I think I'm happy with this.

[velvetpage]

A bill to take back 90% of bonus money paid to executives at companies receiving bailout money has passed in Congress.

I'm amused at the Republican posturing, though: "We could have gotten it ALL back! We would never have given that money to those companies in the first place! Wah wah wah why didn't you vote for us?" Yeah, guys, your legislation wasn't any better. I'm not saying the current bailout legislation was good - I just don't know enough about it to make that judgement. What I'm saying is, no matter who was in power, they had to be seen to be doing something quickly, and in that situation, there are bound to be mistakes made. I don't believe the Republicans would have done it any better - in fact I think they would have done significantly worse because their ideology still relies on the concept of the open market.

Comments

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

There are some relatively good arguments for keeping those bonuses in place. One of the more compelling ones I read cautioned against the message the retraction would send to financial professionals across the industry. In other words, if some whim of an elected official could strip pay earned(I use the term loosely), then no one will step up to work in what is now a dismal setting.

However... I see things differently still. For thirty years, many employees with contracts have had their contracts renegotiated by their employers, often with Federal Government pressure. These employees have been teachers, FAA staffers, Airline pilots and crews, auto workers and so on. If you have made less than $100k(probably less than $250K) per year, at some time in the past twenty years, you have had to forgo raises for one or more years or have put up with them being pathetically small. I know I have only once in my career ever gotten a meaningful raise by staying in a job(I tend to jump up by switching jobs, but I'd rather not have to do that). Every year it seems, people in working to middle class jobs are asked in at least one sector to make a sacrifice for their the company. The salary/wage stagnation is even worse for public sector employees, especially salaried ones. On this hand, all I gotta say to the AIG executives the rest is "Join the club, pals. You're bit late, but the party's just getting started".

What's happening right now is that people in the US are now finally fed up with an economic system that is closed to most. In the lower 48 here, we're pissed that there have been two sets of rules and only one set of players or rather playing pieces that feel consequences of rule violations.

[velvetpage.livejournal.com]

One more reason to be glad I'm a Canadian public servant: my union is strong enough and my government committed enough to democratic socialist ideals that we have not experienced that kind of wage stagnation (though the Boards of Education have tried, along with at least one Conservative government.)

I agree with you - it's time for those executives to get back to the real meaning of the word "bonus," which is, "Extra money for a job well done." They haven't done a good job, let alone an excellent job, and there is no extra money, so there should be no bonus.

Also, honestly? I doubt anyone in the financial sector is going to jump ship unless they're forced to, over a simple matter of disappearing bonuses, for the simple reason that there aren't a lot of places to go.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

The big reason why bonuses were paid is that the execs who have stayed are going to be eating giant shit burgers every day, every 12 hour + day, for the time it takes to wind their unit down. They are going to be working a grim job with duties that include being scapegoats. An awful lot of these guys have left with the money they already stole from the global economy. Why some of that crowd are getting the bonuses is beyond me, though. These bonuses were for retention, not performance. The execs were paid to essentially be undertakers.

The real problem is not the bonuses paid now, the issue here is what happened. These guys were securing derivatives on slices of bundled bonds that secured mortgages and slices of bundles of mortgages. You have to a great many levels down before you can even find an ownership stake in anything. These guys were playing games of chance that they don't even allow in Vegas. The problem was that they managed to keep the winnings while they put the losses off on someone else, namely governments around the world. These guys were operating in a total moral and ethical vacuum. That's the larger problem. I'm a professional these days. I follow a code of ethics and conduct that both guide and bind me. I will leave an employer that tries to make go back on that and I have a professional association that'll back me up(sort of). Business people are, in no sense, professionals and they operate only a sense of individual ethics which, in my experience, is almost totally absent.

[dagoski.livejournal.com]

Just so y'all know, I'm pulling numbers out of my nether regions. This is what's known as a rant. Expect neither logic nor rigor.

[morpheus0013.livejournal.com]

I think I stated my problem with this the other day, which was that I don't feel it's ethically correct to go back and levy this type of tax after the fact. Fix the current laws so that this can't happen AGAIN--that I'm fine with. I don't even know if this is legally sound, let alone Constitutional, and aside from all that, I don't believe in meeting crappy ethics with crappy ethics. And the posturing on both sides is completely ridiculous. (The idea of Republicans saying they wouldn't have given corporate big wigs bonus money? EPIC LULZ.)

It's troublesome to me, but then again, this whole thing is troublesome.

[bodhifox.livejournal.com]

What percentage of the money we've given to AIG is being used for bonuses? Not much. What about the rest? Being paid to banks and hedge funds who best the housing market would tank, including other institutions that are getting their own bailouts. There's the moral issue. If AIG bet against them, and then lost, why do we need to cover their bets?

[athelind.livejournal.com]

I'm amused at the Republican posturing, though: "We could have gotten it ALL back! We would never have given that money to those companies in the first place! Wah wah wah why didn't you vote for us?" Yeah, guys, your legislation wasn't any better.

If I understand correctly, the AIG bailout money ISN'T from the current bill. It's part of the wad of cash that the Repugnicans doled (http://dictionary.reference.com/search?q=dole) out under Dubya.