AIG, Clueless Again on Exec Bonuses
I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again. It’s in incredibly bad taste to give out 7-figure bonuses to the execs who drove your company (and the whole economy) to ruin while holding your hand out to collect billions in government bailouts. Worse than the auto CEOs flying separate corporate jets to go begging in Washington, at about $20K a pop. This is simply an outrage. Bonuses are supposed to reward performance. This performance is not worth rewarding, and taxpayers shouldn’t be funding these bonuses.
President Obama ordered Secretary Geithner to use “every single legal avenue to block these bonuses and make the American taxpayers whole.” I totally support his call. And I look forward to seeing these thieving and clueless pretenders to the throne of economic wisdom grovel before Congress tomorrow.
Of course, if the execs are smart, they’ll donate their huge bonuses to the recovery effort. And if they’re not, it wouldn’t surprise me if they find themselves the victims of physical attacks on their homes or their persons. I don’t condone that kind of violence (in fact, I don’t condone violence at all), but it would be a predictable result of this kind of class warfare mentality, and they should not be shocked to see angry mobs at their gated communities. People have lost their homes, lost their jobs, because of the incompetence of these executives and the companies they operate. To take home bonuses several times the size of the typical American paycheck under these circumstances has no positive benefit, it only serves to incite.
This is OUR money these companies are squandering, after all.
