Why Jake DeSantis Still Matters

On March 26, 2009, Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president at AIG’s Financial Products division, published a resignation letter in the New York Times. DeSantis was fed up with CEO Liddy’s many public betrayals, most notably agreeing to the bonuses that would become so controversial, and then calling them “distasteful” before congress. While the company was under attack by the torch-and-pitchfork mobs as well as the entire Obama administration, Liddy’s actions were nothing less than devastating to the morale of most executives at the beleaguered insurance giant.

DeSantis’s resignation letter ignited its own controversy with certain of the pitchforkers making YouTube videos and writing their opinion pieces that stated, in short, that DeSantis was not only not worth his compensation, he was the lowest form of life on planet Earth.

What may surprise you is that Jake DeSantis is still at AIG. Bound by a loyalty that has nothing to do with money, he is slaving the same 12 hours a day to ensure that his team is on solid footing.

Money can not buy that kind of integrity.

The thing that the pitchforkers can not get through their thick skulls is that people like Jake DeSantis, Rex Shelby, Donald Trump, Jeff Skilling, Scott Yeager, Rush Limbaugh, Howard Ludnik,even poor old Dick Fuld and John Thain, and our own Sean do not dedicate their lives to work for money. Money is a result, it’s true, but it’s not the motivator. What motivates these men is the desire to achieve.

When you take away their ability to achieve, they become ordinary. These men … these great men… We can not afford for them to be ordinary. We must unleash them. Let them do what they do best, so that we all may profit.

The thing that divides achievers from non-achievers is will. The desire and the determination to achieve is all it takes to achieve. It isn’t easy – that’s why these men are the exception and not the rule – but it is simple. And there is nothing that says you can’t be one of them.

In the meantime, we should support the brave, great men like Jake DeSantis. We should recognize them for what they are – the heroes. Ultimately it will be the businessmen like Jake DeSantis and Sean and Rex Shelby who elevate us from the recession – not a Communist named Obama.

Long after the recession as receded, these men will continue doing what they do. They will work. They will innovate, expand, and create.

Jake DeSantis matters. Long after the hubbub of the AIG bonuses has been forgotten, long after he finally leaves the company, long after our economy has recovered, Jake DeSantis will matter. After he returns to obscurity, he will still be Jake DeSantis, quietly doing what he does, being who he is – every inch a hero.

AIG Execs Forced To Donate To Dodd

Washington Times exposes a massive scandal (part two) involving Senator Dodd and AIG

As Democrats prepared to take control of Congress after the 2006 elections, a top boss at the insurance giant American International Group Inc. told colleagues that Sen. Christopher J. Dodd was seeking re-election donations and he implored company executives and their spouses to give.

Getty Images Sen. Christopher J. Dodd, chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, has lost some political standing heading into re-election because of his ties to American International Group Inc.

The message in the Nov. 17, 2006, e-mail from Joseph Cassano, AIG Financial Products chief executive, was unmistakable: Mr. Dodd was “next in line” to be chairman of the Senate Banking, Housing and Urban Affairs Committee, which oversees the insurance industry, and he would “have the opportunity to set the committee’s agenda on issues critical to the financial services industry.

“Given his seniority in the Senate, he will also play a key role in the Democratic Majority’s leadership,” Mr. Cassano wrote in the message, obtained by The Washington Times.

That email:

How nice that even suggests the spouses donate.

The article continues:

Mr. Dodd’s campaign quickly hit pay dirt, collecting more than $160,000 from employees and their spouses at the AIG Financial Products division (AIG-FP) in Wilton, Conn., in the days before he took over as the committee chairman in January 2007. Months later, the senator transferred the donations to jump-start his 2008 presidential bid, which later failed.

Now, two years later, Mr. Dodd has emerged as a central figure in the government’s decision to let executives at the now-failing AIG collect more than $218 million in bonuses, according to the Connecticut attorney general – even as the company was receiving billions of dollars in assistance from the Troubled Asset Relief Program (TARP). He acknowledged that he slipped a provision into legislation in February that authorized the bonuses, but said the Treasury Department asked him to do it.

The whole article is a necessary read. Read and marvel at the hypocrisy of the Democrat party.

