AIG, Castigated for Resort Event, Plans Another One
October 9th, 2008Via: Bloomberg:
American International Group Inc., castigated by the White House, Congress and Barack Obama for hosting a $440,000 conference days after an $85 billion federal bailout, plans to hold another gathering for brokers next week.
The event, at the Ritz-Carlton in California’s Half Moon Bay, aims to “motivate and educate” about 150 independent agents who sell AIG coverage to high-end clients, said spokesman Nicholas Ashooh.
White House spokeswoman Dana Perino today called “despicable” expenses from the first gathering, a weeklong conference last month at the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach. Those costs included $23,000 for spa services, according to Representative Henry Waxman, chairman of the Oversight and Government Reform Committee.
AIG considered buying advertisements to explain its position, only to be told by public relations consultant George Sard that it would be “a really bad idea.”
“To spend the taxpayer’s money on an expensive ad campaign to apologize for how you used taxpayer money leaves you open to further attacks,” Sard wrote in an e-mail to Ashooh. Sard, chief executive officer of New York-based Sard Verbinnen & Co., said the message was a private e-mail mistakenly sent to Bloomberg and wasn’t intended to be a public statement.
Is anyone truly surprised by any of this? The plutocratic class lives by different rules than the rest of us working slobs, and takes for absolute granted their entitlement to do so. Anybody who has studied the corporate-overseer and owning classes or has had interaction with them knows this is true and not just some claim made out of leftist snark.
There are at least four squirrely issues here: One, if the government owns most of AIG, they dominate the board, and should be able to overrule any executive decision they want. Two, these sales meetings are typical throughout U.S. business, cost of the meeting relative to the size of the company. The investment is supposed to result in motivating salesmen to make one hundred times the amount of the investment in sales. It is a non-issue. Going after it is an exercise in diversion. Three, the problem is not corporate expenses. It is unregulated finance. The pols keep pointing fingers at Wall Street and businessmen, when the brokers and businessmen are just doing what they always do which is push the envelope of possibility to its furthest limit. It is the pols who broke down, liberalizing the regulation and turning on the money spigot, allowing the furthest limit to extend beyond the edge of the cliff. Four, by extension, in a supposed government by citizens, it is the citizens who broke down, allowing the pols too long a leash. If you respond with your tongue hanging out to the political Vegas come-on: “Are you better off than you were four (or eight) years ago?” then you deserve everything you get. The government is not there to make your life better off. You are there to make your government maintain a stable environment, which means you may not always be getting richer, if getting richer destabilizes the environment. So congratulations, your house, that was worth $200,000 ten years ago, is now worth $500,000 (if you can find a buyer), but your political environment is crap. Okay for you, maybe, but your kids hate you for it.