AIG CEO Compares Bonus Anger to Lynching

Talk about false equivalence. In a wide-ranging interview with The Wall Street Journal, AIG CEO Robert Benmosche compared the public anger and government targeting of bonuses paid by AIG in 2008 and 2009 after the insurer was bailed out to the horrific racial violence suffered by African-Americans in the 19th and 20th centuries. Criticism over the insurer’s practice of paying large bonuses—even though AIG needed an infusion of $182 billion in public funds to stay alive—“was intended to stir public anger, to get everybody out there with their pitch forks and their hangman nooses, and all that—sort of like what we did in the Deep South [decades ago]. And I think it was just as bad and just as wrong.”