Iowa senator urgest AIG execs to commit suicide Japanese-style

Charles Grassley is a Republican Iowa senator, and he's angry. Angry at AIG execs for paying themselves $165 million in bonuses even after the federal bailout; something even Prez Obama opposes. Instead of trying to paraphrase, let me just quote him:

...the first thing that would make me feel a little bit better toward them if they'd follow the Japanese example and come before the American people and take that deep bow and say, I'm sorry, and then either do one of two things: resign or go commit suicide.And in the case of the Japanese, they usually commit suicide before they make any apology.

Hmmm. Okay. Later, the guy's spokesperson explained that Grassley didn't actually want the AIG peeps to commit suicide; he simply wanted them to take responsibility. But he still maintained that the Japanese have a tendency to commit suicide.

There's a major distinction that Grassley should be aware of here—Japanese execs who fuck up kill themselves when they feel that their shame is too heavy for them to carry on living; in the AIG case, clearly the execs are acting completely shameless even after all the screwing up they did.

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Comments

[Dragonfang18]

Yeah... And American execs are greedy too.

They drain the lives of their American workers to increase their profit to survive the depression.

The only good CEO I heard of was the Japan Airlines president who gets paid less than his pilots, because the pilots and flight attendants do the "dirty work" for the company which causes income.

That was a long while ago too!

[Jeff]

This is an example of the subtle racism against Asians that's still there in a lot of American society...

A lot of people love Asian culture (maybe not Japan specifically), but they clearly don't understand it, nor do they make an attempt at understanding it. So even when they're trying to make a point at how whatever Asian culture is superior to ours in some way, they end up overgeneralizing and coming off as patronizing. "Oh yeah, those Japanese execs all commit suicide whenever they do bad. Everybody knows that!" Duh.