AIG: the surreal corporation

It is a strange characteristic of modern journalism that it is so consensus driven that huge stories are completely missed. Such is the case with the surreal resurrection of AIG corporation. Not content with caretaker management intending to quietly sell off the remnants of AIG, the cancer men behind the Obama administration have chosen a pompous retired CEO, Bob Benmosche, to “revive” this zombie corporation.

Recall that the US taxpayers have pumped about $180 billion dollars into AIG, and that the current (highly inflated) market capitalization of the company is only $6 billion. There is not the ghost of a chance that the taxpayers will ever get their money back, because most of it was paid out to back crazy casino bet derivatives. But none of this matters, because the Obama administration does not believe in running corporations financed by the taxpayers. No, this would suggest that the Government could actually manage an organization better than the people who wrecked it.

Thus, we now enjoy the surreal spectacle of a bankrupt organization supported by taxpayer funds hiring a CEO who tells the government to back off and let him run the company according to his whims. We, the US taxpayers, are paying the salary of an arrogant blowhard who insists that he has the right to do with our funds as he pleases because he is a member of the CEO caste.

How many more companies will turn into Federally funded zombies run by loose-cannon CEO’s? How can one even predict the actions of managers who are completely untethered to any financial reality? It is as though the US economy is slowly turning into a comic-book caricature of itself, a Bizarro world of incongruity and excess, with the only constants being corruption and unaccountability.

1 comment

    • Inky99 on August 31, 2009 at 21:36

    That’s how it is now, and that is how it shall stay.  

    Neither party can, or will, change this.

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