Today the New York Times reported that AIG, a company that has received two bailouts in less than six months, is planning on rewarding it’s incompitent executives over $168 million in bonuses. How can we continue to let them take advantage of the American people? The lawyers for AIG say that they are contractually obligated to give these bonuses, yet they lost so much money last year that they had to take two bailouts from the government. Last time I checked you only get bonuses when your company does well and profits, not when it splutters and almost dies.
To me it sounds more like they broke an obligation to the American people to use the bailout money wisely to build business for the company. Instead we have bank management lining their pockets with our tax dollars. I am scared that their next step is to let the company collapse so that they won’t have to pay the money back at all. At this point I don’t see any reason why we should trust the upper management of AIG. So instead of continuing with their games and their bullshit the government should step in and give them two options. Either they give us back all the bailout money, because they obviously didn’t need it if they had enough left over to pay as bonuses. Or they step aside and let the company be nationalized, whoa I got carried away. Calming breath… Ok, sorry that would be a step towards Communism. Scratch that, we already own a large stake in them from this. Lets just replace all the execs, our nation has shareholder power now. Put in people that are not controlled by the government (yikes, that will be difficult to find). Then any profits from the company will be shared with the American people and thus reduce our taxes (seeing as we have shareholder status and dividends could be helpful once the company is profitable again).
If we do nationalize step in to cut out the cancerous growth at AIG then when it happens all of these executives should be fired and given no severance pay. Make examples of these fools and bring them up on criminal charges. Then replace them with men and women that make significantly less, but that still make a fair amount for the work they do. It is time to get rid of the old guard in politics and business. They are just a rotting, necrotic cancer on business and society.
Here is the NY Times article: http://www.nytimes.com/2009/03/16/business/16aig.html?_r=1&hp
-Pjerky
Tags: AIG, bailout, Congress, Consumer Rights
