A couple of days ago, I “reported” some of the Dutch reaction to the Netherlands’ version of our AIG scandal in “The Netherlands ‘AIG.‘”
The Dutch “version” being the ING Group, that is reported to have paid out 300 million euros (about $405 million) in bonuses to thousands of its employees despite the company’s steep losses.
As part of the Dutch reaction, I mentioned, “While I don’t think legions of Dutch “boeren” (farmers) armed with pitch forks have been marching on the Dutch Parliament or on ING headquarters, as has been allegorized in our country, there has been a lot of outrage.” I was referring to stories in the U.S. media allegorizing that angry mobs of citizens armed with pitch forks would be marching on Congress and on AIG offices and homes of AIG employees.
I wrote [I] reported, above, in quotation marks, because I am not a reporter.
However, a real reporter, Freek Staps, one of the Dutch NRC Handelsblad’s US correspondents joined “a name-and-shame bus tour of the affluent houses of AIG employees in Connecticut” and is reporting on Americans’ reactions to the AIG scandal.
In, “Americans vent their anger at AIG employees,” Staps writes:
After almost three years of listening to macro-economic abstractions like ‘real estate bubble’, ‘bad assets’ and ‘toxic loans’ made by faceless banks that couldn’t be confronted, Americans seem to have found their scapegoat: the employees of insurance giant AIG who received millions of dollars in bonuses while their activities were at least partly responsible for the current crisis. Suddenly the credit crunch has an address. It has a double front door, three chimneys and a front yard with private guards standing on the lawn.
Staps then proceeds to describe his experience aboard “Bus 650, a rickety old vehicle with a barely attached ceiling and encrusted snot on the brown upholstery of the seats,” and how bus 650 “struggles with the rolling hills in this park-like upscale residential area in Connecticut. This is where several employees of insurance giant AIG reside – the ones who received millions of dollars in bonuses even after AIG had to be rescued with a government bail-out.”
Read Staps’ entire, interesting report here.
The report also has an imbedded slideshow of the “bus tour,”
The author is a retired U.S. Air Force officer and a writer.