Just when you thought the Wall Street elite, government cronies, and rapacious banksters couldn’t possibly get any more despicable, along comes the CEO of disgraced insurance giant AIG to raise the bar...
If you haven’t heard the charming little metaphor that escaped AIG’s Robert Benmosche’s mouth this week, allow me to share it:
The uproar over bonuses was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitchforks and their hangman nooses, and all that-sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago].
And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.
Just as bad?
As bad as being rounded up by a violent gang and hung from a tree simply because you’re black?
I had to laugh to keep from crying…
Your company lost $61.7 billion in a single quarter — the biggest loss ever for a corporation — and you have the gall to dish out $165 million in executive bonuses to the same financial wizards who lost all that money in the first place?
And you didn’t expect people to break out their torches and pitchforks?
If my company lost that kind of money, not only would I not expect a million-dollar bonus… I would have already packed my desk and started walking to the end of the unemployment line.
Just as wrong?
Your company took $170 billion dollars in U.S. taxpayer funded bailout money, and you’re shocked that the unwashed masses are angry that you spent almost 10% of it on lavish bonuses for well-to-do derivatives traders?
Bonuses are supposed to reward success, not failure.
And to compare that justified populist anger to hysterical, racist lynch mobs is as insensitive as it gets.
But Robert Benmosche is far from the only wildly out-of-touch elite to suffer a case of verbal diarrhea…
Let’s take a walk down the down the hall of shame.
Lloyd Blankfein: “We’re Doing God’s Work”
Goldman Sachs’ Lloyd Blankfein is perhaps one of the most hated men on the planet — and he knows as much, once joking: “I know I could slit my wrists and people would cheer.”
When Blankfein attempted to justify the work they do at Goldman Sachs, he only made matters worse by likening the firm’s work to that of Mother Teresa.
“We’re very important,” Blankfein told the Times of London. “We help companies to grow by helping them to raise capital. Companies that grow create wealth. This, in turn, allows people to have jobs that create more growth and more wealth. It’s a virtuous cycle.”
He went on to say (perhaps in jest, but nonetheless putrid), “We’re doing God’s work.”
I wonder if a higher power would consider selling toxic assets like collateralized debt obligations to investors, while at the same time betting against them to reap mega-profits “His work.”
If that’s God’s work, I’d rather cozy up next to the fireplace in hell.
Charlie Munger: “Stop Bitching”
During the unprecedented bailouts of the banks and financial institutions that drove us to the gates of ruin, while Americans around the country either lost their homes, their retirement savings, or their jobs, Warren Buffett’s cantankerous sidekick Charlie Munger flat-out taunted them.
“Suck it in and cope,” he told a crowd at the University of Michigan.
“Hit the economy with enough misery and enough disruption, destroy the currency, and God knows what happens. So I think when you have troubles like that you shouldn’t be bitching about a little bailout. You should have been thinking it should have been bigger.”
Munger suggested if we didn’t bail out these companies, we’d suffer the same fate as 1920s Germany and usher in a leader like Adolf Hitler. What’s more, that’s not the only boneheaded Hitler reference he’s made…
If you recall, last year Munger had the gall to slander gold investors with this knee-slapping Holocaust reference: “Gold is a great thing to sew onto your garments if you’re a Jewish family in Vienna in 1939, but civilized people don’t buy gold — they invest in productive businesses.”
I’ll go out on a limb and say “civilized” people don’t equate precious metals investing to the wholesale slaughter of a population, but that’s just my opinion.
It’s a Big Club
These stuffed-shirt shysters have repeatedly invoked history’s worst cases of victimization while trying to defend their own soulless actions.
The truth is we are all ‘the real victims’ here.
To sit and listen to these clowns imply that we need to shut up and be grateful for allowing us to even bask in their presence is a slap in the face.
These guys are some seriously deranged individuals, plain and simple. They can sit in their ivory towers and spew this arrogant nonsense knowing full well that they’ll be just fine…
They aren’t the least bit scared of us and our pitchforks.
Over 3,000 blacks were hatefully strung up in trees between 1882 and 1968.
The number of crooked bankers lynched? Not a one.
Millions of Jews were exterminated during the Holocaust…
But how many predatory financiers paid the ultimate price for their deviltry? Nil.
That’s because they are the rulers. They are the law. They are the system.
It’s like the late, great George Carlin said: “It’s a big club, and you ain’t in it…”
