AIG Update

I suppose I should stop picking on AIG; it's starting to get old. You know, like making "Ike" jokes in a time when no one really remembers anything about the Eisenhower Administration except the Korean War ended and the Vietnam War began, and the Cold War really started to hit the big time. Or making "Tricky Dick" jokes in a time when Nixon has been fully rehabilitated and is being fondly remembered for going to China, putting the Watergate complex on the map, and leaving BEFORE Congress could drag him through the mud. Still, there is something inherently offensive about a company whose primary function is managing other people's money screwing up so badly that they have to request that the government give them $150 billion of OUR money -- and then blowing large chunks of it on resort hotels and spa treatments for their idiot management team. Or, for that matter, hiring more PR people so that they can appeal to humor websites for better spin...

The political satire/comedy site known as Wonkette is reporting that they've been getting emails from AIG's Public Relations department, reacting to the site's mocking AIG for the aforementioned squandering of public bailout money for the enrichment of their (already obscenely well compensated) senior management with requests for reporting that casts the company in a better light...

Now, it must be admitted that Wonkette is not exactly a top-tier news organization; it's a popular website that spends most of its bandwidth mocking the more absurd figures and actions of the day. But that's precisely the point: if AIG is suddenly employing enough PR personnel to scan for ANY negative mention of themselves and then write personalized messages begging for better treatment (in a vaguely threatening manner and tone) then clearly AIG is spending too much of its new-found government loot on spin, and not enough of it actually fixing the things they are supposed to be fixing...

Of course, I could also spend this post railing against banks who are hoarding all of their Federal TARP money so they can collect and retain the interest, legislators who will gleefully fling bales of cash at failed banks and insurance companies without a thought of oversight -- and then tell the American automobile industry that they "don't feel right about" giving money to companies with "failed management practices," or even about automakers who show up before Congress to plead for billions in bailout funds (each bigshot arriving on a separate corporate jet costing $12 million a year, naturally) without being able to produce a single page of written plan for how those funds would be used...

But I think I will save all of these topics for another day. For the moment, let's just say that all of those people who were saying last summer that they should have gone out and bought themselves an oil company were wrong. What you should have gone out and purchased was an insurance company -- or a bank...