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The Fact Is That "Fake Jake's" Desantis' AIG Retintion Contract Would Not Have Been Worth The Paper It Was Written On If His Nieghbor's Hard Earned Tax Dollars Had Not Been Stolen
UPDATE:
Why I Have No Sympathy for Jake DeSantis
Huffington Post
Mitchell Bard
On Tuesday the New York Times ran on its op-ed page the resignation letter written by Jake DeSantis, a vice president of AIG's infamous financial products ...
....I am not the least bit moved by DeSantis's point of view, because over the last several years, he has tremendously profited from a larger financial culture that is completely out of whack. Those working in the financial industry made untold sums of money from a bubble that was bound to burst, and they did so in an environment that rewarded risk with no consequences for failure......
.....In other words, DeSantis has become wealthy beyond his wildest dreams, with no worries about money for the rest of his life, at the expense of most Americans and the financial system as a whole, all by taking advantage of a set of rules that skewed in his favor. He profited from an industry that rejected decades of regulations and took crazy risks that a bubble could be sustained against all logic to the contrary, and that firm's could leverage themselves at unhealthy levels with no consequences. And now that some semblance of order is trying to be applied to the financial industry, with the bill being footed in billions of dollars by the American people, he has the audacity to complain that he is being treated unfairly? It's like someone finding a hole in the side of a bank vault and stopping by once a year to take millions of dollars from the structure, only to complain on the 15th trip when the hole has been sealed up......
.....My point in listing DeSantis's bloated salary isn't, as my friends on the right will probably immediately accuse me of doing, an effort to attack wealth or wealth creation. Rather, my quarrel with DeSantis's letter is that it represents an unwillingness to confront the culture that not only caused the current financial collapse, but that will prevent true recovery if it's not addressed.....
.....You would think that those who created this mess would have some humility. But you would be wrong. DeSantis's letter is just one example. In a front-page New York Times article on Monday discussing the administration's attempts to get private equity firms and hedge funds to buy into Treasury secretary Timothy Geithner's new plan to purchase toxic assets from banks, the chief executive of a "major investment firm" is quoted as saying
"The deal is good, but it's not worth it if I'm buying myself into a retroactive tax or a Congressional hearing."The article notes that
"some executives at private equity firms and hedge funds, who were briefed on the plan Sunday afternoon, are anxious about the recent uproar over millions of dollars in bonus payments made to executives of (AIG)."
When I read observations like these, I just cannot believe that these people are so blind as to what has happened to the financial industry in the last six months. I know these individuals profited from a bubble, but apparently they are also living in one.....
.....A plan to rescue the banks without addressing and changing the compensation culture on Wall Street is like treating a cancer patient's symptoms without eradicating the tumors. The relief will be only temporary......
.....If DeSantis doesn't want to be a part of the solution, if he wants to hold onto a system in which it is reasonable to pay him (and, presumably, many others) $742,006.40 after taxes, by a company accepting hundreds of billions from the federal government, I can only come to the conclusion that he doesn't understand where we need to go. He is part of the problem, not the solution. Good riddance to him, and let the door hit him on the butt on the way out. DeSantis may have a valid contract, but it's a product of a corrupt system. And it's time for the system to change, if we truly want to rebuild the nation's financial institutions and economy.
The apocalyptic rich
Baltimore Sun
The next day, that long whine by AIG executive Jake DeSantis appeared on the Times' op-ed page, proving my point. This fool is completely oblivious to the fact that he wouldn't be in position to earn a million-dollar bonus were it not for taxpayers. And if he deigns to send it anywhere, in his attempt at martyrdom, DeSantis's $742,006.40, after taxes, should come right back to the U.S. Treasury.
Some at AIG Buck Efforts to Give Back Bonus Pay
Wall Street Journal
....Wednesday, employees at the insurer gave a standing ovation for Jake DeSantis, an executive in AIG's financial-products division, who was the first to publicly refuse to return his retention bonus despite an outcry over the payments.
Joining in the ovation was Gerry Pasciucco, attendees said. Mr. Pasciucco heads the division that had $40 billion in losses last year that nearly sank AIG and triggered the government rescue. About five employees of the unit quit Wednesday, said a person familiar with the matter.......
.....In recent days, employees have huddled in small groups in conference rooms off the division's main trading floor in Wilton, Conn., debating what to do.....
........One employee said he had instructed his wife to call the police in the event his identity became known and a news truck appeared at his home.....
AIG Exec Whines About Public Anger, and Now We're Supposed to Pity Him? Yeah, Right ...
AlterNet
AIG exec Jake DeSantis' NY Times letter asking for us to chill out about his poor overworked employees is a sick joke.....
....AIGFP only had 377 employees. Those 400-odd folks received almost $3.5 billion in compensation in the last seven years, a very large part of that money coming from the sale of credit default protection. Doing the math, that averages out to over $9 million of compensation per person.
Ask yourself this question: If your company made that much money, and the boss of the unit made almost $280 million in just a few years, exactly how likely is it that you wouldn't know where that money was coming from?
Are we supposed to believe that Jake DeSantis knew nothing about Joe Cassano's CDS deals? If your boss and the top guys in your firm were all making a killing selling anything at all -- whether it was rubber kayaks, generic Levitra or credit default swaps -- you really wouldn't bother to find out what that thing they were selling was? You'd really just mind your own business, sit at your cubicle and put your faith in the guys up top to fill you in if there was something you needed to know?.....
