Oct 09 2008
How Today’s Business Economy Could Teach Us Frugality
In the news over the past few days we have given a major corporation - in this case AIG - $85 Billion because their collapse, we were told, would cause the collapse of the business economy of the entire country and perhaps even the world. I’m a good-hearted person and I don’t want anyone to collapse, but as the news week progressed we learned more about why the company needed so large a check.
When former AIG CEO Robert Willumstad was replaced in September, he refused the $22 Million severance package he was contractually entitled to, saying “I prefer not to receive severance payments while shareholders and employees have lost considerable value in their AIG shares.” according to n ABC News source. Too bad Willumstad had to leave so soon. Apparently he took with him any common sense the company had.
Less than a week after the BDBO (Billion Dollar Bail Out), AIG execs weren’t too concerned about the business economy as they took a week-long spa trip to California - complete with banquets, massages and gold outings- at a cost of $440,000. If you’re doing the math, that’s nearly half a million dollars. Are you mad yet? Wait, it gets better.
Last night just after Wall Street closed with another record low it was quietly announced that AIG was set to get another $37.8 Billion from the Government that We the People put in place; a goverment that We the People pay for. Let me close by sharing this:
The outstanding public debt as the the minute that this blog post is being written was $10,229,834,015,920.52. Based on the total estimated population of the U.S. that puts
each citizen’s share of that debt at $33,554.00 and that total debt has increased at a rate of barely less than $3.25 Billion per day since September of last year.
If you haven’t figured it all out yet (and who has? certainly not Washington D.C.), we’re in one hell of a mess with our business economy. It seems to me that the only lesson that we as regular citizens can learn from all of this is what not to do. It sure doesn’t seem like we have any true leaders anymore.
This is such a huge mess, I read that about the 1/2 million dollar party, how sad. We are so self involved that we don’t know what living in our means is anymore. We feel we are entitled to a lifestyle just because were breathing.
We need to fire ALL of the elected an appointed officials.
This teaches them nothing, it teaches this:if you are really big business “your to big to fail so we will give you whatever you need”. It is not just the tax dollars that are spent here that infuriates me. It is how they wasted our insurance premium dollars and continue to waste from the only people that are feeding them in the form of our tax dollars. Nothing has changed no lessons learned.
http://downwithdebt.today.com/
Unfortunately you’re exactly right. I feel as though the bailout did nothing whatsoever to teach anyone anything except that we cannot trust the 545 people who are in control of our government.
It is a sad, sad time in America.
I wrote an article about Spitzer called “Spitzer paid a whore and we all got f*$&%”.
Wouldn’t it be nice to hear about something other than the same crap they’ve been rehashing about the candidates for the past several months? Oh, I don’t know…something like the fact that people are losing their jobs, their homes, their health insurance, their retirement…? Is that too much to ask?