I'm Not Religious, But A-Fucking-Men

Merit pay, performance based pay? All pretty much bullshit. BULLSHIT! Sorry for using the frightful all caps & the incendiary exclamation point, but this whole topic sets me off. We're going to fix an ailing educational system so we pay people more to fix it, the same people who apparently created the problems in education? They same goes for these brilliant Wall St. morons, they pretty much destroy our economy, so, we give them bonuses, bonuses, for crying out loud. & the worst thing is, what's the point? Greed is obvious, but what else drives this line of thinking? All the notions that capitalism is self-regulating, self-healing have clearly been proven (Again!) to be smoke screens, the cancer causing smoke screens. As usual, I'll need to put off my vacation while the poor bastards who engineered this economic meltdown will have to ski the Rockies, rather than the Alps.

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.

— Edward Liddy, chief executive, American International Group

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Now comes Mr. Liddy, the government-appointed chief of A.I.G., defending multimillion-dollar bonus payments for the people who run the small division that brought down the company. If the government doesn’t let them have their money, they will walk away, Mr. Liddy says, and nobody else will know how to clean up their mess.

We’ll get to the merits of his argument in a moment, but it’s first worth considering the damage that the current system of corporate pay has wrought. The potential windfalls were so large that executives and bankers had an incentive to create rules that would reward them no matter what. The country is now living with the consequences.

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Most amazingly, the A.I.G. bonuses haven’t even accomplished their stated goal. Andrew Cuomo, New York’s attorney general, said Tuesday that 52 employees who received bonuses had since left A.I.G.

My emphases.