Slashdot Mirror
AIG Contemplates Joining Stockholder Suit Against US Gov't
inode_buddha writes "After completing its bailout rescue and paying back the money with interest, AIG is considering suing the US Government for doing so. The reasons why? Among other things, the 14% interest rate paid to the government. 'The lawsuit does not argue that government help was not needed. It contends that the onerous nature of the rescue — the taking of what became a 92 percent stake in the company, the deal's high interest rates and the funneling of billions to the insurer's Wall Street clients — deprived shareholders of tens of billions of dollars and violated the Fifth Amendment, which prohibits the taking of private property for "public use, without just compensation." The former CEO and current major shareholder said: "The government has been saying, 'We're your friend, we owned and controlled you and we let you go.' But A.I.G. doesn't owe loyalty to the government," a person close to Mr. Greenberg said. "It owes loyalty to its shareholders."' The lawyer representing him is none other than David Boies of SCO fame."
For not putting any of the criminals responsible for the financial collpase in prison where they belong. Now those same criminals are suing the government. Sadly the US taxpayer will once again be on the hook for the payout.
They were perfectly free to reject the taxpayer bailout and look for money elsewhere.
Will someone put these motherfuckers against the wall and shoot them already?
Give me Classic Slashdot or give me death!
The thing is though that it wasn't a waste of money. We got a stinking big profit out of it.
Not only that but we saved a metric fuckton of money on things like pension insurance, deposit insurance and unemployment benefits that we would have had to pay out if they had gone tits up.
There is certainly a case to be made that the AIG bailout was structured in no small part for the benefit of AIG's counterparties(for reasons that, um, have absolutely nothing to do with the fact that Goldman Sachs was one of the big ones, and the thing was essentially written by GS staff temporarily working for the feds); but it takes serious chutzpah to complain about an interest rate lower than the one on a consumer credit card when your situation was so fucked up that nobody would touch your corpse with somebody else's ten foot pole during one of the most dramatic capital-market fuckups in the history of capital markets...
It's survived (so far) both G. W. Bush and Obama, for example, and that's probably as extreme a difference in ideology as you're likely to get.
For real? You think Bush and Obama are extremely different?
December 2008, Bush was gearing up to leave office and Obama was gearing up to enter office. Both proclaimed their support for the GM bailout:
From wikipedia:
December 12, 2008: General Motors stated that it was nearly out of cash, and may not survive past 2009. The U.S. Senate voted and strongly opposed any source of government assistance through a bailout bridge loan (originally worth $14 billion in emergency aid) which was aimed toward helping the struggling Big Three automakers financially, despite strong support from President George W. Bush and President-elect Barack Obama, along with some mild support from the Democratic and Republican political parties.
We could list the similarities for hours, right? Everything from the PATRIOT act, support for the TSA, the bailouts of private corporations, and countless billion dollars of government grants to private corporations that donated to campaigns, etc..
You are seeing differences where they don't exist simple because of who you are talking about, even though you arent labeling one side good and the other side bad. You have just demonstrated exactly what the GP was talking, simply pretending that one person is different than the other in spite of a lack of demonstrable evidence to suggest that it is actually the case.
"His name was James Damore."