John Galt Quits AIG

If this doesn’t set you right about AIG, I don’t know what – if anything – will. It is a resignation letter from Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of AIG:

DEAR Mr. Liddy,

It is with deep regret that I submit my notice of resignation from A.I.G. Financial Products. I hope you take the time to read this entire letter. Before describing the details of my decision, I want to offer some context:

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.

You and I have never met or spoken to each other, so I’d like to tell you about myself. I was raised by schoolteachers working multiple jobs in a world of closing steel mills. My hard work earned me acceptance to M.I.T., and the institute’s generous financial aid enabled me to attend. I had fulfilled my American dream.

I started at this company in 1998 as an equity trader, became the head of equity and commodity trading and, a couple of years before A.I.G.’s meltdown last September, was named the head of business development for commodities. Over this period the equity and commodity units were consistently profitable — in most years generating net profits of well over $100 million. Most recently, during the dismantling of A.I.G.-F.P., I was an integral player in the pending sale of its well-regarded commodity index business to UBS. As you know, business unit sales like this are crucial to A.I.G.’s effort to repay the American taxpayer.

The profitability of the businesses with which I was associated clearly supported my compensation. I never received any pay resulting from the credit default swaps that are now losing so much money. I did, however, like many others here, lose a significant portion of my life savings in the form of deferred compensation invested in the capital of A.I.G.-F.P. because of those losses. In this way I have personally suffered from this controversial activity — directly as well as indirectly with the rest of the taxpayers.

I have the utmost respect for the civic duty that you are now performing at A.I.G. You are as blameless for these credit default swap losses as I am. You answered your country’s call and you are taking a tremendous beating for it.

But you also are aware that most of the employees of your financial products unit had nothing to do with the large losses. And I am disappointed and frustrated over your lack of support for us. I and many others in the unit feel betrayed that you failed to stand up for us in the face of untrue and unfair accusations from certain members of Congress last Wednesday and from the press over our retention payments, and that you didn’t defend us against the baseless and reckless comments made by the attorneys general of New York and Connecticut.

My guess is that in October, when you learned of these retention contracts, you realized that the employees of the financial products unit needed some incentive to stay and that the contracts, being both ethical and useful, should be left to stand. That’s probably why A.I.G. management assured us on three occasions during that month that the company would “live up to its commitment” to honor the contract guarantees.

That may be why you decided to accelerate by three months more than a quarter of the amounts due under the contracts. That action signified to us your support, and was hardly something that one would do if he truly found the contracts “distasteful.”

That may also be why you authorized the balance of the payments on March 13.

At no time during the past six months that you have been leading A.I.G. did you ask us to revise, renegotiate or break these contracts — until several hours before your appearance last week before Congress.

I think your initial decision to honor the contracts was both ethical and financially astute, but it seems to have been politically unwise. It’s now apparent that you either misunderstood the agreements that you had made — tacit or otherwise — with the Federal Reserve, the Treasury, various members of Congress and Attorney General Andrew Cuomo of New York, or were not strong enough to withstand the shifting political winds.

You’ve now asked the current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. to repay these earnings. As you can imagine, there has been a tremendous amount of serious thought and heated discussion about how we should respond to this breach of trust.

As most of us have done nothing wrong, guilt is not a motivation to surrender our earnings. We have worked 12 long months under these contracts and now deserve to be paid as promised. 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.

Many of the employees have, in the past six months, turned down job offers from more stable employers, based on A.I.G.’s assurances that the contracts would be honored. They are now angry about having been misled by A.I.G.’s promises and are not inclined to return the money as a favor to you.

The only real motivation that anyone at A.I.G.-F.P. now has is fear. Mr. Cuomo has threatened to “name and shame,” and his counterpart in Connecticut, Richard Blumenthal, has made similar threats — even though attorneys general are supposed to stand for due process, to conduct trials in courts and not the press.

So what am I to do? There’s no easy answer. I know that because of hard work I have benefited more than most during the economic boom and have saved enough that my family is unlikely to suffer devastating losses during the current bust. Some might argue that members of my profession have been overpaid, and I wouldn’t disagree.

That is why I have decided to donate 100 percent of the effective after-tax proceeds of my retention payment directly to organizations that are helping people who are suffering from the global downturn. This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I simply believe that I at least deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and do not want to see them disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.’s or the federal government’s budget. Our earnings have caused such a distraction for so many from the more pressing issues our country faces, and I would like to see my share of it benefit those truly in need.

