No one feels as though bonuses to AIG Executives are appropriate.
Bonuses to any company failing to support their product and employees while turning a positive bottom line for company longevity are undeserving. I find it unnecessary and more than crass to align such anger with a reasonable resolve.
The one positive aspect to Senator Grassley's statement is that he is actually blaming the people most responsible for extremely poor decision making and not the new administration that has actually inherited this mess.
The fiscal outcome of eight years of irresponsible spending in DC does not give permission, through act of hubris and preceived priviledge, to crashing a global economy. The problem is that poor examples existed at the top of government all those years and a lot of premission was given to a financial sector seeing no end in site to escalating budgets and raised debt ceilings. Nor did the financial sector know exactly where such increase in liquid capital would stop and with an Executive Branch in the White House continually screaming war was a necessity, nor did they feel it was reasonable to stop creating more financial capital regardless of how poorly many decisions were supported.
There is plenty of blame to go around and some of us OUT HERE actually saw all this 'disaster' coming, including the huge build up of 'Taliban War Fuel' now in Pakistan and Afghanistan. So, to say anyone directly responsible for fiscal irresponsibility either in government or business is innocent or actually has an excuse, needs to reconsider their position.
I will say this, however, the same executives that are CONSENTING and fall back on contractural reasons for accepting 'unearned' bonuses are more guilty of continued irresponsible decisions than they ever were before.
And to Senator Grassley, one of the hallmarks of civilization is to rise above 'primal screams' and work through methods that will attempt to correct a "W"rong path chosen by even you a long time ago. I doubt seriously that Senator Grassley actually meant any of those words except perhaps apology and resignation. He would regret anyone taking any other of his words seriously, I am confident he would regret any harm coming to anyone for any reason, self inflicted or otherwise. That does not mean we should look the other way entirely as we know full well there are members of our society that have died for reasons of financial ruin alone at their own hand and in acts imposed on them by others. For those deaths, there needs to be accountability as well. That would be justice as well as justified.
Let's get problems solved, shall we?
