That is what I read, that AA was a good company which got nuked on account of a few bad apples. This was Enron/AA, circa 2001, and the net job loss of around 85,000 meant that when it happened again on a grander scale, Too Big To Fail was the result. Politicians didn't have the stomach for that many white collar job losses, especially in that economy. They were probably right. We were on the brink of another Great Depression and that wasn't the time to be moralistic about corruption. It really wasn't.