El tipejo de la imagen es  Richard S. Fuld, responsable de Lehman y dueño de un careto de villano propio de un comic de la Marvel.  A un tipo con esta cara uno se lo imagina pegándote un tiro por la espalda, ordenando que los helicopteros cobra fumiguen una aldea vietnamita, o cortándote los dedos de la mano a machetazos por orden de la familia Caprile.

A partir de ahora, cuando vayamos al banco, habrá que pedir una foto del responsable para quedarnos más tranquilos. 

No deja de ser curioso que frente a un universo de avaricia y caos, la basca haya reaccionado  asociándose en masa a comunidades virtuales, metiéndose un chute diario de emoticones, besos y cariñitos. El mundo real es una caca, pero en facebook  el personal es guay, chachi y se quiere mogollón. No hay ladrones, ni hijosdeputa. Bueno, miento… Los hay, pero en las fotos disimulan. No como Richard S. Fuld.

A.I.G. spent $442,000 for a retreat AFTER the bailout.  What will be done about it?  And the government wonders why we don’t trust them and the bailouts.

By MICHAEL J. de la MERCED and SHARON OTTERMAN

Published: October 7, 2008

A day after Richard S. Fuld Jr. was compelled to explain the millions of dollars he made at Lehman Brothers, two former executives of the American International Group took their turns in government witness chairs on Tuesday, answering critical questions from lawmakers about business and pay practices and outsize spending that continued even after the company received an $85 billion lifeline from the government.

One particular point of contention during the hearing before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee was a weeklong retreat that a life insurance subsidiary, AIG General, held for its top sales agents at the St. Regis Resort in Monarch Beach, Calif., only a week after the government extended its $85 billion loan last month.

The $442,000 in expenses for the week included $150,000 for food and $23,000 in spa charges, according to documents obtained by the committee.

Joe Norton, A.I.G.’s director of public relations, said in an interview that the event had been scheduled last year, though he did not know whether executives had considered canceling the retreat after the bailout.

Source.

Trust me.

I am as baffled as most of you are about the financial upheaval of the last few weeks. I don’t understand derivatives, cascading effects, and the intricacies of mortgage-backed securities.

But I have spent many years studying what sociologists call moral panic, sudden shocks to a social system in which it seems that the most basic assumptions about right and wrong, about the norms and values we take for granted, suddenly come undone.  The concept was developed by the British sociologist Stanley Cohen, whose work I admire greatly. I have been mostly interested in sudden violence, but any sudden, disorienting shock to a social system can rip away at the social fabric.

For all their seemingly unique horror, so much of what usually follows these events is predictable. Society rushes to the moral barricades. Portraits of evil are drawn so we all can share a collective image of who we are supposed to hate. Heroes are constructed who will save us. And scapegoats – those who brought this evil to our doorsteps — are sought and stigmatized and made to pay.

It’s the scapegoating that’s on my mind.

Social shocks are almost immediately followed by a hunt for the guilty. We need to know who to blame. We find it almost unbearable to live in a state of uncertainty in which a sudden, disturbing event cannot be blamed on a specific person or group. We need to see the face of evil. We need to hear its voice. We need to construct a narrative with a villain who knew what he or she was doing, yet still chose to act in a purposefully venal manner.

And then we need to join together and focus our collective loathing on the group or individual who tried to hurt us. Congressional hearings are wonderful settings in which the guilty are brought to the public scaffold and publicly humiliated. Right and wrong becomes clear during these rituals and we symbolically purge ourselves of those who would do us harm.

Yet this is precisely the point at which we often really screw things up.

Months after the panic has calmed, we almost always look back and see that, in our rush to the scaffold, we settled on the wrong culprit. Or we see how, without even realizing it, we lost the ability to see how an event might have resulted from the complex interaction of multiple culprits, or that even we ourselves might not have been blameless.

I was thinking of this as I watched former Lehman Brothers CEO Richard Fuld testify Monday on Capitol Hill. Trust me. You could waterboard me and I still wouldn’t be able to explain the dynamics of this financial collapse or what role Richard Fuld did or did not play. My forever secret math SAT score stands as silent testimony to why no one in their right mind should ever look to me for any economic wisdom.  And I certainly don’t know what Richard Fuld knew and when he knew it.

What I do know, though, is that my panic alarm starts to ring anytime I see someone publicly demonized in the midst of traumatic events. It’s not that they might not turn out to be demons. Or worse. I just wish we were all more aware of just how bad we are at assigning blame at these moments when we are afraid, when we are angry.

To suggest that events and their causes are complex is not what we want to hear right now, especially when we feel like somebody – anybody — has to pay. The question is whether, with all this anger, we can hold fire and struggle to see events in all their complexity before we decide who we should blame.

Fairness is never more important than in those moments when we are most tempted to ignore it.

Waxman questions Fuld about planned $23.2 Million in bonuses to Execs.

Waxman asks Lehman CEO who received $480 Million in salary, if that is fair?

Monday, before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee, members learned that Lehman was planning to give millions in executive bonuses, while asking for government help. As Congress tries to unravel through a series of hearings, how the collapse of Lehman’s came about.  Lawmakers are angry over Friday’s bailout vote, they wanted a face to put the blame on for the financial fiasco that has rocked Wall Street.

That face was Richard S. Fuld Jr., the Lehman chief executive who sat for a two-hour-plus grilling before the House Oversight and Government Reform Committee as the panel combed through his pay history, management practices and financial strategies.

“You made all this money by taking risks with other people’s money,” Rep. Henry Waxman, D-Calif., the panel’s chairman, said. “The system worked for you, but it didn’t seem to work for the rest of the country and the taxpayers, who now have to pay $700 billion to bail out our economy.”

While Fuld testified to taking full responsibility for the decisions he made, that also included compensation system that paid him $350 million, from 2000 to 2007 was appropriate. I don’t know how these men sleep at night, knowing their greed for the most part created this financial nightmare.

Waxman unearthed a very incriminating e-mail that made Fuld’s look like the true villain that he is. The committee also found documentation of planned bonuses.

The panel unearthed internal documents showing that on Sept. 11, Lehman planned to approve “special payments” worth $18.2 million for two executives who were terminated involuntarily, and another $5 million for one who was leaving on his own.

Waxman released e-mail correspondence from June 2008 in which Fuld dismissed the suggestion from executives at a Lehman subsidiary that the company’s top people forgo bonuses to “send a strong message to both employees and investors that management is not shirking accountability for recent performance.”

Fuld tried to pass off to the committee that he is haunted by this and that “This is a pain that will stay with me for the rest of my life,” he said. Sorry, but I have no sympathy for a man that earned almost half a billion dollars in less than eight years. Fuld didn’t earn it honestly, he made it off of deals that paid the most commission, not ones that would have protected the corporations integrity and bottomline. After the committee is finished with him, my suggestion is that his new residence be a federal prison where he can contemplate all the misery and suffering he has caused.