pools and libraries. And even now, we have to see our taxes go up because of AIG’s fuckups. Poor babies, someone shows up at AIG executives’ houses and tells them what a bunch of fuckers they are.
He ended the conversation with a request: “Leave my neighbors alone.”
HAHAHA: his neighbors don’t like him EITHER:
Too late. Jean Wieson, who has lived down the block for 24 years, had stopped her car in front of Mr. Haas’s house before he arrived home. She was angry about the millions of dollars in bonuses paid to its executives, the credit-default swaps that brought American International Group to its knees, the $170 billion the federal government has spent to prop it up. “It makes me absolutely sick,” she said. “It’s despicable. It’s disgusting what these people have done. They should be forced to give every cent back.”
And the whining that it’s so unfair begins. Do you know what it’s like to work for AIG and to be rightfully blamed for losing everyone’s money? It’s like McCarthyism.
One A.I.G. executive, who spoke on the condition of anonymity because he feared the consequences of identifying himself, said many workers felt demonized and betrayed. “It is as bad if not worse than McCarthyism,” he said. Everyone has sacrificed the employees of A.I.G.’s financial products division, he said, “for their own political agenda.”
The anonymopus executive neglects to mention that it was the financial products division that fucked everything up, so how this is McCarthyism, defined as
politically motivated practice of making accusations of disloyalty, subversion, or treason without proper regard for evidence
…is beyond me. I’m with Jon Green, the director of Connecticut Working Families, who’s taking poor families from Bridgeport and Hartford on bus tours of the neighborhoods where these highly paid criminals and incompetents live:
“I know there’s a lot of anger and a lot of rage about what’s happened. We’re not looking to foment that unnecessarily, but what we want to do is give folks in Bridgeport and Hartford and other parts of Connecticut who are struggling and losing their homes and their jobs and their health insurance an opportunity to see what kinds of lifestyle billions of dollars in credit-default swaps can buy.”
The fact of the matter is that our elected representatives have failed in an epic fashion for years, and finally the whole house of cards has fallen down, and everyone’s been caught with their pants down. As Krugman points out, that includes the administration:
At every stage, Geithner et al have made it clear that they still have faith in the people who created the financial crisis — that they believe that all we have is a liquidity crisis that can be undone with a bit of financial engineering, that “governments do a bad job of running banks” (as opposed, presumably, to the wonderful job the private bankers have done), that financial bailouts and guarantees should come with no strings attached.
This administration, elected on the promise of change, has already managed, in an astonishingly short time, to create the impression that it’s owned by the wheeler-dealers. And that leaves it with no ability to counter crude populism.
…and having seen their elected representatives allow people like AIG to get away with murder, the people are angry, and beginning to respond to “crude populism.” Faux outrage from Congress, coupled with a disinclination to actually do anything beyond bluster, does nothing but fan the flames.
I don’t advocate violence, but I certainly approve of putting these executives and the congress that enables them in a state of fear. A Congress that fears the people responds to the people.
March 20th, 2009 at 1:30 pm
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March 21st, 2009 at 12:23 pm
check this out and be even more pissed.
March 21st, 2009 at 5:46 pm
The AIG ‘outrage’ is misdirection. The Administration and Congress aren’t afraid of the people. Not one bit. We’re not going to vote them out of office or tar and feather them.
March 22nd, 2009 at 5:00 pm
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March 23rd, 2009 at 6:56 am
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