Jon Stewart dedicated the first segment of “The Daily Show” on Thursday to verbally destroying AIG executive Maurice “Hank” Greenberg’s lawsuit against the federal government over the $184.6 billion bailout his company received during the 2008 economic crisis.
“So the essence of Greenberg’s argument is that the banks got special treatment that AIG did not get, to which I say welcome to the f-cking world, buddy. Because that’s what we’ve been mad about forever,” Stewart said. “You’re angry that they wouldn’t lend you at less than 14 percent? Yeah, we hate it too, except it’s called having a credit card. And we don’t sue over those rates, because we can’t.”
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Greenberg, the company’s former CEO and currently one of the largest shareholders, isn’t just mad about the interest rate, either.
He believes the amount of money the government bought 92 percent of the company with was an unfairly low valuation. Again, that figure was $184.6 billion.
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Greenberg’s lawyer compared it to “extortion” in court, but Stewart did the math and reminded Greenberg that AIG was only worth $15.4 billion at the time of the acquisition.
“We paid you more than 1,000 percent of your market value,” Stewart said. “As a general rule, your better extortionists and your better kidnappers, extract money from their victims rather than contribute.”
Stewart boiled down Greenberg’s entire legal argument to this: “Wahhhhhhh! It’s not fair!“
