The following is a letter sent on Tuesday by Jake DeSantis, an executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit, to Edward M. Liddy, the chief executive of A.I.G.
If congress can override AIG's employees' contracts.. what makes us think our jobs are safe.
I am so sick of the way the jerks in congress are acting.
Congress has NO right to interfer with people's payrates.
It's time to vote the losers out.
In 2010.. FIRE EM ALL!
If a person earns money, they should keep it.
If a person is smart enough to sign with a firm that pays millions of dollars.. they should be allowed to keep it.
There certainly is a difference in renegotiating contracts and completely taking away the persons salary for the entire year less one dollar. And I am not aware of any legislation that forced Unions to renegotiate their contracts.
So you support companies like AIG getting billions from tax payers and then paying out large bonuses to the people who were responsible for taking America down?
No way.
At some point someone has to pay for this crisis.
I would suggest that you read the letter. Jake DeSantis states that he was not party to AIG's woes. If he worked honestly he should expect what was promised him.
There are two sides to every story, but the author of the article hasn't won me over by any means. He says:
If he agreeed to work the year of $1 while AIG fixed itself with my taxpayer dollars and after he benefitted from 10 years of extravagant salaries, then why is now complaining that he is being held to his word?
A retention payment of "$742,006.40" hardly sounds as though he really agreed to work for no pay. What he agreed to was a salary bigger than the President's only instead of calling it a salary, he is using the term "retention payment". :rolleyes:
Yeah, okay, but if it walks like a duck, quacks like a duck and has feathers, it's likely a duck. He was NOT working out of the graciousness of his own heart for the "good of the company and country". He was working for the money.
That's not necesssarily a bad thing. But to claim one agreed to work for $1 and then accept a huge payment is disingenous at best and a plain out lie at the worst. I hope he doesn't believe his own lies. The whole pity-party bit about donating the money is simply a red herring to distract attention from his own contradition.
Retention payments are bonuses to hold on to people who are going to be laid off. AIG negotiated with these people, most of whom had nothing to do with issue at hand, to stay and help fix the problem instead of just leaving when they got laid off.
If the bonus was in the contract, and the man worked honestly to uphold his agreement with AIG, why should he not get paid? Especially when he is overseeing the dismantling of the division that caused all the problems in the first place, which he had nothing to do with.
I asked my roommate this tonight, and I'll ask the board too... are workers not worthy of their wages? Is the company not morally obligated to pay what it owes its employees? If the Congress can target a specific group of workers for an outrageous tax rate because everyone's mad, what's to keep Congress from targeting, I don't know, churches or ministers - after sufficiently angering the public over something churches or ministers supposedly did - sometime down the line? The House's actions last week with the 90% tax on those retention bonus are UnConstitutional and should scare teh living daylights out of every American.
Just because this man worked hard and rose to level most of us will never get to doesn't mean he doesn't deserve the money his company agreed to pay him. He earned it, it's his.
I think the reference was to the auto workers being forced to renegotiate. If what happen to the UAW was ok then it would have been equally ok to renegotiate these executive contracts. Not saying what the outcome would have been but renegotiation could have been forced.
I am curious when this guy became executive vice president of the American International Group’s financial products unit? If he had the job when the ship sank then I don't see how he doesn't take ownership.
This also tells us AIG knew as early as March of last year how bad their situation had become. It would have been nice if we'd got a better jump on the problem.
I was reading where the cause of AIG was deregulation insurance and banks to combine as one company. After the depression legislation was passed to keep that from happening but in the early 2000's that legislation was overridden which is what caused AIG to become "too big to fail". They had the bank financing their insurance devision and the insurance division was covered the banks.
It is the both the legislative and executive branches of our government I blame.
NOT the employees.
If the company was so bad, why in the world did our government give them billions of our money?
It's like a duh moment...
This is what we have been saying all along...
QUIT GIVING OUR MONEY TO LOSERS...
iF the Government wouldn't have bailed them out.. the bonuses would not have been paid.
BUT there was a contract between employer and employee... these contracts should be honored.
Whoever gave AIG the money should be the one to blame.. AIG is under legal obligation to honor contracts they sign...
And this time.. I'll be with you and blame Bush.. He was so stupid to give money to losers!... I was yelling this last fall.. and still yelling...
QUIT GIVING MY MONEY TO JERKS THAT DON'T KNOW HOW TO HANDLE IT!
Maybe we should just have let AIG go down.
To tell you the truth I really don't know whether it would have been better to do that rather than to GIVE them $180B.
Of course if they had gone bankrupt this man wouldn't have gotten his bonus anyway so what's the difference?
His contract was with the previous owners of AIG.
Now the federal government owns 80% of the company.
I don't know whether this invalidates his contract or not.
I do know that these are extraordinarily dangerous times and many people here act as if it's business as usual.
Sincerely, do you have a better idea for getting us out of this?
I don't know enough about the situation to make a call.
The word was that if AIG went down that could have pulled down the U,S, and possibly world economies.
Who do we trust in these times?
For our economy I mean.
I know who I and I'm certain most here trust in much worse times than these and for our eternal security.
That is what I'm learning also, AIG is so intertwined in our economy that their failure would mean the failure of so many connected companies that it would bring down the worlds economy. Look for a thread I started on how they got so big. It was interesting reading.
I am interested in this power the treasury department is asking for. It would allow them to take over a company like AIG and sell off or restructure the crucial parts and let the rest collapse/bankrupt.
Are the new UAW contracts retroactively making people work for free? That's a huge difference, isn't it?
The UAW contracts are cutting pay and benefits prospectively (say by 10%), while this guy is getting a retroactive cut in pay of 100%. Huge difference - apples and oranges.
I don't think this guy is that concerned about the money - he even says that he and his family are fine financially.
It seems his overriding concern is how he is being maligned and misrepresented by the hate-mongering hysteria from the politicians and media.
There certainly is a difference in renegotiating contracts and completely taking away the persons salary for the entire year less one dollar. And I am not aware of any legislation that forced Unions to renegotiate their contracts.