If all of the nation's bloggers screamed at once, would it make a sound?
We had an opportunity to answer that question this week when news broke of the bonuses paid by bailed-out insurance giant AIG. The recipient of more than $170 billion in taxpayer money handed out more than $160 million to many of the people who made the bailout necessary.
The outrage was almost universal.
On the conservative side, Rick Moran of Right Wing Nuthouse summed it up.
I am as disgusted and angry as any American over the AIG bonuses given to a bunch of executives whose performance has been so catastrophically bad that in a just and moral society, they would have been in the stocks rather than laughing all the way to the bank with what amounts to our money. (Actually, it's our children's money, but who's counting?) It really is too bad we no longer put violators of the moral order in stocks. The Puritans certainly had the right idea … I'm sure you can see the efficacy of putting all of these bank big shots in the stocks. That way, we can all have a crack at them. We might even consider taking the show on the road, as it were, and go from city to city, town to town, with executives from AIG, Morgan Stanley, Citigroup, Bank of America, and all the other bail out blue noses whose stupidity and utter disregard of good business practices (limiting risk) got us in this mess.
Former Republican presidential candidate Mitt Romney echoed those sentiments at the Corner.
The news that employees at AIG are on the verge of being rewarded $165 million in bonuses at a time when the insurance giant is on the verge of collapse is rightly shocking to taxpayers who have pumped billions into the company to keep it afloat. Of course, the Obama administration was wrong to initially defend the bonuses as contractually obligated. In 1990, I was asked to assume the CEO position at the management consulting firm Bain & Co., then in acute financial distress. The need to restructure was paramount or else the company would fail, leaving 1,000 employees without a job. We renegotiated debt with bankers. We rewrote leases with landlords. We designed a whole new governing system. We also had to convince the founding partners to turn back profits they had already taken out of the company. Of course, we had no legal basis for making such a request, but without a shared sacrifice we couldn't keep the company alive. Generously, the founders returned the money, putting us on a path to stabilizing the firm and turning it over to new leadership. It's difficult to understand why the same lesson about shared sacrifice is lost on AIG's executive team and their government overseers.
And Joe Sudbay at AMERICAblog expressed the anger from the left.
