“Criticism of AIG paying bonuses to its employees after being bailed out by U.S. taxpayers is as bad as murdering thousands of African Americans by hanging during the reign of terror know as Jim Crow. That’s what the CEO of AIG said.

“Worse, AIG’s CEO believes that this is actually what was “intended” by the uproar and criticism of the bonus payments. It clearly never occurred to him that such criticism and outrage might be justified on the merits. It has also apparently never occurred to him that the pain and suffering inflicted on Main Street by AIG’s and Wall Street’s reckless if not criminal trading and investments might give rise to such criticism.

“Forgotten now is that these tens of millions of dollars in bonus payments to already unimaginably rich people were made in March of 2009 as unemployment was skyrocketing, the stock market was crashing, and people’s jobs, retirements, savings, and dreams were literally disappearing. Economic insecurity and fear of the future was gnawing at the dinner table of most American families who were struggling to get by because they were real victims of the Wall Street-caused financial crash.

“Now, five years after the worst financial collapse since 1929 which caused the worst economy since the Great Depression and Wall Street executives still think they did nothing wrong, still deserve all their bonuses and are still totally blind to egregious damage they have done to everyone else. Worse, anyone who disagrees with them is just a “pitchfork” rabble rouser with ‘hangman nooses.'”

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Read Dennis Kelleher’s full Huffington Post blog post here