Rich Powerful Congress & Govt Leaders Shield Selves by Villifying Corporate Workers?

[terisan]

The Washington Post article today claims that Congress, and administration are unfairly attacking workers at AIG who are part of the solution and not part of the problem.

<http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/content/article/2009/03/18/AR2009031804104.html?hpid=topnews>


If they are correct, are our government leaders just using the old strategy of divide and conquer--getting most of the workers to attack some of the workers (albeit highly skilled, well-paid workers) and letting the corporate bosses and themselves go free to screw everyone again. (After all, a lot of senators, including Obama, received payment from the corrupt AIG and for what ----just running for office)?

Are the AIG workers disrespected saviors and "whipping boys" of the rich and powerful, or just thieves?

INSIDE AIG-PF...
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 19, 2009; Page C01
WILTON, Conn., March 18 -- A solitary flat-screen television hangs on the back wall of the trading floor inside the headquarters of AIG Financial Products here. Wednesday afternoon, the most-talked-about employees in America huddled around it to find out just how despised they have become.


They watched quietly as members of Congress referred to them as greedy and incompetent. They heard more than one demand that their names be released to the seething American public. They heard the chairman of American International Group, Edward M. Liddy, tell lawmakers that people, in e-mails sent to AIG-FP, suggested that the firm's leaders "should be executed with piano wire around their necks."

The evening before, the firm's chief operating officer, Gerry Pasciucco -- whom Liddy recruited in November from Morgan Stanley to shut down Financial Products before it could do more harm to the economy -- had gathered them together in the same spot.

Pasciucco urged them to keep their heads down, to act professionally and to continue working to extricate Financial Products from its more than $1.6 trillion in outstanding derivative contracts. He acknowledged that the past few days have been like being "inside the piñata."

In reply, they told him that they worried mostly about getting shot, despite the guards now patrolling the parking lot, the front door and some of their homes.

A sense of fear hung in the room -- the palpable, unsettling kind that flashes across people's eyes. But there was anger, too. No one would express it publicly, of course. Who wants to hear a wealthy financier complain? And yet, within those walls off Danbury Road lies a deep sense of betrayal -- first by their former colleagues, now by their elected leaders.

The handful of souls who championed the firm's now-infamous credit-default swaps are, by nearly every account, long since departed. Those left behind to clean up the mess, the majority of whom never lost a dime for AIG, now feel they have been sold out by their Congress and their president.

"They've chosen to throw us under the bus," said a Financial Products executive, one of several who spoke on condition of anonymity, fearing reprisals. "They have vilified us."


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