why do you guys have such a tough time wrapping your mind around the fact that its a company with almost 120,000 employees and god only knows how many independent divisions with countless VP's in each?

When he die, sure will go to heaven...

I also don't get why the people who want AIG employees to work for free, or for below market wages, ranted and raved about UAW workers having to take cuts in order for GM to get government help.

Like I said, I'm a liberal, but the populist hypocrisy has got to stop.

If you're pissed off about the government bailing out banks and AIG, then you also have to be pissed off about the programs that allow people who are behind on their house payments to avoid foreclosure.

You can't have it both ways.

I personally sympathize with him and what he said. First, the "problem" is one small division of a massive company and anyone that works for the whole company suddenly has AIDS.

Second... the "problem" isn't AIG and "AIG" wasn't the only one paying employees retention bonuses and all the other banks, VP's, CEO's etc slipped quietly under the radar because it wasn't politically convenient to attack them to direct attention away from everything else going on

Very true.

Sadly, we can't be sure that this is really the case.

As someone who has owned construction companies, I've seen many occasions where tradesmen cover each other's ass. They are more loyal to each other than to the owners.

We can't be sure the guys still there aren't trying to keep the mistakes and crimes hidden. In fact, the only smart thing is to assume they are.

The old workers should be court ordered and removed, and cleanup and investigative teams brought in.

And this helps the taxpayers and the economy how?

AIG needs to be broken down and sold....then the proceeds from the sale can be paid to the Treasury. Anything that delays or hinders that is just political theater or people wanting their pound of flesh....which might make some people feel better for about 2 minutes but won't do anything to get the taxpayers their money back or fix the economy moving forward.

Also, FWIW, the government doesn't have the authority to do what you're suggesting. The Obama administration has asked congress to give it that authority, but they don't currently have it.

Also, nobody at AIG did anything illegal. They did alot of stupid things but none of it was against the law. If it didn't pose systemic risk to the whole system, they'd just let it go bankrupt like any other business that made bad bets....but after what happened with Lehman, they decided an orderly wind down of the business was in everyone's best interest....but that doesn't mean they get to go in and tell people they're not getting paid or they're taking back money they made before or investigating people or shit like that.

That's ridiculous.

Snake Doctor, do you understand when your cat talks to you?

Hi there, I was wondering when you'd get home from school.

Are the street lights on yet?

executive vice president of the American International Group?s financial products unit

and he had no idea they were setting up for disaster?

or he didnt care as he was focused on getting his money

I read the letter and he makes some good points. Here is my opinion on this.

1. I have been in this guys situation (to some degree) in the past. I worked for a company that had several different divisions. The division I worked in was profitable and did well for the company. However two others were poorly ran and the sales team overestimated the amount of the units that would be sold. To meet the assumed demand the company ramped up production and hired a lot of people as well as purchasing the machines and tools these people needed to work. What came of it was a few warehouses full of product and no buyers. So the company spent a ton of money making a product they now were having trouble selling. That division along with another one drove the company into losses for the year. Twice a year they gave out bonuses and on this particular year they didn't because of the losses of those two divisions. No the bonuses were not guaranteed, but still everyone assumed we would get them and we were told by management that we would get them. Then we didn't

It happens. If the company fails you may get screwed. How many people who worked for Enron and had nothing to do with their downfall got fucked over? The ship was sinking and he decided to trust them and stay on and got the shaft.

2. If he wants to leave, let him leave. As someone else said this is a global company with around 120,000 employees. Does he assume that there is nobody else out there who can do his job? If the government hadn't stepped in with a bailout he would have been out of the job and no bonus because there would be no company. I understand him wanting to make a living, no problem, but tough times call for tough measures.

3. They should offer these people stock instead of bonuses. Sell the on the fact that the stock is at around $1, but just 2 years ago it was at around $70. Give them a ton of shares and tell them if they can just get it back up to $8-$10 they will be very rich. If they have that option ahead of them they may be willing to stay on work for next to nothing with the prospect of making a ton of money as the company rebounds.

