Saturday Night Live on AIG’s Bottomless Chutzpah

It did­n’t take long for cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca to start brazen­ly shaft­ing the Amer­i­can tax­pay­er again. Just days after the gov­ern­ment spent $85 bil­lion bail­ing out AIG, the com­pa­ny shelled out $440,000 to send its execs to a South­ern Cal­i­for­nia resort. There a good $23,000 was spent on well-deserved spa treat­ments.

The cor­rup­tion has reached points where you just have to laugh (did you know that AIG’s CEO also gets a $5 mil­lion per­for­mance bonus?), and that’s what Sat­ur­day Night Live helps you do. Watch the video below and fast for­ward to the last two and a half min­utes.

PS In the com­ments, one of our read­ers has offered a defense of AIG. Your thoughts? 

 


by | Permalink | Comments (6) |

Sup­port Open Cul­ture

We’re hop­ing to rely on our loy­al read­ers rather than errat­ic ads. To sup­port Open Cul­ture’s edu­ca­tion­al mis­sion, please con­sid­er mak­ing a dona­tion. We accept Pay­Pal, Ven­mo (@openculture), Patre­on and Cryp­to! Please find all options here. We thank you!


Comments (6)
You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.
  • Steve says:

    OK..let me get this straight: You guys have a prob­lem with AIG reward­ing it top sales­peo­ple with their annu­al “pres­i­den­t’s club” or what­ev­er they call it. First of all, this was prob­a­bly paid over a year ago. Sec­ond of all, fies­tas like this are attend­ed by top execs but it is real­ly a reward for the guys who have make AIG a ton of mon­ey. Remem­ber that AIGs basic busi­ness is fine (sell­ing and under­writ­ing all dif­fer­ent types of insur­ance), it is their wacky finance group in Eng­land that got it in trou­ble. The last thing we need as tax­pay­ers and bond hold­ers is AIG piss­ing off their top sales peo­ple by not giv­ing them their annu­al shindig–a well deserved reward com­mon in many indus­tries, not just insur­ance. Those guys quit and go to the com­pe­ti­tion, our bonds are worth crap.

  • Stephen says:

    And let’s not for­get that a big spend­ing is just what the Cal­i­for­nia econ­o­my needs right now to stim­u­late it out of reces­sion.

  • Karen says:

    Oh please! Those guys are the embod­i­ment of greed.

  • Ian says:

    @Steve: You make a good point, but it neglects that those top sales peo­ple will go wher­ev­er the mon­ey is. I ques­tion the ethics of those sales peo­ple as well as the top of the food chain at the com­pa­ny. It takes more than one per­son to get a huge com­pa­ny like that in trou­ble.

    How­ev­er, peo­ple are usu­al­ly sat­is­fied with a scape­goat, so we snag an exec, pub­licly cru­ci­fy them, and then leave the rest to con­tin­ue busi­ness as usu­al.

    But then again, I don’t think that the bailout was a good idea at all. Any Sen­a­tor or Rep­re­sen­ta­tive who vot­ed for it ought to be oust­ed from their office the next time their seat is up for elec­tion.

  • David says:

    “it’s spring­time for hitler and ger­many”

  • Hanoch says:

    I have no inter­est in defend­ing AIG, but the notion that cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca brazen­ly shafts the Amer­i­can tax­pay­er is mis­guid­ed. Let’s remem­ber that cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca is what gen­er­ates the rev­enue that makes tax­a­tion pos­si­ble in the first place (no goose, no gold­en eggs for Uncle Sam). More­over, cor­po­rate Amer­i­ca is itself an enor­mous Amer­i­can tax­pay­er. In fact, it pays tax­es not once, but twice: first at the cor­po­rate lev­el and again at the share­hold­er lev­el when those already-taxed prof­its are dis­trib­uted.

Leave a Reply

Quantcast