In the New York Times. Long and good, but something stands out.
The writer, one Jake Desantis, asserts - quite correctly - that not everyone at AIG is resopnsible for the meltdown of the company; not all of those executives who got the bonuses were involved with the sale of the credit-default swaps which brought the company crashing to the ground:
I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.
Fair enough. But then we get to this:
As most of us have done nothing wrong, guilt is not a motivation to surrender our earnings. We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. 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.
So my question is - where is the &$#@* electrician, or electricians? The chief one would be Joseph Cassano:
As head of the Financial Products unit, Cassano racked up billions of losses while assuring investors it was nearly impossible for his unit to lose.
“It is hard for us, without being flippant, to even see a scenario within any kind of [rhyme] or reason that would see us losing one dollar in any of those transactions,” he told investors.
Before he was finally fired last March, Cassano pocketed $280 million in cash and an additional $34 million in bonuses.
Under a “retirement” agreement marked “confidential,” Cassano also got a $1 million-a-month “consulting fee.”
AIG subsequently cut off these payments, but Cassano still walked away with more than $315 million while the company staggered under $440 billion in liabilities. Taxpayers had to pour in $170 billion in bailout money.
If we - the public and the media - have been too hard on the likes of Desantis, we haven’t been hard enough on the likes of Cassano, who should be a household name by now. Our rage has been unfocused - “AIG executives.” Let us be more specific. But let us be no less enraged.