We agree that AIG needs to be taken apart and resold.

An investigative takeover helps the taxpayers and the economy by giving one of the major things lacking in this situation - an objective picture of what happened and is happening.

I also agree that the government doesn't have the legal mechanism AT THIS TIME to do an investigative takeover.

However, thats simply a matter of legislative will. And it makes more sense than the idiotic show of taxing the bonuses 100%.

To get back to what I will say is my main point - what is most lacking, and most needed, is a objective picture of exactly what it is we bought when we handed out all this free money to the financial corporations.

How can we trust any of these institutions now?

I read the letter you posted, and my first response is, WHY should I believe a word of it? Or care, even if it's true?

AIG is huge, I get it. Many employees, I get it... global corporation, I get that too.

What I don't get is a VP of financial products division within the AIG family... the vice-president, second-in-command of that division has never even exchanged an email or a teleconference with his bosses, boss? or bosses, bosses, boss depending on their org structure? Liddy was put in power 6 months ago and they have never spoke?

This man wasn't a fucking mailboy in the basement somewhere.

It seems maybe this lack of communication was due to a high-level exec waiting out his time as he squeezed out a few more million before getting axed.

Here's an article from Matt Taibbi that sums up a perspective (my perspective certainly) on this Jake DeSantis' letter.

It's from alternet so the republican whiners should avert their eyes - it's too much for your girlish sensibilities.

http://www.alternet.org/mediaculture...t/?page=entire

Here's an excerpt with the salient points. Later in the article he busts down that idiotic plumber metaphor, so it might be worth your while to click the link just to read that.

================

Like a lot of people, I read Wednesday's New York Times editorial by former AIG Financial Products employee Jake DeSantis, whose resignation letter basically asks us all to reconsider our anger toward the poor overworked employees of his unit.
DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano's toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn't even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn't, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.

I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.

AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years, a very large part of that money coming from the sale of credit default protection. Doing the math, that averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.

Ask yourself this question: If your company made that much money, and the boss of the unit made almost $280 million in just a few years, exactly how likely is it that you wouldn't know where that money was coming from?

Are we supposed to believe that Jake DeSantis knew nothing about Joe Cassano's CDS deals? If your boss and the top guys in your firm were all making a killing selling anything at all -- whether it was rubber kayaks, generic Levitra or credit default swaps -- you really wouldn't bother to find out what that thing they were selling was? You'd really just mind your own business, sit at your cubicle and put your faith in the guys up top to fill you in if there was something you needed to know?

This would be a believable claim for an employee of some other wing of AIG, a company with well over 100,000 employees. But DeSantis works for tiny, 377-person AIGFP, a unit that had only two offices -- one in London and one in Greenwich, Conn.

And we're talking about financial professionals, the most shameless group of tirelessly envious gossips ever to walk the face of the earth. The likelihood that Cassano would pull in $280 million for himself, and his equally greedy, hopelessly jealous employees wouldn't know not only exactly how he made that money but every last ugly detail about his life -- from what skank he's sleeping with to what side of his trousers he hangs on -- is almost zero.

I know plenty of people who work in this world, and I've met very few who didn't hate with every cell in their bodies anyone in their own companies who made more money than they did or got bigger bonuses at Christmastime. Gossiping about each others' bonuses, and bitching about each others' compensation, is the national pastime for these people.

So forgive me if I don't buy this story that poor Jake and his buddies didn't know about Cassano's CDS business.

Also, there's this: let's just say, Jake, that you're telling the truth, that you don't know anything about this toxic portfolio. If that's the case, then why the fuck does anyone need to retain you at an exorbitant salary to help unwind that very portfolio? If these transactions aren't and never were your expertise, then where the hell is your value here?

