Treasury Boldly Adds “Sugar On Top”

To the “Please, please, please, pretty please” it has already offered AIG.

From the NYT:

A.I.G. Planning $100 Million in Bonuses After Huge Bailout
By EDMUND L. ANDREWS and PETER BAKER

WASHINGTON — Despite being bailed out with more than $170 billion from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, the American International Group is preparing to pay about $100 million in bonuses to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

An official in the Obama administration said Saturday that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner had called A.I.G.’s government-appointed chairman, Edward M. Liddy, on Wednesday and asked that the company renegotiate the bonuses.

Administration officials said they had managed to reduce some of the bonuses but had allowed most of them to go forward after the company’s chief executive said A.I.G. was contractually obligated to pay them.

…
“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,” [Liddy] wrote Mr. Geithner. The government owns nearly 80 percent of the company.
...

Let’s be clear; AIG made its money gambling. For all the finance doubletalk Nutella the boys in the $10,000 suits have schmeared over every surface of this shit sammich, anyone who got rich at AIG over the last 10 years made their dough covering other people’s bets that a bunch of Capitalism’s Biggest Crack Houses -- about whose internal health AIG apparently neither knew nor cared -- wouldn’t go “Boom!”

Then they all went “Boom!”

And now, like any other gambler, AIG has to pay up or go down hard.

Unlike any other gambler, our government says that AIG gets to pick our pockets to make good on its bad bets, because if we don’t go good for these reckless fucknozzles horrendous mistakes, the global economic hard drive will crash and dump us all into the middle of the 11th Century in our underpants.

Or something.

Which may be a mile-high pile of happy horseshit, or may be just hard fiscal truth; I don’t know enough to judge.

What I do know is that we have been lied too, used, fucked over, rolled over, rinsed and repeated over and over again by this same species of clowns enough already.

So on the one hand, maybe the people who flew the world financial system into a mountain really are holding some Special Genius Monetary Powers in reserve that will save us all, but that for some reason they have clearly not bothered to use so far.

Or maybe they’re just holding the last 100 lbs of Majyk Fiscal Pixie Dust hostage in the basement of AIG.

And either way, maybe there really is no way to persuade these Radical Reaganomic Jihadists -- the children with those Armani "Best and Brightest AIG Talent" explosive vests strapped to their chests -- to help extinguish the planetary economic conflagration they fucking well helped ignite other than to give into their demands and pay out millions and millions and millions of dollars in ransom.

That's on the one hand.

On the other hand, maybe there is another way.

Maybe we’re coming at this from exactly the wrong direction.

Maybe it's time for a little of that "shared sacrifice" we've been hearing so much about to be vigorously shared up the food chain instead of just down.

And maybe one of America’s oldest and most profitable temples of raw, unfettered capitalism already figured out long ago the most effective way of dealing with deadbeat gamblers

like those at AIG.