The left is calling for AIG executives to return their bonuses and resign. One guy does exactly that. Daily Kos rakes him over the coals for having a "bad attitude". Some people just can't be pleased.
When somebody at Daily Kos is hounded to give away a million dollars and resign a lucrative job I'd like to see their attitude.
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6 comments:
Hi,
He does have a bad attitude.
Most anyone would.
Fact is, most of these guys think they were responsible for the success of AIG in the good years and not responsible for the disaster last year. The reality is that they weren't the primary reason for the success of AiG in the good years {because there are more people like them than there are jobs for them}, and they are mostly not responsible for the disaster, either. But in the good years he made ten times what a good teacher does, and that was because he held a strategic post in the structure of the corporate world, not because he was worth ten times what a good teacher is. Two years ago he was very lucky, last year he ended up in the wrong place at the wrong time and was very unlucky.
Which is by way of saying that yes, he probably has a grievance, and if he sued, I might award him a dollar. Lots of people who deserved better ended up worse off than him. Our capitalist system needs some serious restructuring and he doesn't seem to see that.
Ray,
You (the plural you, including Daily Kos) act like the Inquisition at an auto de fe, trying to decide who is "worth" more than others and probe into the hearts and minds of the heretics. The guy returned the money and quit, following exactly the forms of leftist religion you espouse. Yet he is still a sinner, cause you don't think he really "believes". Face it, his real crime in your eyes is that he has a lot more money than you and isn't a socialist, and nothing he can do will fix that.
Whatever.
The point is that when you read the NYT post you empathized with him.
When I read the NYT post I thought, here's another guy like Tony Lisotta. I thought he'd been happily screwing people like me for years, and has been unhappily surprised that the system is now screwing him.
Neither of us has any idea of whether he is more like you than like Tony. For that matter, you may be more like Tony than it is really convenient for either of us to deal with.
I didn't bother to post a response to the original Times story, because to me he's just another guy who lost a job. Like millions of other people, he probably doesn't deserve what is happening to him.
That's capitalism. When it is good it is very good and when it's bad it's awful.
But then you posted you sympathy for him, and yur aversion to the Daily Kos post. This led me to wonder whose side you are really on?
So I thought I'd point out to you that your position is not the only possible position. The system has treated you fairly well, you're pretty smart, and you see it as legitimate. The system has not treated me as well as it has treated you, I started having gone through my teenage years in the last half of the Vietnam War, and I'm not as smart as you. So I have a different view of the system, and of this guy's complaints, than you. I think last year he was one of the favored few, still thinks he deserves to be one of the favored few and is shocked that the system will act against him. This does not inspire much sympathy in me.
Sorry.
So he'll have to live with your support and not mine. Life goes on.
Ray,
Sorry Ray - most of my ire was directed at Daily Kos, not you. And many on the right have also lambasted the bonuses.
Out of interest, what could he do to make you happy? That's my question. He returned the money and quit. Which is exactly what many were calling on him to do. Yet they still seem unhappy with his actions. Apparently, populists will never be happy.
Hi,
Actually, there is very little he could do to make me happy. But making me happy is not his responsibility anyway. I wasn't aware that he existed till he wrote for the NY Times, and I wasn't that irritated when I read his story.
I'm actually a lot less irritated with him than most of the critics. What the hell, he's a lot younger than me and he made a good decision for his career when he chose to go into finance. But we need to tilt the system so you can't get incredibly rich in finance by taking huge risks and then coming to the government because your institution is too big to fail. If we {the rest of the country} were in a position to let AiG fail, he'd be an unemployed executive without a bonus and I would probably never have heard of him.
But then I'm an old cynic who was exposed to Marxist lines of thought in the late 60's and early 70's. I think we need to figure out what we want our banks to do, and force bankers to do that and nothing else. France and Germany seem to be a little better at that than we are, though their banks apparently bought plenty of "secure mortgage backed assets" in the US.
I would also point out that many of the people on the left are not old Marxist cynics, but young guys who would rather write than be bankers. They let the bankers run the economy {while looking down on them}. They accepted the view of guys like this banker that the bankers deserved a ton of money when the economy was good.
OK, now the economy is not so good, a fair number of writers and reporters are barely making it {sometimes with help from their families}. Ask your wife. If a broke writer reads something like what this banker wrote, he'll be furious. Being a writer, he'll write about it. While I see it in terms of class conflict, a lot of other people who didn't read Marx and his disciples in the late 60's and early 70's see this as a moral issue.
Maybe you don't like it, but that's the way it is.
Which is to say, I'm just not that interested in him. He apparently has money, let him go to India and teach English and banking for a while. He's annoying, but the fire directed at him really needs to be aimed at the banks instead. Replacing him with another banker, who makes the same mistakes and gets us into another economic implosion ten years from now, is not useful.
Ray,
I agree that he is not the proper target, our banking/finance system is.
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