We do it in cars every day. We are rude, cut people off, curse them, bully them when they go too slow for our liking, maybe even run them off the road to teach them a lesson.
We do it in blogs like this one and letters to the editor.
We do it through our surrogates in government.
In each of these cases, it is easy to get angry, easy to hate, easy to think of someone else as nothing more than a faceless enemy who has too much money, is in our way, has done us wrong, who must be taught a lesson.
Fact is… these folks in the other car, in those big houses, rich, poor, who may look different or have different traditions… they like us are Americans, with families, responsibilities, problems, distractions, needs, desires, dreams, goals… they are not faceless.
It is too easy to judge, too easy to hate, too easy to demonize, too easy to purposefully deny basic rights under our Constitution from afar simply because we are angry and need someone to pay.
Thanks to an Op-Ed published in the NY Times, we now know at least something about one AIG “villain” (the following has many edits to pull out some highlights. Click over to the link for the full letter):
NYTimes 3/25 – It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products.
I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in – or responsible for – the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.
After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company – during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 – we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials.
I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.
How many of us would be willing to work 14 hour days for $1 a year? Now, 12 months later, Congress and others want to deny a promised bonus.
The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation. I never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps that are now losing so much money. I did, however, like many others here, lose a significant portion of my life savings in the form of deferred compensation invested in the capital of A.I.G.-F.P. because of those losses. In this way I have personally suffered from this controversial activity – directly as well as indirectly with the rest of the taxpayers.You’ve now asked the current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. to repay these earnings. As you can imagine, there has been a tremendous amount of serious thought and heated discussion about how we should respond to this breach of trust.
As most of us have done nothing wrong, guilt is not a motivation to surrender our earnings. We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised.
The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear. Mr. Cuomo has threatened to “name and shame,” and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats – even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in courts and not the press.I have decided to donate 100 percent of the effective after-tax proceeds of my retention payment directly to organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn. This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I simply believe that I at least deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and do not want to see them disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.’s or the federal government’s budget. Our earnings have caused such a distraction for so many from the more pressing issues our country faces, and I would like to see my share of it benefit those truly in need.
On March 16 I received a payment from A.I.G. amounting to $742,006.40, after taxes. In light of the uncertainty over the ultimate taxation and legal status of this payment, the actual amount I donate may be less – in fact, it may end up being far less if the recent House bill raising the tax on the retention payments to 90 percent stands. Once all the money is donated, you will immediately receive a list of all recipients.
Granted that’s a lot of money… but it is compensation that was promised. How many of us would, after working an entire year for $1, simply donate every penny of an earned bonus? If it was me, I would have already spent it or had a plan to spend it before the blow-up in Congress, which would make it very difficult to just hand it over.
The behavior of our “leaders” on this is not only embarrassing, it is not only wrong, it is very likely unconstitutional.
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