On March 16 I received a payment from A.I.G. amounting to $742,006.40, after taxes. In light of the uncertainty over the ultimate taxation and legal status of this payment, the actual amount I donate may be less — in fact, it may end up being far less if the recent House bill raising the tax on the retention payments to 90 percent stands. Once all the money is donated, you will immediately receive a list of all recipients.

This choice is right for me. I wish others at A.I.G.-F.P. luck finding peace with their difficult decision, and only hope their judgment is not clouded by fear.

Mr. Liddy, I wish you success in your commitment to return the money extended by the American government, and luck with the continued unwinding of the company’s diverse businesses — especially those remaining credit default swaps. I’ll continue over the short term to help make sure no balls are dropped, but after what’s happened this past week I can’t remain much longer — there is too much bad blood. I’m not sure how you will greet my resignation, but at least Attorney General Blumenthal should be relieved that I’ll leave under my own power and will not need to be “shoved out the door.”

Sincerely,

Jake DeSantis

Holy pogosticks. If there are still men like this out there, there is hope for our nation and our freedom. Mr. DeSantis is a real-life John Galt. Perhaps because of the difficult financial times and the narrowing of our culture as Socialism casts its shadow over us, I seem to be hearing more of these stories of great businessmen who are carry with them the values of independence, capitalism, self-reliance, and achievement. These are the flickers of greatness – these stories, these men – are the reason America will endure.

The John Galts of our society should be admired (I certainly admire them). They should be given every freedom to accomplish their dreams. Without them, the rest of society is doomed … and they don’t even realize it. Yet.

Big Lies About AIG Bonuses: How Big Bonuses Benefit Taxpayers

I have discovered the rarest gem in the whole universe: I’ve discovered someone who thinks the exact same way I do about Arthur Andersen and AIG.

Will Offensicht, the pseudonymous author of the above entitled action, patiently, calmly, rationally explains how AIG made its money, and why it was no biggie that some of those guys got bonuses.

I’m too stunned to even be snarky.

AIG Caves! Will Repay Taxpayers $165m In Bonus Money

AIG has succumbed to the pressure and will repay $165 million in money paid in bonuses. According to the article:

The Treasury Department will order failed insurance giant American International Group Inc. to repay the taxpayers up to $165 million the company is giving employees as bonuses, Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner said Tuesday. In a letter to congressional leaders, Geithner said the government can’t block the payments, which are being made under contracts signed before the government stepped in with $173 billion to prevent AIG from going bankrupt. Acknowledging “considerable outrage” about the bonus payments, Geithner said AIG will pay the Treasury an amount equal to the payments, and the Treasury will deduct that amount from the $30 billion in government assistance that will soon go to the company.

Oh AIG. I had such hope for you.

Thanks for giving us the money back. Now we have more to give for the health benefits of gay federal employees while US military men and women now must pay for their own war wounds out of their private insurance.

"This Is Going To End Badly"

I love this quote from an AIG guy who spoke on the condition on anonymity because he doesn’t want his balls chewed off by anyone who catches him talking to anyone about anything, goddamit:

“It’s going to blow up,” said a senior Financial Products manager, who spoke on condition of anonymity because he was not authorized to speak for the company. “I have a horrible, horrible, horrible feeling that this is going to end badly.”

Awesome.

Team AIG!

Senator Suggests AIG Execs Kill Themselves

Iowa Sen. Charles Grassley has suggested that AIG executives should kill themselves.

Meanwhile, conservative blogger Cara Ellison suggests that Iowa Senator Charles Grassley kill himself.

At least that way, we’d get rid of some dead weight around here.

What the fuck is wrong with people? What is wrong with this senator? What the hell do you mean, AIG execs should kill themselves? That their value as human beings is somehow diminished because they gave bonuses to people who are contractually entitled to them?

Fuck you, Sen. Grassley. Fuck you and your anti-capitalist friends on Capitol Hill, and your asinine measurement of the value of a man’s worth, and your complete disregard for human decency. Fuck you. Go kill yourself.

Use all that energy that you have to criticise the only men in our culture right now who are producing anything and go hang your bloody self so we no longer have to listen to your ridiculous, outrageous wailing. I’ll supply the rope and the live videocam.