Good lord, now we have OpEd's written by former AIG employees?
I am proud of everything I have done for the commodity and equity divisions of A.I.G.-F.P. I was in no way involved in — or responsible for — the credit default swap transactions that have hamstrung A.I.G. Nor were more than a handful of the 400 current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. Most of those responsible have left the company and have conspicuously escaped the public outrage.
After 12 months of hard work dismantling the company — during which A.I.G. reassured us many times we would be rewarded in March 2009 — we in the financial products unit have been betrayed by A.I.G. and are being unfairly persecuted by elected officials. In response to this, I will now leave the company and donate my entire post-tax retention payment to those suffering from the global economic downturn. My intent is to keep none of the money myself.
I take this action after 11 years of dedicated, honorable service to A.I.G. I can no longer effectively perform my duties in this dysfunctional environment, nor am I being paid to do so. Like you, I was asked to work for an annual salary of $1, and I agreed out of a sense of duty to the company and to the public officials who have come to its aid. Having now been let down by both, I can no longer justify spending 10, 12, 14 hours a day away from my family for the benefit of those who have let me down.
Well well well.
I'm going to disassemble this clown, because, to be blunt, I have been there.
Not in the marketing and production of financial weapons of mass destruction, but certainly in the general sense - being an employee of a company that was about to do something, well, personally distasteful.
Set the wayback machine more than a few years. I was hired to build a network and the software to run on it to deliver a newly-IPOing firm's products to end consumers, in a position just below director level. It sounded like a really good opportunity, with a potential windfall payoff - quite literally tens of millions of dollars - if the firm was successful.
I took the position, and for quite some time, all was going well.
But in the middle of my work, it came to my attention that there were rumblings from within this firm to find a way to link consumer behavior to specific identities - people - and then sell that information to any and all comers. This was neither part of the firm's original intent, nor what I was hired to do.
There were aspects of this - for example, tying the purchase of tobacco products to people and then potentially selling that information to insurance companies - that bothered me, and that's putting it mildly.
I did my level best to dissuade the corporation from this course of action. Ultimately the company failed, but part of my lobbying - internally, and entirely without making a fuss outside the firm - was to find ways to perform the desired business function (that is, matching behavior to people without creating a means to sell data that would be unexpectedly collected to people who might use it for nefarious purpose) without opening up that Pandora's box.
I was prepared to "quit and squeal" if necessary. Fortunately, it was not necessary. Unfortunately the firm ultimately failed and my stock options turned out to be great toilet paper. Fortunately the timing was excellent and provided me with the impulse and opportunity that led to the formation of MCSNet, my Internet firm.
How does this align?
Quite well, in fact.
I simply do not accept that these traders had no knowledge of the actions of the AIG "financial products" people who created this mess, nor do I believe that their knowledge did not extend to the fact that AIG was engaging in these transactions on what amounted to a naked basis without either the capital to pay or an effective hedge.
Further, the firm gained the funds to promise and pay these bonuses over the years directly from the activity that proved to have generated false profits rather than real earnings.
That is, the money with which those bonuses were paid never really existed, but it sure was spent.
Whether this individual was personally involved in marketing and selling these financial destructive devices is not material. But for government support this person's job would have ceased to exist in September. But for government support that job would not exist now.
More importantly, had this individual or any other many like him raised hell within the company and, had they not been heard, in public, this mess would have likely been aborted before it did the critical damage to our financial infrastructure that occurred and all that fake money that was handed out in bonuses wouldn't have been.
In short, there is nothing that has been "lost" that was truly owed. The fruit of a poison tree is poisonous, irrespective of whether you personally watered the tree or not. If you ate it and didn't die, you got off easy. Arguing that you should be able to obtain even more fruit, this time with an antidote provided prospectively, is an outrage.
I do not claim that this person had a duty to blow the whistle, as whether or not someone feels driven to do the right thing - that is, whether they are a moral person and exactly what moral means, is up to them. That's a question that I will not presume to answer for someone else, although I know what my personal view of such transgressions in corporate America is, and I know that I personally will put my job on the line to stop abuses I believe are important - because I have.
No, my issue rests with playing the "whaaaaa" card when one does not raise the alarm, despite either actually knowing or constructive knowledge (that is, willful blindness) and then taking to the streets in this sort of fashion to whine, cry and complain.
Sorry dude, but you find no $ale from this guy - and that's speaking as someone who's been there and done that.
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