From the NY Times (and everywhere else):

The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

[Snip]

In a letter to Mr. Geithner, Edward M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G., said at least some bonuses were needed to keep the most skilled executives.

“We cannot attract and retain the best and the brightest talent to lead and staff the A.I.G. businesses — which are now being operated principally on behalf of American taxpayers — if employees believe their compensation is subject to continued and arbitrary adjustment by the U.S. Treasury,” he wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday.

In plain English, fuck ‘em. How ironic that Liddy is (1) named Liddy, and (2) that he invoked the words “Best and Brightest,” the same phrase being the title of David Halberstam’s classic book on the self-styled geniuses who led us into another national disaster. If AIG needs to retain these people, we might as well cut off the funds now and deal with the inevitable.

The “rapid disenchantment” referred to above, however, does not refer to AIG, but to the administration, one I would like to be fervently cheering for, by the way, which continues to enable these geniuses.

This entry was posted on Sunday, March 15th, 2009 at 3:14 am and is filed under The Political Mindscape. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.