It’s difficult to think of suicide as anything but negative… though when the person doing it is mixed up in one of the worst financial disasters in modern history, and was rewarded handsomely for his role in having helped to bring the economy down, it begins to lose some of the bad. You begin to think the only bad thing about is the way it forces the media to speak about such people as though they weren’t incredible assholes.
Such is the case with Wednesday’s shocking suicide of Freddie Mac CFO David Kellerman, a man whom we are told posessed “great talents,” and whose “extraordinary work ethic and integrity inspired all who worked with him” Perhaps this is all true. But he was also one of the chief beneficiaries of our modern Kleptomaniacal Oligarchy. Freddie Mac, once a government entity spun off along with sister company Fannie Mae during the 70s, in an effort to facilitate the screwing over of millions of working Americans, I mean, save the government money, has been under investigation ever since being acquired by the government after it essentially collapsed under the weight of its own stinking pile of financial bullshit. Kellermann himself was only appointed CFO in the wake of this takeover, but it’s worth noting that he’d been with the company for 11 years. If he was highly ranked enough to get the CFO position handed to him when the axe fell upon his immediate superiors, it’s almost certain that Kellerman himself was instrumental in guiding Freddie from a questionable but useful facilitator of loans for people who deserve assistance, to co-ruiner of the national economy.
Freddie Mac, you see, helped to ruin our economy in large part thanks to their pivotal position during the recent housing bubble – much like countrywide, they gave shoddy loans given to people with questionable ability to pay, all the while lobbying for fewer regulations on their industry. Such people were instrumental in peddling lies like “housing prices always go up” and “this isn’t a bubble, it’s a sustainable boom”. Of course, Freddie lost billions in 2008 as the inevitable collapse of the housing boom escalated with each defaulted mortgage, and practically overnight the company fell apart.
They were saved in the nick of time by an infusion of 45 billion dollars worth of TARP funds, and since then have been mercilessly monitored by federal agents, strict, relentless oversight that surely led to Kellerman’s reportedly massive weight loss due to stress. Sure, he wasn’t personally under investigation, but Freddie Mac is currently under fire due to the astonishing news that they intend to give out more than a hundred million dollars worth of bonuses this year. That’s hundreds of millions of dollars for jobs well done paid to employees of a company that failed, using money they received from the government. Again, Kellerman wasn’t personally under investigation, but last year he personally received $170,000. He was set to ca-ching himself an additional 680 thousand by the end of 2009.
That Kellerman accepted a bonus at all, given the dismal state of the company and the economy he personally helped to destroy is insulting enough, but the lack of decency and self awareness that allowed him to actually believe he was worth half a million more ought to be a crime in and of itself.
Certainly, as one report alleges, he might have been trying to do the right thing by Freddie Mac. If this is true then he deserves even more scorn for failing miserably to do so. And this still doesn’t excuse his participation in the greatest financial disaster of the last 80 years.
We’ll probably never know why he did it, unless a suicide note emerge. Until conclusive evidence that he wasn’t a parasite surfaces, as far as we’re concerned, he Had it Coming.
That pussy 