Op-Ed Contributor – Dear A.I.G., I Quit! – NYTimes.com.
An Executive VP in AIG’s Financial Products division, you know them as the wankers that destroyed the company, gets his Good-Bye Cruel World resignation letter carried in the NT Times op-ed section.
He whines and cries and complains that AIG isn’t being nice enough to them anymore. He pleads ignorance of the credit default swaps that sunk the company from inside the 377 person two office FP division he’s been part of for years. Seems a wee bit odd that SVP would have no knowledge of a main engine of profit in very small division.
Why should anyone give a good god-damned about this guy? Struggling along on millions per year is so very, very hard to do. I ardently hope his public wailing sinks any chance for him to get anything more lucrative than, say a position as a Walmart Greeter. There’s not much of a market for cry-baby executives from the engine destruction that IS the AIG FP division.
Matt Taibbi does a better job of expressing his outrage:
DeSantis has a few major points. They include: 1) I had nothing to do with my boss Joe Cassano’s toxic credit default swaps portfolio, and only a handful of people in our unit did; 2) I didn’t even know anything about them; 3) I could have left AIG for a better job several times last year; 4) but I didn’t, staying out of a sense of duty to my poor, beleaguered firm, only to find out in the end that; 5) I would be betrayed by AIG senior management, who promised we would be rewarded for staying, but then went back on their word when they folded in highly cowardly fashion in the face of an angry and stupid populist mob.
I have a few responses to those points. They are 1) Bullshit; 2) bullshit; 3) bullshit, plus of course; 4) bullshit. Lastly, there is 5) Boo-Fucking-Hoo. You dog.
Matt tears apart each point, then closes with this:
Hey Jake, it’s not like you were curing cancer. You were a fucking commodities trader. Thanks to a completely insane, horribly skewed set of societal values that puts a premium on greed and severely undervalues selflessness, communal spirit and intellectualism — values that make millionaires out of people like you and leave teachers and nurses, the people who raise your kids and clean your parents’ bedpans, comparatively penniless — you made a lot of money.
Good for you. Consider yourself lucky. But your company went belly-up and broke, almost certainly thanks in part to you, and now you don’t get your bonus.
So be a man and deal with it. The rest of us do, when we get bad breaks, and we’ve had a lot more of them than you. And stop whining. Jesus Christ.
Yes, please STFU
