Matt Taibbi is becoming my favorite writer. He follows up his earlier article on Rolling Stone about AIG with another entertaining piece. And of course, he takes the credit for the best review of Thomas Friedman's "The world is flat".
http://www.alternet.org/workplace/133627/aig_exec_whines_about_public_anger,_and_now_we're_supposed_to_pity_him_yeah,_right/ ----------------------------------------------------------snip AIG exec Jake DeSantis's NY Times letter asking for us to chill out about his poor overworked employees is a sick joke. "I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down." via Op-Ed Contributor - "Dear A.I.G., I Quit!" - NYTimes.com 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 that 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? -raghu. -- milli-helen: The amount of beauty required to launch one ship. _______________________________________________ pen-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.csuchico.edu/mailman/listinfo/pen-l
