fearlesshistory

Making History as personal as a punch in the face

&
 

Oct 16 2008

The Law of Diminishing Returns

Published by vetmichael at 1:05 pm under Politics and History Edit This

When the banks collapsed and the stock market tanked in 1929, many of the persons responsible had the decency to commit suicide.

When banking fraud was uncovered in the 1980’s, federal investigators had the backbone to charge Charles Keating and put him behind bars.

In 2008, insurance giant AIG received a much-publicized $81 billion dollar rescue plan, then sent executives on a spa and golf vacation to the tune of $440,000 of your money. Now, after having gotten an additional $37.8 billion (that’s a grand total of $118.8 billion to one company for those of you keeping tabs), AIG’s executives spent $86,000 on a hunting trip to the UK.

Taxpayer outrage over golden parachutes has been largely ignored (it wasn’t even a hard-and-fast rule in the $700 billion you and I paid for the industry bail out!) and now there’s even LESS chance of congress or state prosecutors in addressing these concerns. That is unless we do something about it. Email, call, AND write your congressman or woman as well as your Representative. Let them know their jobs are on the line if these executive privileges are not reimbursed AND prevented from happening in the future.

Let me put it this way; your nephew approaches you asking for a loan to keep the family business afloat. You know that his spending and shady book keeping got the family business deep into the red but you also know that if the family business goes under, you’re screwed. You loan him the money and ask him to be careful with it. Instead of resucitating the family business, he takes a vacation to Alaska, spending money left and right. He gets back to “work” and realizes he’s pissed away a lot more money than he originally thought and returns for another loan. You need to keep the family business afloat or your house, your car, your entire life savings will be washed down the drain, so you loan himeven MORE money. He takes off to sun himself on the beaches of Malibu a week later. What do you do?

Possibly-related Articles:                                        (auto-generated)

Trackback URI | Comments RSS

Leave a Reply

Some Today.com contributors may have received a fee or a promotional product or service from a manufacturer for promotional consideration, while others receive no consideration at all. Each contributor is responsible for disclosing any such promotional consideration.