I see a landslide a comin

I know AIG is really bad and all, but I really, really hate comcast. Gotta go with my heart on this one.

Sorry Comcast, you tried your best, but as a cable company you just don't have the ability to be as harmful as an insurance company (or whatever a behemoth like AIG really is).

C'mon America I know you want Comcast to win here!

@PSN: kingpsyz: @tc4b: I agree. And especially for 2009. While overall Comcast is a much worse company, AIG this past year has just been ridiculous.

AIG FTW.

Bah, the contest is rigged this year with too much media induced outrage.

C'mon Comcast! Screw up my cable line once more and acheive what is yours!

No contest. I can also attest that my vote was not influenced by any particular association with either company...I don't have any AIG investments, and Comcast isn't even available in my area.

Maybe next year, Comcast. I know you'll be training for it, you customer-serviceless bastards.

AIG is clearly going to win, and with good reason, but I think Comcast warrants some type of runner up prize. Especially that it took AIG to beat them, which should speak volumes.

@PSN: kingpsyz: Yeah, probably so but I had to go with Comnasty over AIG. I can almost chalk AIG's stupidity up to one collective brain injury or something but Comnasty has a long-standing record of customer hatred.

No contest here. Even Ticketmaster gave AIG more of a fight.

Comcast will win once the economy recovers, I have faith!

I think AIG's revised accounting coming just in time for this final matchup was a little too convenient. It's like they were saving it for the finals to ensure a big win.

Well if that was the plan, it worked on me.

@chucklebuck: Can we make the golden poo award extra big and smelly this year?

@Eryk: Totally agreed. Comcast's management should really take it to heart that they are doing it wrong if they end up in this position in the contest repeatedly.

I'd say that this year AIG surely has to win as far as overall evil, but Comcast wins as far as worst consumer-service company. AIG's evil was not really caused by their sales directly to consumers.

Heh, blaming AIG. It's sort of like someone tossed a molotov into a landfill and the flammable trash is going to jail.

Comcast deserves some type of mini-turd award. Make it happen, Consumerist.

@ADismalScience: explain.

It is more about the effect one has caused over the other. You don't need to have any business dealings with AIG to have been affected by them. Whereas Comcast is still bad, and deserves a silver poo... Not everyone is feeling the brunt of their bad business practices.

@johnva: Well put.

Shouldn't we call AIG by their new name? I believe they want to be called Herpes now. Gotta admit, it's a less repulsive name.

@ADismalScience: No. It's more like we're blaming the person who made the molotov cocktail instead of the person who lit or threw it.

Booyeah! AIG FTW!

One Hyphenated Word: Co-Champions!!!!!

I called this a while back, there really wasn't any true competition to AIG this year. Comcast may get the lifetime achievement award though.

@lawnmowerdeth: I agree.

@B: Between this comment, and the adoption of the term Hamthrax, I could laugh for a solid 20 minutes.

@johnva: @Eryk: The fact that Comcast is getting at least a third of the vote right now really shows how terribly they treat their customers. I hate you Comcast.

Gotta give props to AIG for coming out with a new story on the even bigger bonus fiasco on the eve of the finals! They really wanted it this year.

While I'm not so much affected by having to bail out AIG, and unable to have comcast service (unless they decide to lay a second transatlantic cable just for me) I will have to vote AIG.
Those bastards are denying the insurance claim on my car, and that wins them for me.
(Damn baggette wielding french drunk that totaled my GTI)

Although AIG has certainly received an enormous amount of media attention (and well deserved at that), as a company, I will have to go with Comcast.

And I'm basing my decision not off of how much damage either company has done, but rather by the amount of bad policies, poor customer service, and just general company practices that I've read about that happen within the companies themselves.

Overall, this is really a tough decision >< Shoot, I've changed my mind twice already within the span it took to write this!!

@ADismalScience: "You're like a little girl mad at her brother cuz you lost his ball" - Jack White

A, to the I, to the muthaf***in' G!

@chucklebuck: AIG is definitely a clutch player. When it comes down to the wire, they know how to make a play happen.

@lawnmowerdeth: So, you don't think the outrage directed at AIG is justified?

