AIG staff: We deserve this money

If people voluntarily give back all or part of their bonus money they wont have to break the contracts. That would be nice. It would be even nicer to see people do the right thing of their own volition instead of being forced to by legal action.

Though they are not completely doing it of their own free will, the torches and pitchforks outside the door are a motivating force here.

Perhaps we should gather next at the door of these foreign bankers.

Originally posted by UMayBRite!
Many of them do deserve the money. They were promised it and earned it.

However some of them were involved in questionable business that destroyed AIG for the rest. Whoever was involved in that should forfeit their bonuses and be prosecuted

ya, well, I think I deserve the money I earn also, so....
why is it being used to make them happy??

this is bull!! let the danged companies fall!! or better yet, let's all get together and sell our shares that our fine government forced us to buy, to china, russia, and the arabs!!!!

God, if it was just me, with no one depending on me, no one to get harmed by my actions.....
I would quite my job, go homeless, hungry....just to write my elected officials a letter telling them...
HA HA!!! I ain't paying for all this crap!! Find another sucker!!!

as it is...well, I got my ecig, gonna send a pic to all my elected reps and tell them....
HA!! HA!! I ain't paying for your stupid health care subsidy.....find another sucker!!!

Then this family will be saving as much as we can, and leaving this country as soon as we can! Let some other sucker print your crap, pay for your healthcare, pay for your million dollar bonuses! You're losing this one.

I can kind of see both sides of this.

Case 1: The fat cat high level manager sitting the corner office. One of the ones who made the rules and policies within AIG that caused much of this mess. He doesn't deserve a bonus I think.

Case 2: The working stiff sitting in cubile 5G on floor 6, he's part of dept. 7JQ - Data Maintenance. He may, or may not have any idea of the effects of the policies the manager in Case1 have. He does know that if he doesn't do the job the manager has put in front him - he'll get fired. He was following bad orders. But at the end of the day he's just another working guy doing what his boss tells him to to keep his job. He might very well be entitled to some form of bonus as outlined in his contract in my mind.

Its kind of like if a general gives a stupid order that results in the loss of a battle. Do you punish the general that gave the order - or the troops that carried it out - because if they didn't carry out the order they could get in big trouble?

Let the top management, who is the bottom of responsibility, pay these worthy employees out of their own bank accounts. I bet the bonuses are not that important if it came to that action.

reply to post by Frogs


well, they could add a few lines to the tax codes, add a few lines on their tax forms...
one did you work for a company that recieved bailout money from the fed gov't.
two, did you recieve any bonuses from this employers.
three how much in bonuses did you recieve?
subtract $25,000 from said bonuses...
add this amount to the amount of taxes owed.

that $25,000 is more than many of taxpayers are earning, if we are expected to live on that much, I am sure they will be able to live with their bonuses being that small...
and, more than likely, it won't even affect that "working stiff sitting in cubile 5G on floor 6, he's part of dept." I'm not even going with the idea that they should half of everything over a hundred thousand!
first, obviously, some of them were doing their jobs rather poorly.
and second, their actions have cause many of us a great deal of harm!
it's caused our country a great deal of harm....and well, we ain't seen the worse of it yet! wait till the inflation kicks in!
and we always hear about how the poor have an entitlement mindset. well, tell ya what. my sister and her husband has worked all their lives, they saved, they had IRA's, pensions, and well, they ARE retirement age now, they were just getting set to lay back and enjoy a few years of relaxation!! guess what! Maddoff and friends came along and ripped off a good portion of my brother in law's pension fund, IRA's aren't worth much of anything, and well, to make a long story short.....they can forget about that nice few years of relaxation...
they will probably be way too old and grey to care before they recover from this!
but ya....these guys worked so hard, did such a fine job at their company, they deserve to be able to take money from my sister and her family so they can have their million dollar bonuses???
they deserve to have money taken from the homeless, the hungry, sick people going without medical care....so they can have their million dollar bonus??

now, THAT'S A FEELING OF ENTITLEMENT!!!

