Pity the Poor AIG Bankers, Unable To Pay Their Third Mortgages and Fifth Mistresses

Robert Benmosche, CEO of the insurance-finance conglomerate AIG -- you know, the one that nearly tanked the world economy a few years back? that company -- whined to the Wall Street Journal recently that it was so, so horrible that people were outraged about the bonuses he wanted to pay to his hard-working and criminally negligent employees for their economy-wrecking shenanigans.

There is not enough bile in the entire world to express how loathsome his comparison is: he thinks that taxpayers who didn't want their bailout money to go to his incompetent market-manipulators are the same as "pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that–sort of like what we did in the Deep South." Yes, being angry at vast rewards going to people who should rightfully be unemployed -- because their company is vastly worse than bankrupt -- is just like a lynching.

And the thinking behind his statements seems to be the bluntest possible version of "what's the problem? we always make ungodly sums of money -- a little fiscal crisis shouldn't affect that," again showing how vastly out of touch the financial sector is with the real economy and the need to actually provide value in order to be paid. 

The only way to stop the complete financialization of our economy -- and the capture of our political and regulatory apparatus by dangerously self-absorbed cretins like Benmosche -- is to have some real prosecutions of the criminals who caused the crash. Send them to jail for decades, confiscate their property, shut down their companies. (I'd like to say "and sow their field with salt," but a federal judge is unlikely to consider that during sentencing.) Let's start with this clown: he's clearly incompetent at his job, if he's stupid enough to say something like this in public, so the SEC is sure to find evidence of criminal malfeasance if they can just extract their lips from Wall Street's behind long enough to do their damn jobs.