@Sean Masters:

AIG's debt insurance business blew up because it formulated derivative contracts on debt securities that all correlated to one. But it was operating with bad ratings, misrepresented and/or hard-to-determine valuations, and has had its role as a financing conduit for other banks deliberately misrepresented in the press. It built its CDS business on trash paper, but it didn't start the fire. Mortgages and mortgage-backed securities did. That AIG is continuing to receive bailout money so it can pay out contracts on those - and not being allowed to go bankrupt so the company can continue to act as a political cover organization for very large bailouts to what are generally considered "good" banks as well as offshore entities - is not AIG's fault. The company is being made into a sham and a scapegoat.

AIG still gets my vote just due to their synthetic coal tax credit scheme. While legal, it cost the US tax payers millions (at least $875 million) and helped keep AIG on the path to destroying all...

[www.businessmirror.com.ph]

excerpted from the above link:
Unexpected directions

Financial Products' drive to keep ahead of its competitors took the firm in unexpected directions. It developed a reputation as an innovator with one of the most diverse toolboxes in the derivatives business.

That's how Cassano and his Transaction Development Group found coal.

For a group of financial wizards, the coal business seemed an odd turn. But it was a logical extension of what the firm had been doing all along: discovering gaps in regulations and markets.

A 1980 law, generated by the Carter administration, offered tax credits to companies as incentives to design and use synthetic fuel systems. The aim was to reduce US dependence on foreign oil.

Associates at the Transaction Development Group had discovered that many energy companies were not making enough money to benefit from the tax breaks. But Financial Products' profitable parent, AIG, could use those credits to reduce its tax bill.

"One thing AIG had was ample income," Savage said. "So what we did is, we went out and we bought synthetic coal facilities."

The firm had no intention of becoming coal processors. Instead, it arranged to install the equipment-bought for more than $225 million, as Savage recalls-at coal facilities and power plants. The facilities leased and operated the machines at a discount, while AIG got millions in tax credits.

Financial Products hedged aspects of the deals, and checked with government officials to make sure the arrangements qualified for the breaks. Savage said the idea was bold as well as clever. "We had the gumption to go out and take seven of these plants that were sitting around doing nothing," he said. "We carted [the machines] off to where they could be used, and it went on."

Greenberg, too, was taken with the gambit. "It was opportunistic," he said recently. He once joked that he wanted to ride shotgun in the truck carting the machines around, Savage said.

Over the next few years, AIG reaped $875 million in benefits from the deals. It was a coup for Cassano and his group. Although it wasn't Cassano's idea, Savage said, he guided it from concept to reality.

"He says he thought about it for six months," said Savage, who came to appreciate Cassano's single-minded focus. "He made a lot of money for the company."

$875 million plus kept a shady technology going...

@ADismalScience: More like someone who, among others, dumped flammable trash into a landfill, then lit the molotov, threw it, and profited from it.

@Eryk: Agreed.

AIG is a screwed up company, which I could care less about since they never done nothing to me (other then take my tax money, but I blame the government more then I do AIG)

Comcast - They screw consumers directly. (AIG screwed them indirectly).

Even though Comcast will lose, I believe they should get some sort of runner up prize.

... Maybe a golden toilet or golden painted toilet seat or something similar.

@tc4b:
No, there are a lot worse shenanigans going on with the bailouts than AIG bonuses.

I bet customer-wise, Comcast has screwed a lot more people.

@tc4b: I think some of it is, but a lot more of it comes from people with a very limited understanding of finance, law and business assuming the position of a knowledgable authority armed with nothing more than a 2 minute segment on economics from their local news. In other words, people don't understand what's going on and are reacting to things the media tells them without bothering to process and fact-check on their own.

@TheBursar: Agreed, I think Ticketmaster vs AIG was the bigger matchup.

Now a real close fight would be Ticketmaster vs Comcast. I'd really enjoy seeing that. Monopoly vs Monopoly!

@tc4b:

It's probably we avoid turning this thread into some sort of horribly metaphor torture chamber?

@ADismalScience: Yeah, who started it anyhow? Cripes.

@Belabras: Or FTL, as it were.

Looks like AIG will manage to retain its crown.

@TinkishDelight: You're making a lot of assumptions about those people you're looking down your nose at.

@lawnmowerdeth: So, outrage isn't justified unless the company is the absolute worst? In my mind, AIG did plenty to earn the hate heaped on it. Just because another company did more doesn't absolve AIG.