In Maureen Dowd's column today, I learned that Lehman Bros. CEO Richard Fuld was slugged by a company employee who ran into him in the company gym after it was announced that Lehman was going belly up. If it's true -- and it appears to be -- I would love to buy that guy a beer. He's the Man of the Year.
Dowd also reports on another AIG outrage. Here:
Just when we thought executives of A.I.G., the insurance giant bailed out by taxpayers for $123 billion, had been shamed into stopping their post-bailout Marie Antoinette spa treatments, luxury sports suites, Vegas and California posh resort retreats, we were dumbfounded to learn that some A.I.G. execs were cavorting at a lavish shooting party at a British country manor.London's News of the World sent undercover reporters to hunt down the feckless financiers on their $86,000 partridge hunt as they tromped through the countryside in tweed knickers, and then later as they "slurped fine wine" and feasted on pigeon breast and halibut.
The paper reported that the A.I.G. revelers stayed at Plumber Manor -- not the ancestral home of Joe the Plumber, a 17th-century country house in Dorset -- and spent $17,500 for food and rooms. The private jet to get there cost another $17,500, and the limos added up to $8,000 more.
In an astonishing let-them-eat-cake moment, the A.I.G. big shot Sebastian Preil held court at the bar and told an undercover reporter, "The recession will go on until about 2011, but the shooting was great today and we are relaxing fine."
Here's the story as the British tab reported it, with pictures. It's enough to put anybody in touch with their inner Karl Marx -- and their outer pitchfork and torches. Seriously, these executives obviously have no sense of honor or decency.
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Sounds like something on Daily Kos or DU. Real Christian, Rod.
How about we prosecute the guilty instead of assaulting them like leftist thugs? Hey, and while we're at it, why don't we punish the people truly responsible for this mess--the members of Congress enabling Fannie/Freddie and forcing people to give subprime loans to deadbeats? They've taken more from you and I than any of the pompous greed-goblins on Wall Street.
"If it's true -- and it appears to be -- I would love to buy that guy a beer. He's the Man of the Year."
Give me a break.
The pure hypocrisy that has come from this blog over the past several months is unbelievable, it's any wonder I check back in here from time to time.
I'm positive one day I'm going to stumble across you, Rod, at Wal Mart stuffing your face with a Big Mac from the attached McDonalds.
So, if I run into Barney Frank or Chris Dodd it's okay with you if I punch them in the face? I mean, they tend to put me in touch with my inner Adam Smith (and Hayek), so it should be alright, right? They cost us a lot more than Enron or Lehman Brothers, so we should all want to punch them in the face.
How very refreshing to see a Frank Herbert reference that isn't from his Dune books, McKie!
I've always had a fascination for his construction of the Gowachin system of justice and law. It is certainly barbaric by human standards (though not unheardof in human history), but I've sometimes imagined it in practice in certain circumstances. I wouldn't mind seeing Frank and/or Dodd, not to mention the Enron execs, in a Gowachin court. ;-)
Fuld is an evil, self-serving guy who has lied for a living for a very long time. He owns, at last count, 5 multimillion dollar houses scattered across the country, including one that is on a private island in florida. Fuld is quite used to obtaining and maintaining power and money for his own well being, in the face of other equally narcissistic and capable greed driven freaks that work at Lehman on the hope that they, too, can one day ascend to the office of massive compensation coupled with utter lack of accountablility.
Fuld made over 500 million dollars helping to perpetuate the fraud that he helped create. Fuld knew what he was doing, and has planned for this 'day of reckoning' for a long time. He has kept every nickel he made perpuating this fraud, while making a gigantic public issue about his 'not taking his bonus this year'. Fuld has without doubt planned his own personal PR campaign to minimize the actual accountability he is due, by trying to appear that he, too, is a victim, and he, too, was caught completely unawares, and he, too, had NO IDEA that this was going to happen.
But it's a sham.
I am only curious about how much he paid to the 'very senior level' employees to confirm this false story. Fuld is simply trying to short circuit any notions that the real victims might have about inflicting actual physical damage on him, by trying to give them a fantasy story to say "That's right! Hell Yeah!" about.
Nobody punched Fuld. It's part of his effort to skate away scot free from a multi-year fraud that has paid him exhorbitantly while defrauding people all over the USA, and the planet.
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