AIG poster boy wants tax deduction for his 'bonus' but it's our money he's spending

That money isn't Liddy's to give or DeSantis's to take. If he wants to give 100% of the money to "organizations who are helping people suffering from the global downturn" he can give it back to the U.S. government. No organization in the world is doing more to help people suffering from the global downturn. One set of people it helped is at AIG. If the government hadn't appropriated billions for that purpose, AIG would be in bankruptcy right now and DeSantis would have no job to resign from, let alone a bonus to dispose of as he pleases. Which is it, by the way? He agreed to work for one dollar, or he agreed to work for one dollar and another million-plus in bonus pay during a year the company has made no profit? He can't have it both ways. Was the one dollar a year thing a pure stunt? I applaud stunts, but only at Cirque du Soleil, not in the financial district. This is portrayed as a retention bonus, but it’s not clear in that case why Mr. DeSantis was promised one at all. I watched Mr. Liddy’s testimony, in which the retention bonuses were described as efforts to retain – only temporarily – the executives in the company whose jobs were to be eliminated, who understood their own books of business, and were qualified to shed those junk securities as efficiently as possible on behalf of the company. Mr. DeSantis says those people are already gone, and that he isn’t one of them. He’s at pains to say he comes from a different division, a profitable one, handling an entirely different type of business from credit default swaps. Why was his job ever endangered, and why did they give him a new one (at a one million dollar bonus) doing something he has never done before? Although DeSantis may not have been one of the AIG executives who helped tank the economy, he might as well have been. His greed, hypocrisy, and utter lack of perspective are exactly the attitudes that put us in this recession. He complains to unemployed people that he has been working long hours. He complains to homeless people that he fears protestors around his costly home. He complains to auto workers whose benefits have been wiped out at the insistence of the government that the government wants to renege on his employer’s commitment to give him a million dollars. He boasts to people whose 401K’s have been wiped out that he is donating three quarters of a million dollars to charity and quitting his job in the middle of a deep recession. And he demands the public’s sympathy. I’m sure Mr. DeSantis is a dandy professional and a right clever man, but he’s not very clever at appealing for sympathy. When we bailed out the automakers we made it contingent on the loss of pay, bonuses, unemployment protections and health benefits by ordinary Joes on the assembly line. Mr. DeSantis's cleverness at creating value by manipulating commodities markets is impressive, but I find it unimpressive compared to the efforts of those who created real value by creating the commodities in the first place. The commodities themselves have value, no matter what. If Mr. DeSantis didn't know that perfectly well, he wouldn't have wanted a million bucks to buy commodities like a second Porsche. He wasn't buying the cleverness of the guy who manipulated Porsche AG stock; he was buying a damned car. While he complains of being resented, he might examine a little more closely the nature of his own resentments. He doesn’t seem as outraged with the former bad actors at AIG as he is with Mr. Liddy (another dollar a year man with no responsibility for AIG’s woes), the Attorneys General of New York and Connecticut, members of Congress, and the American taxpayers. I’m sorry he’s been threatened with violence, but I hardly feel responsible for it simply because I am outraged at his demands. The same taxpayers who want the bonus money back not only paid that bonus, but are paying for the police who will keep him and his family safe. That protection -- another expense we didn't need -- wouldn't be necessary if he hadn't been greedy enough to land on the shame list. Most of us aren’t thugs, and the worst thugs all left AIG with golden parachutes. He whines that those people have escaped blame, but he doesn’t exactly go on to blame them. They are former colleagues, and who knows, might be future employers. This taxpayer would gladly work for a living wage (Mr. DeSantis no longer needs a wage, and could obviously retire any time he pleases) at any financial firm or law firm where sleeves are being rolled up to resurrect the American economy. It's my duty as an American, and I'd feel great about it even without a million dollar bonus. Thanks to AIG and other behemoths (and a lack of government oversight) I'm actually out of a job at a law firm instead. But I’m still expected by Mr. DeSantis to pay him, from the taxes I’ve already paid, a huge sum promised him by a teetering company. The invincible sense of entitlement of these people even in the middle of a deep recession -- not only to a lucrative job, not only to millions in bonuses at a failed company, but that these bonuses should be paid to them by the U.S. taxpayer -- is nothing short of amazing. The kind of gall it takes to write a Times op ed complaining about those who would deny you those bonuses could be used to strip Mr. DeSantis’s sun porch. That he may not have helped cause the recession is sheer good luck on his part. That he should be rewarded for lending a helping hand in the crisis is quite just. I’d be just fine with his accepting a decent salary and forgoing the bonus. But he chose not to, and if a dollar isn’t enough incentive, perhaps he should consult his patriotism (if he has any loyalty not for sale) for a better one. And as a longtime high level employee of a company whose practices have brought us to this pass, he might even consider taking on some of the shame. Shame is notably absent from his letter, save for that he wants to heap on others. I’m not taking delivery on it. Mr. DeSantis’s isn’t a private missive to Mr. Liddy or Andrew Cuomo, it’s an attack on anybody who feels Mr. DeSantis doesn’t deserve a million dollars. I’m unapologetic.

Every crook is just a good guy humanitarian victim of injustice. Just ask one.

The pay packages of the specialists brought in by AIG to unwind the now toxic positions put in place by the previous cadre of AIG traders, which were agreed to by Ben Bernanke and Tim Geitnher, have become a rallying cry of the neo-populist left. Too bad that fellows like Ol' Chad haven't quite thought this issue through. Because if they had, they might have noticed that because of the hysteria of the mob, the House passed a Bill of Attainder, which, by the way, is unconstitutional. And furthermore, because of this kind of wacky behavior by the politicos, Goldman Sachs has stated that as soon as the stress tests are finished, they intend to return the 10 billion the firm received in TARP funds to the Government. I wonder if Ol' Chad realizes that the Treasury is due 500 million dollars in annual dividends on the money that was loaned to Goldman with the first quarterly dividend having already been paid. And Goldman is just the tip of the iceberg. All banks, with the exception of Citi,want to repay their own share of TARP monies as soon as possible, whether the Treasury wants the money back now or not, which would cost the Treasury, i.e. the American taxpayers, billions of dollars in dividends. All this over a lousy 160 million that was legally due these individuals as compensation for services performed to clean up the mess.

The AIG bonuses are only the tip of a very large iceberg. In every corporation, every federal agency, every non-profit charity, there are men and women in positions of authority and responsibility who believe merely because they possess a master of business administrative degree they are entitled bonuses, above and beyond an already bloated salary, just for being who they think they are.

It was just this last December that the ringleader of a scam which defrauded the State of Iowa out of $1.5 million which went toward "executive bonuses" was sentenced to seven years in prison. (Ramona Cunningham Sentenced to 7 Years," KCCI.com)

The system of awarding bonuses is epidemic, not only on Wall Street but in the ivy covered towers of higher learning. Though, as a quick Google scan can verify, many, though not all, university presidents in this time of economic turmoil have had the foresight to forgo their bonuses, unlike their brethren on Wall Street.

Meanwhile, as he makes dire predictions of future reductions in service and pending layoffs at the United States Postal Service, Postmaster General John Potter raked in $850,000 after bonuses awarded on top his base salary of $258,840 per year. Yet Potter and his apologists do not consider this excessive!

He wouldn't be donating it to a charity that would be his next employer would he? Possible perks: use of company (I mean charitable organizations jet) and junkets (I mean fund raisers and executive trainig seminars) in exotic vacation spots. Charities are crooked too. It will be interesting to see which he picks. I would be remiss not to mention having his mistress on the payroll, but that is so common.