State's AIG Workers In Wilton Face Unwelcome Spotlight Hartford Courant
The employees of AIG Financial Products — from the secretaries to the managing directors previously enjoying quiet lives in the posh cul-de-sacs of Fairfield and Greenwich — have come under siege.....
.....Doug Poling, the Financial Products executive who reportedly received the company's largest "retention payment" of $6.4 million, has a security guard stationed in the circular driveway outside his sprawling Fairfield estate — even though he agreed to return the bonus.
"People are scared," said one former employee, who has been in touch with her former co-workers in recent days.
Even as AIG remains the focus of state and federal investigations, and of debates in Congress, much of the anger is aimed broadly at the culture of bonuses on Wall Street.
....AIG spent Friday working with state and federal law enforcement officials to ensure the employees' safety, a person familiar with the efforts said.
Jon Green, director of Hartford-based Working Families, and his band of activists are exactly the sort of thing AIG's Wilton workers fear — indignant citizens coming after them. The organization has mounted a tour this morning that will carry a busload of people, some facing the loss of their homes, jobs and health coverage, to AIG employees' homes in Fairfield County.
It is scheduled to conclude with a rally outside AIG's Danbury Road offices in Wilton.
One neighbor of Poling's who read about the Working Families bus tour in the newspaper sarcastically said Friday, "It's going to be fun."...
....New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo announced Thursday that he had received names of those who received bonuses from AIG, and Connecticut Attorney General Richard Blumenthal said Friday that it was only a matter of time before Connecticut officials get them too.
If they do, Blumenthal said Friday, the state's freedom of information law might compel his office to release the names publicly.
.....Wilton employees have been swapping comments on each other's Facebook walls about how to sneak out of work without getting mobbed.....
....Jeffrey A. Sonnenfeld, a professor at the Yale School of Management, said the growing outrage over the AIG bonuses reflects the extreme value of "fairness" in American culture."We're a very meritocratic society. We are thrilled that Bill Gates is as wealthy as he is — he earned it," Sonnenfeld said.
"But we have an awful lot of people who didn't earn it. It wasn't their capital at risk, it was ours. …There's something very parasitic about it."
PLEASE SEE:
MORE INFORMATION:
Showing Up At A Greedy CEO's House Isn't All That Bad
First The Financial Fat Cats Who Got Bailed Out Were Calling Working Men And Women, Who Didn't Get A Damn Dime Losers For Losing There Houses To Foreclosure
Now The Bailed Out Fat Cats Say:
"What's With All This Class Warfare?"
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