To Understand AIG, You Have to know C.V. Starr

AIG is currently in a legal battle with its old CEO and perhaps greatest booster and benefactor, Maurice Greenberg, who took the company from a small maritime and cargo insurer with some clients in the Pacific market to the world's largest insurance company, and no. 7 in the world.

"Mo" or "Hank" Greenberg allegedly took or mismanaged or misappropriated $4.3 billion in trust fund assets of an AIG entity Starr International, also formerly known as C.V. Starr & Company. This company Greenberg argues is a stand-alone, independent, non-affilated company in no way owned or influenced by AIG, at least on paper no doubt anyway. And probably not in the course of conduct, another legal argument which may have legs. But by no means believe that is the truth - AIG is C.V. Starr & Co. and the reverse is even more true....as noted:

Cornelius Vander Starr
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Cornelius Vander Starr (October 15, 1892 – December 20, 1968), an American businessman and Office of Strategic Services operative who founded the American International Group (AIG) insurance corporation.

(a 1910s - WWI young man, a 1920s 30-something wildcatter in China, a 1950s and 60s gray flannel suit guy. btw - did you say OSS? as in pre-CIA? probably for both wars)

Starr was born in Fort Bragg, California, where his Dutch father was a railroad engineer. He began his first business, selling ice-cream, at the age of nineteen. In 1914, he moved to San Francisco, where he sold auto insurance by day while studying for the California bar exam.

He joined the U.S. army in 1918 but was not sent overseas. Instead, he joined the Pacific Mail Steamship Company as a clerk in Yokohama, Japan. Later that year, he travelled to Shanghai where he worked for several insurance businesses.

(note the American West, the railroads, the Dutch of that time - who were racist and brutal - and his unusual but not necessarily unpredictable move to Asia. America was moving west alright, and they needed an agent on the ground there, up comes this young new recruit. what was his draw to Asia?)

In 1919 he founded AIG, then known as "American Asiatic Underwriters". AIG left China in early 1949, as Mao Zedong led the advance of the Communist People's Liberation Army on Shanghai,[1][2] and Starr moved the company headquarters to its current home in New York City.[3] AIG was once the world's largest insurance company, and the sixth-largest company in the United States according to the 2007 Forbes Global 2000 list.

(the name AAU says it all. the intent was to exploit the Asain shipping markets of that day. how was he able to start an insurance company after being there no more than a year? i dunno, but it was all good, until Mao said enuf. now i understand why...the West was destroying his country and his people, and he had had enuf.....so take the money and run. btw, they didn't even build the building. AIG was thought to be what at that time they were for sure, a 2nd rate company that couldn't even afford to build its own skyscraper palace, it had to buy one used...)

The C. V. Starr East Asian Library at Columbia University was named for Starr in recognition of an endowment gift by C. V. Starr Foundation in 1981. The C. V. Starr East Asian Library at the University of California, Berkeley was completed and dedicated in October 2007.

(guilt breeds philanthropy. think carnegie, rockefeller, gates, ford - all monopolists, all ruthless against the competition, seen as mean-spirited. these are the people that due to their cruelty to real people they have to build mounuments of stone to show they were actually good people instead)

Starr is the uncle of lawyer and former solicitor general Kenneth Starr. (sheesh - who knew? can you spell Richard Scaife?)

So what have we learned? Well, if the company can say anything, it can say the corporate culture was driven by a philosophy one should re-examine a little closer. It's the product of a person who lurked in the dark corners of the world as a spy, whose company may well have been a front company for the American intelligence community, a smuggler of information or whatever else. Someone and something that was set up to serve the purpose of America.

SO is the largest insurer in the world a hybrid hidden office of the CIA? Could that be the pose for which this lady strikes? It would be a good cover for a vast many of its executives to come to and interact and exchange. The money's close by too, so they have access when they need it. What a perfect cover ......

We have learned that Mr. Starr was if nothing else a mysterious man of modern day America. Not a Rockefeller or Gates, whose names you know. And not seasoned icons you know by name...you know you're in good hands with Allstate, or that State Farm is there, or you're under the umbrella of Travelers, or even who that duck is - AFLAC! You know Barclays sounds like the Brits, or Generali sounds like Italia (but you may not know that they sold policies to the Jews, but never paid on them for death during and after WWII)...even Tokio Marine you know is from Japan, or at least Asia, but AIG? You just never knew, never heard of them until now (unless you were born after 1990).

Own a Piece of the Rock - Like a Good Neighbor!

So now AIG is struggling with stock prices of $1.53 share as of June 15th 2009. Very bad. And 70% of it is owned by the U.S. government - oh that's right, US! So given that, it really makes sense to learn something about what you bought. Given the gas, maintenance and care you're gonna hafta give it, you might as well know the lemon you've bought into. Enjoy!!