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The worst company in America?
Consumerist.com is having a little poll/tournament to decide the worst company in America. The Final Four was AIG vs Ticketmaster and Bank of America vs Comcast. Can you guess who's in the championship?
It's AIG and Comcast!
To get to the finals, #1 AIG took down #32 Target, #17 Peanut Corporation of America, #9 Walmart and #5 Ticketmaster. AIG is hardly a surprise, but Ticketmaster looked like it might pull off the upset based on some of the comments I read:
Once AIG gets detangled, they can go the way of the dodo, so I'm not too worried about them. They played a big part insuring against garbage, but they didn't create the garbage to begin with.
TicketMaster has my vote. These douchebags charge you money to print a PDF. Why does it cost $2 to print a PDF? They're the epitome of a monopoly; they squash any competition, collude to effectively block competition by locking venues into exclusivity, and they bribe every congressman to look the other way.
Comcast's run through the tournament included stomping #30 DirecTV, #14 Capital One, and #11 GM. I don't know. GM!
I'm pretty sure AIG's gonna take it in a landslide. I think GM vs AIG would've been an interesting matchup.
But if you have a different Final Four and champion, let me know. You can also vote on the consumerist.com finals here.
I was going to pick Ticketmaster but they wanted to charge me a $5 convenience charge for using the internet and a $3 "delivery charge" to print out the bracket on my own computer. On top of that they had already given first choices to some broker in Las Vegas while I was waiting in the queue.
Hah! I love the little "Not sponsored by" on the chart.
(Liked Ivette's comment too!)
The big problem with the playoff format, however, is it gives no sense of How Much worse is the winner than the loser. Looking over this list of teams, I wonder if it would have been fairer to just declare a 32-way tie.
I think there are a lot of worse companies on that list than AIG.
To quote one on of the responders on the consumerist site:
"Blaming AIG for the meltdown is kind of like if someone were to throw a Molotov cocktail into a landfill and everyone blamed the garbage for the fire"
Since it's AIG, then it should specify AIG Financial Products Corporation (why pick on the good companies under the AIG umbrella?) And if AIG Financial Products...uh...you have to put the gov't in there since they allowed for no regulations on derivatives AT ALL. Sell all you can, boys! Make this country rich! The CFMA of 2000, passed by our gov't. Brooksely Born (head of the Commission on Futures said is this was passed that the deregulation of derivatives could lead to an economic meltdown. Greenspan, Rubin, and Summer all told her to shut up and went straight to Congress. Born did too, but guess who Congress listened to? Without the CFMA of 2000 passed by our lovely gov't, there would be no meltdown, or not in the way it occurred. So please differentiate between the company in AIG that caused the problem---the other 200 plus did not, are average American citizens and are taxpayers too. And their jobs are in jeopardy--and they had ZERO to do with FP. Only the same "parent." The country has been totally uneducated on this whole issue. It's been inexcusable. Look up the Congressional record of who voted for the CFMA of 2000 and then see who is Congress is doing all the blaming now (many who voted yea! Which is most of them.) Doesn't matter the party.