.....But all of this is really secondary to the tone of DeSantis' letter. He acts like he's a victim because he didn't get to keep his after-tax bonus of $742,006.40 in the middle of a global depression. And he really loses his fucking mind when he writes:
"None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house."
First of all, Jake, you asshole, no plumber in the world gets paid a $740,000 bonus, over and above his salary, just to keep plumbing. Second, try living on a plumber's salary before you even think about comparing yourself to one; you're inviting a pitchfork in the gut by even thinking along those lines. Third, Jake, if you were a plumber, and the electrician burned the house down -- well, guess what? If you and that electrician worked for the same company, you actually wouldn't get paid for that job.
Out in the real world, when your company burns a house down, you're not getting paid by that client. It's only on Wall Street, where the every-man-for-himself ethos is built into an insanely selfish and greed-addled compensation system, that people like you expect to get paid in a bubble -- only there do people expect their performance bonuses no matter how much money the shareholders lose overall, no matter how many people get laid off after the hostile takeover, no matter how ill-considered the mortgages lent out by your division were.
You expect that money because you think it's owed to you. But what money? The money is gone. Your boss, if not you, set it all afire. You want the money, but where exactly do you think it's coming from?
Do you just not understand that that money now would have to come out of someone else's pocket? That it would have to come from middle-class taxpayers, real plumbers, people who didn't make millions over the years in equity and commodity trading?.....
.....Only a person with a habitually overinflated sense of self-worth could think he deserves a $700,000 retention bonus, even if it has to be paid by taxpayers....
.....Hey Jake, it's not like you were curing cancer. You were a f**king commodities trader. Thanks to a completely insane, horribly skewed set of societal values that puts a premium on greed and severely undervalues selflessness, communal spirit and intellectualism -- values that make millionaires out of people like you and leave teachers and nurses, the people who raise your kids and clean your parents' bedpans, comparatively penniless .
Good for you. Consider yourself lucky. But your company went belly-up and broke, almost certainly thanks in part to you, and now you don't get your bonus.
So be a man and deal with it. The rest of us do, when we get bad breaks, and we've had a lot more of them than you. And stop whining......
John Walker Lindh presents Enemy Combatant t-shirt to Jake ...
TPMCafé
In a moving ceremony today, John Walker Lindh, the "American Taliban" convicted of treason in the wake of the Sept. 11 disaster and resulting war with Afghanistan, handed off the "enemy combatant" t-shirt he has worn for the past eight years to Jake DeSantis, a former employee of AIG Corporation who has refused to return his negotiated compensation, controversially dubbed a "bonus," to American taxpayers, electing to donate the money instead.
"Man, it's weird," opined Lindh in his remarks prior to the presentation. "One day, you're just a feckless kid from Marin County, or an egghead from MIT in Jake's case, out in the world doing what you more or less believe in. The next day history catches up with you and you're in the bright lights with everybody calling you a traitor. I can't say the last eight years have been great for me or that I don't kind of want to scream 'Your turn, asshole!' to Jake. I mean, guys like him are exactly the guys I was trying to fight against. But wearing this Enemy Combatant t-shirt isn't easy, and on a human level I hope he doesn't end up dead or spending 20 years in prison. I'm pretty sure he has more friends in high places than I did, so it doesn't seem likely."
DeSantis, after accepting the Enemy Combatant t-shirt, said only "I bet all you Liberal freaks are thinking 'Hey, what goes around comes around.' I told you I'm giving the money to charity, just like Jesus would have. Now either crucify me or get off my effing back."
No elected officials have yet commented on the event.
A Response to AIG’s Jake DeSantis - Victim
Wrecking Ball Report (satire)
AIG’s Jake DeSantis is a self-righteous wealthy person who likes to remind us how hard he works. This reminds us of numerous Hollywood stereotypes designed to make us dislike various wealthy characters so we can root for the plucky young working class hero.
And that makes us really hate Hollywood for getting inside our heads, because although his guest Op-Ed in the New York Times made us throw up our leftover Mac and Cheese.....
....DeSantis is quitting his job at AIG and giving whatever part of his bonus he has left after (possibly massive) taxes to charity. Sounds noble enough, but there’s a catch:
Jake Desantis wants us to see him as a victim, perhaps even feel sorry for him......
....The pledge to donate to charity - nice, we like it. Tough not to see it as a clever play for positive PR in a world that’s ready to throw you to the wolves, while we all play the part of the wolves ....
....But here’s the thing - that shit is really happening. There are fucking tent cities springing up in California, dude. And it isn’t to film a Slumdog Millionaire sequel. These are your countrymen in this day and age, unemployed and homeless, many through no fault of their own. Now, if you want to see yourself as blameless, that’s your right. Maybe you are. But you are an executive for AIG’s Financial Products division - whether or not the paperwork for CDS’ crossed your desk or not, you have become a rich man by working at a company that in the end, f**ked us all.....
....Go home to your family, dude. We’re sorry about your sh*tty boss and that lost year of your life, but we’ve got to clean the puke off our second-hand clothes and go whore ourselves to make rent - we don’t have time for your f**king pity party.
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