It's a bad time to be a banker, and not just because President Obama said so.
Andrew Cuomo, the New York State Attoney General, recently subpeonaed insurance giant AIG for a list of the names of every single person in the financial division slated to receive a bonus, for the purposes of some kind of “review.” And an internal memo has recently been circulating the AIG offices, warning all its employees to be cautious of suspicious loiterers, to always travel in groups, and to not make obvious their place of employment. In other words, it seems the people of America have returned to claim their republic, and in a big way.
I don't really wish to be an advocate for outright violence, but it seems like the leadership of this fiscally and philosophically bankrupt firm ought to have a little trepidation about flossin' the corporate logo. Why would they want to, anyway? It's embarrassing enough to wear a Royals hat in the middle of downtown Kansas City, and they're just benign losers. Their executives, on the other hand, have planted themselves directly at the center of a worldwide economic crisis with their greed and stupidity, and now their CEO hopes to pacify the growling mob by urging his employees to return half of their bonuses? “Half-assed,” as David Shuster put it, hardly begins to describe it; it's seems at first surprising not that they still have their jobs, but rather that our stores haven't yet run out of pitchforks.
But, of course, it suddenly becomes a more complicated matter once the apologists arrive. It becomes a matter of “bloodthirsty populism,” “bad risk management,” “socialistic redistribution,” and a million other disingenuous catchphrases from people who are trying to justify the disaster or shirk responsibility for it but don't know anything about macroeconomics. Even Rush Limbaugh slithered from his cesspool long enough to defend the bonuses. (Of course, in typical fashion, he didn't elect to just follow AIG's own propaganda—that they have been forced into payment by some kind of contractual legal obligation—but felt compelled to add that these bonuses for the superrich will actually serve as a positive stimulus for consumption. Rush Limbaugh: chameleon, conservative, champion, devoted Keynesian.) For better or worse, the Treasury itself has suggested that it is unwilling to ever allow AIG to fail, and that it will forever continue to bail them out, numbers be damned. And our venerable media outlets, apparently bored with parroting the “too big to fail” rhetoric but having far too much fun to just shut up, have just taken to babbling one-liners from the French Revolution and fanning the flames. It's all so hopelessly confusing, and the aggregate effect of all of the noise is a kind of intractable agnosticism. Who's to say, suffocating in the data and the chatter, who really deserves what?
Haven't we had enough of this obscurantism? The facts are pretty clear: the situation has nothing to do with retention of top talent, because many of the people slated to get these bonuses have already left, gliding gently back to earth with the softest of golden parachutes. The bonuses themselves are a red herring, a distraction, a pittance compared to the total bill, and our indignation ultimately does us no good. But the anger is certainly understandable. These people have spent the last quarter-century peering down from the heights of the Manhattan cityscape, and now, not only do they need our help, they're perfectly glad to bite our hands as we give it to them. But as we have learned about capitalism, these are ransoms we occasionally have to pay. If we love our system so much, what we ought to be doing is making sure we never have to pay this much again.
