The chief executive officer of AIG – a company which received billions of dollars in federal bailout money – says anger over the bonuses paid out to his employees with borrowed tax dollars was the result of public ignorance.
In fact AIG CEO Robert Benmosche compares this ignorant anger to … wait for it … the mentality of Deep South lynch mobs.
The campaign against the AIG bonuses “was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that – sort of like what we did in the Deep South,” the Brooklyn, New York native told The Wall Street Journal this week.
Wait … huh? Did this guy seriously just say that? Did he really just equate the extralegal murder of blacks in the Deep South with the contempt expressed toward the beneficiaries of taxpayer-funded bailouts?
Yes … yes he did. In fact Benmosche specifically said what happened to his fellow bailout recipients was “just as bad and just as wrong” as what happened to the victims of the lynch mobs.
“It is a shame we put them through that,” Benmosche said of his bonus recipients.
Astounding … if there were any justice in the world, somebody would show this tanfastic asshat what the end result of an old school Deep South lynching looks like.
Anyway … this website addressed these bonuses back in 2009, arguing that while they were “exorbitant, undeserved and wholly unjustified,” the real villain was the bailout culture itself.
“A self-respecting company would have taken capitalism’s judgment standing up, not begging the taxpayers to pick up the tab for their fiscal mismanagement and inability to compete,” we wrote.
We also wrote extensively on government’s starring role in the sub-prime mortgage debacle …
16 comments
I suppose if he gets lynched now, it won’t bother him since it isn’t any worse than what he’s been through already.
Dude needs to put on some sun screen every once in a while.
What he needs to do is to implant a couple of horns on each side of his head, add a tail, and swallow a couple of gallons of red dye #2.
TBG thinks he’s waaaaay ahead of you on the Red Dye #2.
Just make sure you use the kosher product.
– sort of like what we did in the Deep South,” the Brooklyn, New York native told The Wall Street Journal this week.
“We” who, Yankee?
The proper response might be, “I think it more like the rape, pillage, house/city burning committed by us Northerners in the Deep South.”
Like your user name – SPLC thinks everyone not like them is evil.
BINGO!
AIG bonuses. The free market at work. Right Sic Willie?
Not that anything is much of a free market, with even interest rates being manipulated, but in this case AIG being bailed out clearly made the whole affair as far from “free market” as possible.
Instead, it was one giant exercise in moral hazard-while they briefly provided some cover for the big banks who porbably committed fraud in bankrupting AIG to start…but really it wouldn’t matter if we had a free market because they wouldn’t have realized enough from AIG(let alone the taxpayers) to solve their woes anyway.
Crony capitalism run amok…no free market anywhere in sight.
AIG bonuses. The free market at work. Right Sic Willie?
*snort*
You’re better than this, CNSYD.
He looks like the Most Interesting Man in the World’s brother.
Extralegal lynchings?
Shows you don’t get the point, either.
There’s nothing more pitiful than watching some multi millionaire crying over his burdens.Tis a shame indeed,
This is the same Big Business Democrats rail against in public but cater to under the table. Remember John Kerry bailed this same folks out when they bilked Massachusetts!