Pity The Bankers: Public Outrage ‘Just As Bad’ As Lynching

The CEO of AIG had himself a little interview with the Wall Street Journalpublished Monday. Apparently feeling at ease with the ever-friendly WSJ, Robert Benmosche felt free to whine about how the whole mess was really just the fault of a few bad apples: “He said ‘less than 10’ employees were behind the bad trades.” And so, you see, it was totally unfair that the public became so outraged over bonuses paid-out following an $85 billion government bailout.  “That was ignorance … of the public at large, the government and other constituencies.”

He then went on to explain “why he thought the treatment of some AIG employees was akin to abuses from the civil-rights era”…

“Now you have these bright young people [in the financial-products unit] who had nothing to do with [the bad bets that hurt the company.] … They understand the derivatives very well; they understand the complexity. … They’re all scared. They [had made] good livings. They probably lived beyond their means. …They aren’t going to stay there for nothing.

The uproar over bonuses “was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that–sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.

Yes. He just compared the outcries over bonuses paid to employees of a company still in business due only to taxpayer funds to the lynchings in the South. He really did.

Plus, he couches it in what he seems to think will be a sympathetic story of poor young financial professionals, used to making good money, possibly over-spending in spite of that, faced with the loss of some of their income… Oh, boo hoo hoo, Mr. Benmosche.

I’m a little less concerned with the reduced incomes of AIG employees than with the nearly one-quarter of  American workers still unemployed or underemployed in the wake of a financial crisis brought on by your industry — all while your industry has not only fully recovered, but is sitting on piles of cash, not investing in the economy, and raking in record profits.

I believe the expression, Mr Benmosche, is “check your privilege.”

By: Sandi Behrns

Sandi Behrns is a noted policy nerd, new media & web developer, and consultant to progressive organizations and campaigns. She is a senior contributor to Liberaland, and the Executive Editor of Progressive Congress News.