Obnoxiousness: Defined

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.

Fighting Back

I’ve been waiting to see the money shoveled into the yawning orifices of America’s corporate banks returned to taxpayers in the form of increased lending.

But a funny thing happened on the way to the recovery: it hasn’t happened.

Those gosh-darn banks kept the money for themselves. Can you imagine?

God knows there’s not enough to go around. Even Wells-Fargo CEO John Stumpf indicated as much through his observation that the minimum wage is just too high, and needs to be lowered. How’s a poor CEO supposed to feed his family when he’s paying the rabble manning his counters nine-dollars an hour?

I mean, where are our priorities?

Since our fine and upstanding corporate banks have decided to follow the lead of our just-say-no congressional Republicans, it’s time we make the ultimate bank withdrawal and move our money to banks that care.

Those would be neighborhood banks, whose first priority is usually re-investing in the community, rather than in their CEOs and executive boards.

If you’re any kind of lover, you know it’s only right to take care of your partner. To pleasure him or her as you’ve been pleasured. And as lovers, American consumers have been woefully negligent. We have selfishly and wantonly stolen our bank's love without so much as lifting a finger in reciprocation.

And that needs to change.

With this in mind, I suggest we respond in kind. That we love our corporate banks as they have loved us. Vigorously. Thoroughly. Passionately.

We took care of Wall Street. We took care of our behemoth banks. Then we took care of our automakers. Now it’s time to take care of ourselves.

If we don't, no one else will.

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