Six weeks ago, I wrote of the staggering ignorance and contempt Goldman-Sachs CEO Lloyd Blankfein holds for people who receive any monies/services/and or benefits he does not. Even when we pay for them.
Our failure to understand the consequences of our unbridled gluttony and its effect upon his starving Wall Street brethren has earned us his well-chronicled derision.
Now, former AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg (who asks that we call him “Hank”) seeks to outdo his Wall Street compadre by joining a lawsuit filed against the American government seeking redress for the “excessive” interest the government charged AIG for its 2008 bailout of the financial giant.
Yes—you read that correctly. No one snuck up behind you and bashed your skull in with a blunt instrument. Nor are you experiencing a cardiac episode.
Folksy, regular guy Hank wants to sue America “on behalf of” AIG stockholders who were made to shoulder the expense of the government’s (presumably excessive) rescue of the corporate parasite.
If this strikes you as suing the ambulance company because you made it to the hospital in time for life-saving surgery, you’re standing smack dab in the middle of the road to reason.
Let’s go over this one more time, so that even if you’re a cash-addled, Wall Street shithead you understand the lunacy of it:
Because AIG stockholders continue to earn money from their AIG shares (which, by the way, climbed 50% in value last year) thanks to the American taxpayer, Greenberg and AIG want to sue same because it cost them money to be brought back from the dead so that they might be allowed to live and continue making money.
For a change, the nation and its citizenry reacted with swift, bracing clarity. The resounding sentiment was something along the lines of “Bite me, AIG! Fuck off, Greenberg!” Even officialdom weighed-in with uncharacteristically blunt remarks.
But if I have learned anything watching America disintegrate into a corpocracy, it is that the corporate sense of entitlement is like a virus. It will emerge and retreat until it has chanced upon the ideal set of circumstances and the perfect host which will allow it to thrive.
Failing a Republican president and/or a Republican-dominated Congress, it will wait until things quiet down and then find a back door and pending legislation to quietly attach itself to.
You just watch.
Our failure to understand the consequences of our unbridled gluttony and its effect upon his starving Wall Street brethren has earned us his well-chronicled derision.
Now, former AIG CEO Maurice Greenberg (who asks that we call him “Hank”) seeks to outdo his Wall Street compadre by joining a lawsuit filed against the American government seeking redress for the “excessive” interest the government charged AIG for its 2008 bailout of the financial giant.
Yes—you read that correctly. No one snuck up behind you and bashed your skull in with a blunt instrument. Nor are you experiencing a cardiac episode.
Folksy, regular guy Hank wants to sue America “on behalf of” AIG stockholders who were made to shoulder the expense of the government’s (presumably excessive) rescue of the corporate parasite.
If this strikes you as suing the ambulance company because you made it to the hospital in time for life-saving surgery, you’re standing smack dab in the middle of the road to reason.
Let’s go over this one more time, so that even if you’re a cash-addled, Wall Street shithead you understand the lunacy of it:
Because AIG stockholders continue to earn money from their AIG shares (which, by the way, climbed 50% in value last year) thanks to the American taxpayer, Greenberg and AIG want to sue same because it cost them money to be brought back from the dead so that they might be allowed to live and continue making money.
For a change, the nation and its citizenry reacted with swift, bracing clarity. The resounding sentiment was something along the lines of “Bite me, AIG! Fuck off, Greenberg!” Even officialdom weighed-in with uncharacteristically blunt remarks.
But if I have learned anything watching America disintegrate into a corpocracy, it is that the corporate sense of entitlement is like a virus. It will emerge and retreat until it has chanced upon the ideal set of circumstances and the perfect host which will allow it to thrive.
Failing a Republican president and/or a Republican-dominated Congress, it will wait until things quiet down and then find a back door and pending legislation to quietly attach itself to.
You just watch.
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