There is no denying that corporate officers have completely lost touch with reality in regard to bonuses, fixing up offices, flying around in corporate jets, etc. Perhaps one good thing that might come out of all this is that stockholders may look more carefully at the egregious and obscene salaries/bonuses handed out to mere mortals. No person on this planets is worth a golden parachute in the tens or hundreds of millions of dollars.

Notwithstanding my statement above, I believe it is none of the government's business to interfere in what executives are paid or how they run their business, unless of course, the government is lending money to that business; however, all this chest-pounding coming out now is rather disingenuous. Why were these same Congressmen and Senators not minding the store all these years when it came to taxpayer monies spent on absurd and wasteful government projects?

And after all the yelling and screaming it seems that the AIG bonuses were in fact deserved ¹.

Apropos the new Obamanation, my attorney friend BW sent me this:

I recently asked my friends' little girl what she wanted to be when she grows up. She said she wanted to be President some day.

Both of her parents, liberal Democrats, were standing there, so I asked her, 'If you were President what would be the first thing you would do? '

She replied, 'I'd give food and houses to all the homeless people.'

Her parents beamed.

'Wow....what a worthy goal.' I told her, 'But you don't have to wait until you're President to do that. You can come over to my house and mow the lawn, pull weeds, and sweep my yard, and I'll pay you $50. Then I'll take you over to the grocery store where the homeless guy hangs out, and you can give him the $50 to use toward food and a new house. '

She thought that over for a few seconds, then she looked me straight in the eye and asked, ' Why doesn't the homeless guy come over and do the work, and you can just pay him the $50? '

I said, 'Welcome to the Republican Party.'

Her parents still aren't speaking to me.

Notes

(1):

Powerline, Highlights From the Hill, Part II

One significant point that emerged from the testimony of AIG's Edward Liddy is that the bonuses that have stirred controversy were all, within AIG's financial products division, retention bonuses, not performance bonuses:

LIDDY: Congressman, I -- I think the contracts that you are reading from have to do with performance bonuses. No performance bonuses at F.P., zero. It's a different issue than the retention bonuses, where we basically said to people, "You have a job. That job's going to go away after you wind down the book of business that you manage. If you'll stay"...

(CROSSTALK)

FRANK: So you're talking about the only bonuses that were paid recently were the retention bonuses?

LIDDY: Yes.
***
Liddy: What we asked them to do was to stay, do a specific amount of work, and if you do that, at the end of that period of time and you've done that work, we will give you a retention bonus. That's what those payments were. So they did the work. They reduced the risk from that $2.7 trillion down to $1.6 trillion. And the American taxpayer is better off because we have less risk.

AIG hired (or retained) employees to supervise and wind down the financial products division's book of business, then well in excess of $2 trillion. Since the business was being wound down, these jobs were not great career opportunities. So AIG entered into agreements with its employees that if they would stay for a given period of time, they would earn a bonus. The bonuses that fueled the current controversy were paid to employees who held up their end of the bargain by remaining with AIG.

So an employee is promised a bonus if he stays on and works another year in what would otherwise be a dead-end job; in reliance on that offer, he stays and works for a year. Now Congress wants the bonus back. It's hard to understand how that comports with anyone's idea of fairness, let alone legality.