Maybe populism has gone too far. The Weekly Standard noted this morning that U.S. Senator Charles Grassley in a radio interview remarked that the AIG executives who ran the insurance company into the ground, and then accepted taxpayer-funded bonuses, should resign and kill themselves, Japanese-style. Grassley to AIG: It’s Seppuku time.
Now you know I have absolutely no sympathy for these AIG morons and think the bailout is absolutely stupid. We should have let the company fail and the chips fall where they may. But this is way over the top. What sets America apart from Japan is that we do not embrace their culture of “face” and respect, which is what drives executives to resign in shame and then, not infrequently, commit suicide. In the U.S., you are what you do and what you represent, not to whom you report. Organizations are important but have no real meaning aside from the individuals who make them up.
So as far as I am concerned, AIG should “claw back” those bonuses and fire these idiots. (It’s not like that so-called talent helped the company do anything other than rack up the largest quarterly loss in the history of capitalism anyway!) But suggesting Seppuku is just out of line and un-American.
Posted via email from glenn’s posterous