When I spoke to Christine Pretto, the AIG spokeswoman, and asked about those bonuses, she said that AIG needed to retain people like you in order to take advantage of your "knowledge of these transactions." So if you don't have knowledge of these transactions, what are you being paid for? Your winning attitude?

Then there's the matter of Jake's other job offers. About that: It was apparent as early as last February that Cassano had basically destroyed not only the unit but perhaps AIG itself. The company announced over $11 billion in losses around that time.

If I'm Jake DeSantis, and I'm really innocent, I'm looking for a job that very instant. And I'm taking the first good job anyone offers me. Because by then I'd have realized that I was working for the latest version of Enron. That the man I've been working for the last six or seven years has turned out to be one of the most irresponsible Wall Street villains of all time, a man who single-handedly destroyed the 18th-largest company in the world. If I'm Jake DeSantis, I'm quitting out of moral disgust, because I don't want to be associated with this kind of behavior.

The only reason I'd stay is if I didn't have a choice. Which I feel sure is what happened here. If Jake DeSantis didn't take advantage of an opportunity to get a better job elsewhere with a company that didn't hide billions in losses and make $500 billion bets with money they didn't have, that's his fucking problem.

The notion that I the taxpayer have to pay this asshole a million-dollar bonus because he turned down a better job at a less-guilty company is repugnant to begin with; the notion that he stayed at AIGFP because he expected me to pay him this bonus makes me hate him even more.

But it's all moot, because I feel quite sure it's a lie. As one trader for another firm told me not long ago when I asked what he thought about the need to pay these "retention bonuses" to these "valued employees" at AIGFP:

"Yeah, right. Who would hire these guys? They'd stay for a dollar if you offered it to them, much less a million."

I mean, half of Wall Street is unemployed right now. There are plenty of unemployed traders out there whose resumes don't include such entries as "Worked for years at small unit of AIG that helped destroy the universe; throughout that time was completely ignorant of burgeoning global disaster unfolding 5 feet from my desk."


==============

good post

well said cuts thru the bullshit

I would have kept my million dollar bonus and my letter would have went like this..


Dear taxpayers....

Hahahahahaha. Ha. Haha. Ha. Thanks for the cash bitches...


- Jew cat

You can blame anyone you want for this, but the truth is at the end of the day all of us are to blame. If you bought, sold, or borrowed against a house in the past five years, your guilty.

It doesn't cut through anything, it's just more populist rhetoric that ignores the facts and reality of the situation and replaces them with "you should have known something was wrong and I think you're lying, and btw you're an asshole"

I could go through that letter point by point and show the egregious flaws in logic and twisting of the facts to suit the author's purpose, but that would be a total waste of my time because at the end of the day, most people want someone to be pissed off at, need to have someone to blame for all of this, and logic and reason apparently can't stand up to populist outrage these days.

I'm just happy that the guy in charge today is a cool headed person who is interested in facts and rational argument, not populist outrage.

You're right, the populist outrage of these guys getting taxpayers money in their sinking ship of a company is so uncalled for.

Once again, your extensive vocabulary and use of million dollar words can't save you Lenny..

Pay the bonuses and move on its the right thing to do :2 cents:

Yeah, that.

Reading that letter made me sad.

Welp I think this sums it up right here:

"None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house."

Heh... like all good scams - where are the people who started this boondoggle? Long gone from AIG I suppose... but where are they now?

No it was sending jobs overseas and wall st fucking leveraging 35 to 1. No one buys a house to lose it. It started before all this fell to shit. I was getting more and more girls who never worked in adult. Had real office jobs and were laid off and couldn't find other work that paid enough to cover their bills. And if you think this guy from AIG had to no clue to whats going on, your playing with yourself,he worked in their financial services diversion.The same diversion that help create this mess and he knew nothing? That's funny. What Im learning from all of this there isnt really right wing and or left wing media its all corporate media. Thats where everyone gets its all our fault and they hear so many times they believe it. Do the math 500 billion would buy up all the bad loans in this country and they have spent how many trillions to date? It was 35 to 1 leveraging, they know this and dont want to give the true number to the american people because they would shit themselves.

