While I probably wouldn't do any better than any of these *ssh*l*s, I would do the same job for a whole lot less. A good deal for the taxpayers? I doubt it. A better deal than the one they are getting? Without a doubt.

Do we want to leave the job to the dregs of the organization?

If by 'dregs of the organization' she means 'the millionaire idiots at the top who bankrupted the company, then no, we don't want to leave the job to them.

Thinking that you have to pay million-dollar salaries to get good businesspeople is incredibly stupid. For $100,000 a year you can find thousands of people smart enough to figure out that economic variables aren't all uncorrelated, and that sliced-and-diced pools of crap are still in fact crap.

Just in my state alone, Florida, you can find hundreds of bankers who make less than a half million a year, and whose banks are not in trouble because they didn't do incredibly risky BS. While the multi-millionaire heads of Bear Sterns, Lehman Bros, AIG, not only blew their institutions to pieces but damaged the *global* economy. Fire those romanticized 'top talent' geniuses at AIG and replace them with these cheaper, typical bankers who will make responsible loans, who won't sit around dreaming up opaque SIVs, and in general won't jeopardize the entire system. Is it too much to ask for some responsible, boring people to run insurance companies and banks?

It’s indeed hard to fathom how a company that’s taking millions in bailout money from the taxpayer can in turn transfer some of that money to reward the people who caused the problem in the first place.

As I posted earlier this month, I think, the rationale for the financial services dudes and dudettes is probably: "Gee, if they hadn't done such a stellar job, we'd be more effed up than we are now." As hard as that might be to believe.

Of course, I would have let AIG fail, but nobody asked me.

If that's the case, it's not a matter of the employees suing AIG, it's a matter of AIG suing the employees. Good luck with that.

In any event I'd be surprised if the contracts were not in fact pretty clear and pretty bulletproof. Employment contracts, even for highly paid employees, are not really that complicated. AIG is a big company with all the HR and legal bureaucracy that entails - so I'd assume that basically the contracts are solid.

I'd also, before going too far down this road, ask whether it's a problem if none of these guys ever shows up for work again? E.g. is there a tangled mess of stuff we need them to clean up, or can we just cut them loose? If the former... hardball may prove unproductive...

But, surely, the AIW bailout negotiations could have stipulated that certain contractual obligations be renegotiated as a condition of receiving taxpayer dollars.

Unlike the auto companies, there's like no agent equivalent the the UAW that can make such an agreement on behalf of all employees. And trying to get each and every employee effected to individually sign off on the bailout wasn't feasible.

The real issue here is that the fact AIG was locked into this perverse salary structure is just another reason the government should have let them go bankrupt to begin with.

If the government was worried about ripple effects, then have the government agree to honor AIG's outstanding policies, but that can be done without saving AIG itself.

LINK

http://www.talkingpointsmemo.com/archives/2009/03/squeeze.php

The WSJ reports that the Treasury is delaying the most recent $30 billion infusion into AIG while some of this is resolved. Nice.

To be sure, the AIG and UAW cases are different, in that the UAW was a second party to the bailout and the terms of the Big 3’s labor agreements were considered by many to be a major contributing factor to the pickle they were in.

There is also a retroactive versus prospective difference here.