Wednesday, March 18, 2009

“All or Part” Is Not Nearly Enough.


Ed Liddy, a man making $1 a year as the new head of insurance giant AIG said that some of his executives have begun returning all or part of bonuses they were paid, totaling some $165,000,000.

I don’t think it’s a magnanimous, charitable or an honest act. -That executives are willing to give back money they didn’t earn, is an act of contrition made possible only by the fact that the average American is out for blood and politicians are listening fearfully to the collective outrage.

Imagine that you’ve lost your job and then your home. Imagine that you read in a newspaper on the way to an unemployment office that executives at an insurance company are being given bonuses. Imagine that those executives are the same business people responsible for billions of losses of dollars reflected in your 401k or stock vested pension plan. Imagine the nightmare of 21st century America. Imagine our America, imagine our world today my friends. Our world; where the unethical abuses and criminality of the financial elite bankrupts faraway nations like Iceland.

Just because executives signed contracts that were negotiated before shareholders and the public knew the criminal negligence they were undertaking on a daily basis, doesn’t mean those agreements should be honored. The contracts in question were not honored by the executives who signed them: bonuses are not given out for failures and losses. These contracts are part and parcel at the heart of the problem in the modern financial world. These contracts are in and of themselves fraudulent. If we the people had not bailed out AIG, those self same contracts would not be worth the paper on which they were signed.

Yet Ed Liddy wants the contracts to be honored and paid, -for fear of losing institutional knowledge.

These AIG executives who constructed failed creative investment instruments and greedily gambled on securitized mortgage packages should be incentivized to remain at AIG in lieu of
PRISON.
The mandate from Liddy to AIG should have been along the lines of a command to straighten the mess out, or he'd then open the door for the cops and federal government:
Fix the garbled scams originating at AIG or throw the executives in jail and wring the details out of those financiers in a lengthy trial.

I’ve been saying it since October: not enough people are going to jail over these crimes. If it was known that a certain man stole a $50 at gun point, there’d be no question of his arrest, but in the world of finance, thieves operate openly and are emboldened to break more laws to get at more money under the guise of propping up a so-called wounded financial and banking system.

House Democratic leaders announced plans for a vote tomorrow on legislation to reclaim the bonuses indirectly by taxing 91 percent of the AIG executive bonuses and also other bail out recipients.


That’s just fucking stupid.


And it’s probably not even constitutional. What the government should do is take all of the money back and start prosecuting everyone involved. Not enough people are going to jail over this financial meltdown. They should never have gotten a penny, not any of them. I have not agreed with any part of this bail out. Not for the automakers, not for these crooks at AIG.

Bail out the American worker.
The American worker is in debt. The American worker is the one being taxed for the bail out. It’s the American worker’s own money. Let the American worker’s tax-backed bail out trickle up to AIG and others, otherwise, put a someone from the treasury department in charge of companies like AIG, and make them report monthly to the congress.

Make them accountable to us. All or part of our money back is not nearly enough.

-SJ

1 comment:

Jack Jodell said...

I agree completely that the American worker is the one in need of a bailout. Today's "executive class" is a joke. They are a worthless bunch of pampered crybabies with a sense of entitlement dwarfing that of a very spoiled small child. Their arrogance and condescension knows no bounds. To lavishly reward failure and non-productive speculation with "retention bonuses" is un-American and simply welfare for the rich. And "asking" these goofs to voluntarily return half or better of the money is a joke too. These losers deserve a "DETENTION Bonus": Strip them of their bank accounts, homes, yachts, jets, and expensive automobiles and relocate them to Harlem in public housing on welare wages for 6 full months. Maybe after that these losers will finally get a clue and understand what is truly meant by the phrase they love to use so often on regular workers and the poor, "You don't get something for nothing." It is high time we stop coddling this group of scammers. If they're unhappy with getting only the exorbitant salaries they already get, let them relocate to China. We don't want or need these parasites here!