About Those 'Bonuses'

I'm as dismayed as everyone about the way that unchecked greed has brought down our economy and our financial systems. It's been painful to watch friends lose their jobs, businesses go under and households hanging on for dear life. If we really want to figure out how we got here and what we need to change if we're to prevent this level of catastrophe in the future, though, we need to have a reasonable dialog. The Media and everyone else who keep referring to the AIG payouts as 'bonuses' are not helping matters. (And the Obama Administration has not handled the whole thing well, either.)

So, what were these big checks? They were retention payments. Retention payments are delayed paychecks. That is, you negotiate an annual salary and then you agree to postpone the reciept of a portion of the paycheck until the end of the year. When you get the balance of you paycheck, you agree to stay on for another year. These were contracts regarding their unqualified annual salaries, not bonuses based on performance or any other indicators. It's important to be clear about that, as we're all screaming about who gets a bonus when they've done such a bad job. It is likely true that the legal costs around breaching those contracts might have outweighed the cost of honoring the contracts. And we all know that every tax has a loophole. We're talking about people who master and manipulate the financial system for their own gain. By 2010, when these tax dollars are due, each and every one of them is likely to have used the retention money to earn more than enough to cover the tax liability and/or will have found some way to offset the tax by hiding income and assets. At this point, the damage is done.

That said, these weren't people who negotiated a deal for a $50,000 salary and lived most of the year on a $30,000 paycheck. These were people making hundreds of thousands or millions of dollars. It's not as if they are going to starve or lack resources for housing if they don't get the remaining balance of their pay. Once the company had to take public money, the responsible thing to do would have been to require that every person making over a certain amount of money come forward for a renegotiation of their entire benefits package before public monies could be received. There should have been a forced conscientiousness. When you're on the dole, you can't justify lavish lifestyles while those who are doling are losing jobs and homes and health care. Congress should have written language in to require that when they wrote the Big Bailout Bill last year. But I can't think of a time when our government has ever pushed  conscientiousness and accountability onto the power class.

So, they didn't. They operated from panic. The Bush Administration pushed the panic buttons, too. All of our dear leaders were telling us at the time that this unprecedented bailout of private companies who had ruined the public economy had to have all this money immediately, with no requirements or accountability on their part, or life as we knew it was going to fall into oblivion.

All of of this is so flawed in so many ways. So, of course, the Big Bailout has not resulted in fixing anything and now we're seeing the continued selfish, greediness of the privileged class and now we're going to focus all of our anxieties and anger at this one definable group.

Tragic. It saddens me deeply to realize that this how we're going to process the massive failure of a social ethos - one of 'individualism' and a 'free market' that does not attempt in any way to curb the human pathos of greed and ego in order to protect the vulnerable and ensure a sustainable economy for all.

I'm bothered by this red-herring of outrage about these non-bonuses. We're at a critical time in our culture. A time when we could be looking deeply at a new way forward. If we were really interested in that, we would be talking about why anyone thinks it's okay for any single person to earn millions of dollars, representing the hoarding of the Earth's resources, when others are starving, homeless and without health care.

Take Oprah, for example. Why do we revere her? She's one of the wealthiest people in the country. And, yes, she's done some philanthropic work. She's always sure to promote her philanthropic work and she's never given up a single creature comfort in order to help others. She throws herself a multi-million dollar birthday party, requiring that each guest come prepared to praise her.  She launches a magazine with her own picture on every cover. She's narcissitic and greedy. With her resources, she could probably make sure that an entire town ended hunger, educated everyone and built a bevy of small businesses for long-term sustainability. She might not have as much expendable money afterwards as she's used to, but I'm sure she'd still be comfortable.

So, what does it say about us that, as a culture, we reinforce her pursuit of wealth for herself while our neighbors choose between paying the heating bill and having health insurance? Why are we so comfortable with individuals hoarding resources at the expense of others. And don't tell me that it's not at the expense of others. Money is only useful if it has the power of purchasing goods and services. All of which require energy or material resources from the planet. The planet is a finite object. There is only so much food that can be grown, for instance. So, if you're eating more than your share, you're denying food to someone else. (We may not be a the limit of food production, yet, but you get the gist.) Why isn't that concern high on our moral checklist?

So, what bothers me about the AIG mess, isn't that these people are getting their retention pay. It's that we don't bat an eye at how much the paychecks are in the first place. I mean think about it. Is any one person really worth that much more than another? Why do some people think they deserve a $1million paycheck while the guy two floors down only deserves a $75thousand salary and the guy working from the basement keeping the the building in tact and making sure you have a clean, safe place to work only deservies a $30 thousand salary. If I work 40 hours and you work 40 hours and we both have families to feed and house and educate and insure, what makes you think you and your family "deserve" a more lavish lifestyle while my family worries about whether they can get more than beans at the grocery store?

I've heard people argue that managers and executives are taking on more responsibility and, therefore, deserve more money. I'm not convinced that this is a meaningful debate point in and of itself, but it certainly isn't when there is not accountability to go with the responsibility. If you're getting all that money and you fail and you cost everybody else their livelihoods, maybe you should get stuck with a bill to cover their costs of living. On a human level, how can one person look another one in the eyes, especially someone working side by side in the same endeavor, and feel good about their multi-house, jet-setting life when their co-worker can't afford a home?

It's the cold, selfishness of it all that gets to me. More than that, it's the celebration of this cold selfishness that gets to me. The willingess to call self-serving people heroes or proffer up some status of higher being is a testament to how far away from the ideal of "all men are created equal" and the mission to create a place where "life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness" is equally accessible to all. These things can never be true when we encourage people and celebrate them for accumulating so much for themselves. Until we face that truth and have a deeply, profound shift in our cultural values, we will continue to have cycles of false economic prosperity (where, really only a few people are truly prospering) and "shocking" crashes. Watching the shallow public discussion about AIG suggest that we want it that way.