I always thought that the reason for getting a bonus in the first place, was because the company did good? Am I wrong? You dont award someone for helping in the collapse of an entire system do you ?
They shouldnt get a dime as far as I am concerned.
I am not one for paying someones bonus with taxpayers dollars, whenthose dollars were supposed to be used to keep them out of bankrupcy. Would they have gotten their bonuses if we didnt bail them out? And if they did, who was going to pay for it?
Our politicians spared our money, without hesitation to bail these people out, and all they did was give their employees bonuses which they DIDNT deserve in the first place.
It doesnt matter HOW MUCH, it matters WHAT IS. And what is, is that they paid for their bonuses with our money, flat out. Did they ask us? No. Did they let us vote on it? No.

[edit on 19-3-2009 by Common Good]

Originally posted by spacedoubt
Are Rich people the new Al-Qaeda? It appears we need a new enemy.

Atlas Shrugged. Who is John Galt?

these people may not deserve their bonuses.
However, there was an agreement made.

Exactly. It's vile that they are getting bonuses for running a company into the ground, but that was the agreement the company made. you can't go backwards in time and break the contract. If so, then you open yourself up for lawsuits which will, in the end, cost taxpayers more money.

Originally posted by Dr Love
Seems like this whole AIG thing is just a dog and pony show to keep the public distracted.

DEFINATELY!! I fully agree with you. (does that scare ya'? )

Originally posted by Common Good
I always thought that the reason for getting a bonus in the first place, was because the company did good?

that's what I thought. That you only got a bonus if you did your job well and the company thrived. But apparently that's not the case.

Ill tell you what they do deserve though, a good swift kick in the $#%s.
That should tell them how we really feel.

I thought this was a really interesting breakdown of the situation:

www.fivethirtyeight.com...

The employees in AIG's Financial Products division (AIGFP) were compensated heavily -- perhaps almost exclusively -- via incentive-based compensation. That is, the employees got a profit share -- a rather generous 30 percent share -- of the earnings their division made by trading credit default options (CDOs) and related assets.

In the fourth quarter of 2007, the market for CDOs went completely to hell, an early casualty of the mortgage crisis. AIG, to that point, had already accumulated about $643 million in bad assets on its books. AIG must have anticipated that it was going to spend most of 2008, and perhaps most of 2009, merely climbing out of its hole rather than turning any sort of profit.

This must have posed something of a problem for the employees in the Financial Products division, since their compensation relied on these trades being profitable. So AIG struck a deal with these employees. It guaranteed them, for 2008 and 2009, the same level of incentive-based compensation that they received in 2007 (except for senior executives, who took a 25 percent haircut), regardless of how the division actually performed. The only requirements were that the employees couldn't quit and couldn't be fired for cause (a much stricter standard than the usual conditions of at-will employment.)...

The thing about these "bonuses", however is that they're not really bonuses, which we usually think of as incentive-based compensation. On the contrary, they are something the opposite of bonuses: they took compensation that had been incentive-based and guaranteed it. It's precisely because that compensation was guaranteed -- not incentive-based -- that it is difficult to undo.

The fundamental issue here what I call asymmetrical agency bias. We as human beings tend to attribute our results to skill when we are performing well, but (bad) luck when we are performing poorly. Thus, AIG was willing to pay its Financial Products employees plenty when their trades were going well (assigning them agency for their profits), but was willing to make plenty of excuses for them ("the severe liquidity crisis", "the effects of rating agency downgrades") once things began to unravel. The employees, likewise, may have felt entitled to some large fraction of the incomes that they had "earned" before, and probably didn't regard themselves as culpable for the losses their trades had begun to take.

As bad as the whole situation is... it is still no excuse for anyone to be sending anyone at AIG death threats for them and their families... that is just plain wrong and ignorant to boot.