Mar 17 2009
False Outrage: Please Stop Pretending Like You Didn’t Know What AIG Was Doing With the Money
I don’t like false modesty. Like someone recently said it’s like another form of lying, but false outrage really pisses me off. So, to watch all these politicians scrambling to show how horrified they are that AIG used $165 million of taxpayer money to dole out bonuses just really has me seeing red.
Lat I checked AIG was the company who was still having expensive junkets for their employees when they were a hairs breadth from going bankrupt…well they were bankrupt and we the people saved their asses. We own 80% of AIG. 80-freaking-%, but we have NO SAY in how the bastards spend the money. And please, I don’t want to hear the argument about how it’s only 1% of the total money they received. Ask the American public what they could do with that 1% and then tell me it’s a drop in the bucket.
This is the problem with partial nationalization. They get all the money they want, while still being able to make the decisions. This is why you nationalize insolvent institutions. You take them over, wipe out the shareholders, fire the management, strip them down and sell them back. That way there are no expensive junkets and million dollar bonuses going to people who ran the company into the ground.
If Obama wants to be the next FDR or at the very least live up to his “Change” mantra, the he will get with the program and stop throwing our good money after bad.
Also, the outrage over these bonuses is good and dandy and all - but what about the talk about how AIG spent our money we gave them. They essentially booked billions of dollars overseas, to bail out other global banks. This was announced the same day as the bonuses were, but we only hear about the bonuses in the MSM.
I think we need to open our minds to new ways of thinking about essential industry, nationalization is so unpopular because it’s what people call ‘government control’. Well, if we actually had a democracy then what we would be talking about wouldn’t be called nationalization but democratization of a previously privately held corporation to a now publicly owned and democratically operated industry. I know language such as that is not welcome in the American lexicon. But desperate times call for rational measures.