The Unbearable Greed of AIG

In Hannah Arendt's chronology of Adolf Eichmann's trial by the State of Israel for his crimes against the Jewish people during the Second World War, it was clear that Eichmann thought of himself as a victim of chance who was not  directly accountable for the horrendous criminality pursued by the Third Reich.  In a recent Washington Post article titled, "Transcript reveals anger of AIG employees toward politicians, public" one can observe the same dismisal of accountability and latent victimization conjured by AIG employees and the perpetrators of one of the greatest economic meltdowns in human civilization.

To contextualize, AIG (American International Group Inc.) prior to September 2008, as listed by Forbes magazine, was the 18th largest publicly owned corporation in the world.  The company had been the largest underwriter of commercial and industrial insurance in the USA.  Due to the company's involvement in the sale of credit protection in the form of credit default swaps (CDSs) on collateralized debt obligations (CDOs) and a swift downgrade in its credit-rating, precipitated by the collapse of Lehman Brothers, AIG suffered a liquidity crisis.  The American government driven by the perception that a global economic collapse would ensue if AIG failed, supplied the company with $180 billion in loans, stock investments and other commitments from the Federal Reserve and the Treasury Department.

According to the WaPo, employees of AIG were less than enthusiastic of the public pillorying of  their beloved corporation in the months after the bailout.  Hannah Arendt explained that in bureaucracies there is a diffusion of responsibility due to the collective nature of the enterprise.  As a result, because most bureaucrats do not directly control the nature of how decisions are made, nor do they frequently control how those decisions are executed, these people do not accept personal responsibility for their contributions to what in the end are systematic failures of judgement and ethics.

Consider some of their statements:

One employee doing his best Adolf Eichmann imitation said, "I will stand behind every action I have taken in this company from Day One."

Another jackal of high-finance had this to say of the American public, the US government, and the corporate welfare that had saved his/her job, "To be honest with you, I really hope it blows up. I think the U.S. taxpayer deserves to lose a trillion dollars over this thing for the way they have behaved."

Upon hearing that NY State Attorney General Andrew M. Cuomo was investigating AIG for distributing hundreds of millions of dollars in bonuses to employees and was threatening to disclose the names of these individuals to the public, employees claimed that were being "blackmailed" and subject to "extortion."

The greed-heads shrieked that their windfalls were deserved and that the entire scapegoating process reeked of McCarthyism and "un-American" policies!

The reality is that these people will never accept that they are the one's responsible for the economic catastrophe that has befallen the entire planet.  In their mind it is the government's fault for allowing minorities to buy homes they could not afford.  It is never charlatans like themselves who are to blame for the greed and undisciplined excesses of their company.  It is someone else's fault, and as in the case of all narcissistic sociopaths, it is they who claim to be the real victims.

Keep hoping AIG and fiends, your dream of a global economic collapse may still happen.