We Should Have Expected Nothing Less

The board of A.I.G. will meet on Wednesday to consider joining a $25 billion shareholder lawsuit against the government, court records show. 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.”

  NYT

Amazing.

On the other hand, I guess the government could have just let you go under. Which might have been my vote. 

[N]owhere is the application of [Obama's “look forward; don't look back” principle] more obvious in [its] moral idiocy than when it is applied to the various thieves and brigands who wrecked most of the national economy and then stole what was left, whose piracy was then rewarded by a chance to open the federal treasury hydrant and frolic in the streets. The reluctance to bring criminal cases — a lot of criminal cases, a metric ton of criminal cases — leading to punishments so severe that their greedy grandchildren would think twice about doing it again cemented in the national government the notion that the bankers were nothing more than some businessmen who'd made some terrible mistakes that were exacerbated by unprecedented circumstances, instead of the cabal of sleek crooks who gamed the country out of its wealth and then found to their surprise that the government had discovered a heretofore unknown obligation to save them from personal ruin. That reluctance was founded on the lunatic notion that these people also were responsible public citizens who would learn from what they'd done to the country and to the world.

[...]

AIG didn't give a damn about its shareholders when it was letting Joseph Cassano run riot at its financial products division, a collateralized-debt obligation/credit default swap land mine that finally blew up the company, and nearly took the U.S. economy down with it. […] As a measure of how chastened it had become as it entirely went into the dumper, and as a perfect illustration of the corporate culture that persists to this day, AIG kept giving out bonuses to its executives.

[...]

This little exercise in hubristic cupidity has drawn the attention of the newly minted, soon-to-be senior senator from Massachusetts, Senator Professor Elizabeth Warren who, according to a statement out of her office today, is having none of your nonsense.

  Charlie Pierce

Go get 'em, Liz.