Inside the Piñata At AIG: Death Threats and Disappointment in Elected Leaders

Wwe’re not defending AIG so much as pointing out they they haven’t been treated with the repect that still seems common for “lawmakers’ who screw up just as badly….And nobody except maybe Terrorists and the Taliban deserve death threats….

Seven and one half years ago, death threats were swirling for those that killed our citizens in the World Trade Center.  Now death threats are swirling and aimed at those same captains of finance and economies…

Related:
Protesters At Homes Of AIG Execs

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A solitary flat-screen television hangs on the back wall of the trading floor inside the headquarters of AIG Financial Products here. Wednesday afternoon, the most-talked-about employees in America huddled around it to find out just how despised they have become.

By Brady Dennis
The Washington Post

They watched quietly as members of Congress referred to them as greedy and incompetent. They heard more than one demand that their names be released to the seething American public. They heard the chairman of American International Group, Edward M. Liddy, tell lawmakers that people, in e-mails sent to AIG-FP, suggested that the firm’s leaders “should be executed with piano wire around their necks.”

The evening before, the firm’s chief operating officer, Gerry Pasciucco — whom Liddy recruited in November from Morgan Stanley to shut down Financial Products before it could do more harm to the economy — had gathered them together in the same spot.

Pasciucco urged them to keep their heads down, to act professionally and to continue working to extricate Financial Products from its more than $1.6 trillion in outstanding derivative contracts. He acknowledged that the past few days have been like being “inside the piñata.”

In reply, they told him that they worried mostly about getting shot, despite the guards now patrolling the parking lot, the front door and some of their homes.

A sense of fear hung in the room — the palpable, unsettling kind that flashes across people’s eyes. But there was anger, too. No one would express it publicly, of course. Who wants to hear a wealthy financier complain? And yet, within those walls off Danbury Road lies a deep sense of betrayal — first by their former colleagues, now by their elected leaders.

Read the rest:
http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/co
ntent/article/2009/03/18/AR20090318
04104.html?hpid=topnews