The guy said he was raised by schoolteachers, and went to MIT on scholarship, so I don't think he was belittling teachers and nurses or anything.

That alternet article had some good points on the overall issue, but what person A is responsible in a 377 person company and what person B is responsible for are pretty different. If the point is that it is wrong to feel sympathy for anyone who has ever done better than oneself financially, that kinda seems like spitting on the American dream, given that this particular AIG guy claims to have pulled himself up by his bootstraps and nobody seems to be disputing his backstory.

Dont you understand these scumbags almost collapsed the financial industry? How about all the people that dont have millions who got laid off or lost everything because of these guys actions.

In big business, although it may be nice to have a card which says VP, there are generally many vice presidents, so no specific one is likely to be second in command. From what those articles say the division called "financial products" did not handle the products which nearly sank (and probably should have sunk) the company.

It is like people who do not work in online adult do not understand what someone who is primarily an affiliate means when they say they do not run "sites". Yes, of course they have sites by the definition of the word, but industry people know they mean they do not have membership sites. Yes, of course insuring banks for their poorly-considered loans might be considered a financial service, but that is clearly not what people in that industry mean by it.

I think the point of that op ed to the NYT is that the scumbags who almost collapsed the specific financial industry are escaping in their gold parachutes and leaving non-scumbags taking the blame for others' misdeeds.

Yeah he made millions,mit grad but had no idea what was going on.

So.... where then are all those people responsible for "the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung AIG"?

This whole thing seems just a little bit like postwar Germany in 1945 wherein all the Nazi's seemed to have mysteriously disappeared.

Whether or not he took time out of his 12 hour workdays to check on what other divisions were doing, why is what somebody else did his fault? What should he have done instead?

Wouldn't it make more sense to penalize the people, particularly the managers, in the divisions which actually presided over the disastrous stuff?

Wouldn't it make more sense to penalize entities like Bank of America who grandstanded to get bailout money and claim they can't figure out what they did with it, when they are bankers, so their whole job is to track money?

Funny the way that works. They are all saying it was basically one guy. Yeah I believe that.

hmmmmmmmmm

You're doing the same thing the guy with the second letter did, using emotional arguments to divert attention away from the facts.

Let's make the argument about guys getting bonuses with taxpayer money and say that Snake Doctor doesn't understand what's going on so he uses "big confusing words" to obfuscate. (Yes that last word was put there because I love irony)

At the end of the day, and this is fact, nobody "in the know" disputes this.....if those people weren't kept on staff, by using the retention bonuses, the taxpayers would have lost more money.
It would take months and months for auditors to figure everything out in order to complete a sale (and there is a time value on money), and it's very very likely that the sale price of those assets would be lower.
They need people there who know what's going on in order to facilitate the sale of the different divisions/assets.

So you can burn AIG to the ground, and your $200 billion or so along with it, or you can live with these guys getting bonuses, and get a large portion of that $200 billion back.
You can take a bite of a shit sandwich or you can drown in a shit storm.

Unfortunately I can hear most of you saying "take that bitch" to your face, while you cut off your nose.

Let's try it this way.

Let's fire everyone at AIG. Every single one of them, with no severance.....let's not even let them collect unemployment insurance.

Now that we all feel better, let's talk about that 200 billion dollars we gave that company.
The only way we can get that back is to sell the assets and the profitable divisions of the company. Of course to do that, we're going to need some people working there to keep the company open.
If it's 100% closed, then it's out of business, the contracts and policies are null and void, no premiums are being collected, and there's nothing to sell.

So now we have to hire some people, but what are we going to pay them with? The company is bankrupt, being kept afloat by the government because if it collapses all at once it'll wreak havoc on the financial system the way Lehman did.
So I guess we're going to have to hire some people and pay them with the money the government gave us.

