What They Deserve

The Hill article, "AIG staff: We deserve this money," quoted a source saying,
"“Quants,” the people who put together the computer-programmed algorithms behind the complicated hedges and trades that brought down the company, pushed back hard against any notion they should sacrifice their bonuses"

These people who have made enough money never to work again, do not deserve anything. They may want those bonuses, but they surely do not deserve them and certainly did not earn them. The whole notion of being deserving or feeling entitled has gotten us in this mess in the first place. Feeling entitled or deserving leads to a dangerous hubris that gives us permission to make bad deals, loans, trades that put our economy in peril. They had emerged from biz school believing the hype about themselves as golden children who were the brains behind wealth generation, when it is really the fact that it was the everyday worker who creates and buys real products and services that run an economy.

These Quants and their ilk kill jobs, wreck local economies, drain public coffers, and then try to tell us how indespensible they are in fixing the mess so we should pay them millions to stay on.

The MBAs who only bring companies their complex schemes to skim wealth via bonuses for the short term leaving the company weak or non-existent in the long term have nothing to offer our economy but ruin. They are the ones who layoff workers, lose money for shareholders, and basically mismanage the company without a notion of consequences because they know that they will always get a golden parachute. Bonuses used to be used to reward behavior that made the company stronger. Bonuses were for when a company was doing well and was a gesture to recognize the employee's contribution toward that end.

All the economic failures that have come to pass were very, very predictable and was predicted long before it happened but was drowned out by the mainstream media, Wall Street, and all the "experts" in bed with this broken system. If they had any sense at all everyone who brought this about knew very well this economic collapse would happen, but didn't care because they knew they would emerge from the dust wealthy. They do not care about our country nor do they understand our sacrifice as tax payers in bailing them out.

I want names released of these people who feel that in the face of their overwhelming failure that they deserve anything. What they do deserve and completely earn is a public shaming as crooked failures. They failed and continue to fail our country. They are not golden children who create wealth but drain it. The Quants and those like them need to be publically paraded in dunce caps and sandwich signs with their economic sins scrawled on them and which they would have to recite before angry crowds. They deserve to be poster children for the failure of all the crap that has been taught in business schools the past twenty years or so.

Our culture needs to stop worshipping unrestrained capitalists who transfer wealth upwards, leaving the rest of us to pick up the tab for their adventures.

As 80% owner of AIG I believe that these people owe AIG all of their bonuses, and if they are allowed to work to fix the problem they do so working off all the ill-got funds they recieved. If not, there are plenty of intelligent and hardworking people who have lost their jobs because of these people who can step in and fix it.