Of course, how are we going to hire qualified people when they know this is only a temporary job? They know the company is being broken apart and sold so this job won't last very long. How do you get them to leave the job they're at, that's permanent, to come work here temporarily?

Oh, oh, I know, let's offer them a healthy bonus payment that they'll get once the job is done.

So now, we all feel better that we fired everyone at AIG and really stuck it to them. Then we had to hire people with taxpayer money who didn't know what was going on, give them time to figure out what was going on, so they could sell the pieces....all the while pumping billions into the company to keep it afloat while these new people figured out where the toner was........and then once they sold the pieces and wound the company down, we could pay them the bonus that we didn't want to give to the people who were already there.

So it costs $300 billion to feel better, and it costs $200 billion to live with things the way they are.

Yeah fuck it, let's fire everyone. :rollseyes

That letter is bogus and more for the press...he is lucky he is not in prison. Sorry he had to give back his $700,000 bonus, but most people take 30 years to make that some of money. I have no sympathey for him at all, especially living in NY where the middle class cannot survive. You need to be poor (so you can live off the government) or Rich (so you don't have to give a fuck).

In my opinion only doctors are worth big money.

Wow, some people are really dense. Nobody pays attention to detail, it's no wonder so many people thought Obama was a Muslim during the campaign.

1) Why should be be in prison? He had nothing to do with the credit default swap business that bankrupted the company, and
1a) Nothing the CDS division did was illegal. It was stupid to be sure, but not illegal

2) He didn't have to give back his bonus. He is choosing to give it to charity.

3) What difference does it make how much he earns compared to other people? The guy went to MIT and rose to the level of corporate VP. You think he should get paid the same as a garbage collector?

4) Nobody is forcing anyone to live in New York. This is a free country, you can move to wherever you want to.

You've misunderstood this whole thing so many times in one paragraph I'm amazed you were able to type that many words without passing out.

As you see my post is out of anger and frustration over AIG and the whole bailout.

#1 I would have voted for obama if he was green = we need any type of change...and mccain that mummy would have put me to sleep watching his speaches.

#2 Fuck charity...give the money back...american tax payers now need charity.

#3 I don't care what prestigious college he went to...where they breed nerds...he is no better than a garbage collector. Why cause he got a piece of paper and was taught how to do his job.

4# Free where? Last I remembered you can't just buy land and live off it. Something called taxes. and you are going to see less freedom in america, with survalience cameras, etc. In this country you can be sued for anything...how is that freedom?

5# I would love to move to Cali, or even Japan...but in 1910 my relatves settled in NYC so....

I do enjoy your posts, but I am pissed with my money being taken left and right.

What change ?

One team of crooks has just been replaced by another team of crooks. You have a black man who talks pretty but its just the same old .. there has been no change, and some say this group of crooks is possibly worse than the last lot.

again I could sit through one liars speech, but would not have been able to sit through the other liars speech. no other candidates were available...and had enough access to crooked money.

We all are, and that's understandable, but to say things like "this person deserves to go to jail" and "that person doesn't deserve to get paid for their work" and shit like that is stupid.

Congress trying to retroactively tax people at a 90% rate in order to make angry people happy is pretty stupid also.

Everybody seems to want their pound of flesh and most people don't realize the crisis isn't over yet, and this thing could still get a whole lot worse.
As I said earlier, thankfully the person in charge these days is a cool headed logical thinker who isn't prone to knee jerk overreactions (remember the gas tax holiday? drill baby drill?) so I think we'll be all right as long as he can keep folks like the State AG's on a leash. :2 cents:

Amelia, don't argue with them. Their minds aren't big enough.
They think anyone who's done better than they have either cheated, got lucky, or had rich parents. They also think the evil rich don't pay enough taxes and that, any time the evil rich get screwed, they deserve it.


They're trash. Let them go. :winkwink: