Company So Afraid Of Political Recriminations They’re Asking Obama To Approve Bonuses
They don’t have to ask Obama’s “compensation czar” for permission for the bonuses, but AIG is so afraid of being lambasted by grandstanding politicians looking to distract from their own greed they’re doing it anyway. Obama’s thuggish administration has so intimidated a company operating in what is supposed to be a free market that they’re actually supplicating the government for permission on compensating they’re own employees.
That’s not how it’s supposed to work in a free country.
American International Group is preparing to pay millions of dollars more in bonuses to several dozen top corporate executives after an earlier round of payments four months ago set off a national furor.
The troubled insurance giant has been pressing the federal government to bless the payments in hopes of shielding itself from renewed public outrage.
The request puts the administration’s new compensation czar on the spot by seeking his opinion about bonuses that were promised long before he took his post.
AIG doesn’t actually need the permission of Kenneth R. Feinberg, who President Obama appointed last month to oversee the compensation of top executives at seven firms that have received large federal bailouts. But officials at AIG, whose federal rescue package stands at $180 billion, have been reluctant to move forward without political cover from the government. Setting aside nonsensical, populist objections to people who work in big business making a lot of money, is this not still a free country? Is the American dream not, at least in part, about being free to be as prosperous as you want to be?
Yet here we have a major American company feeling compelled not by law but by pure intimidation to supplicate the government before it hands out bonuses to its employees.
“Anytime we write a check to anybody” it is highly scrutinized, said an AIG official, who declined to speak on the record because the negotiations with Feinberg are ongoing. “We would want to feel comfortable that the government is comfortable with what we are doing.”
About a month ago I said that our political leaders were turning us into a nation of supplicants instead of citizens. This is yet another example of that. In what is supposed to be a free country, we have one of our largest businesses looking to supplicate the government for permission to give its employees bonuses not because the company is required to do that by law but rather because they’ve been thoroughly intimidated by a gang of politicians who fully intend to run our economy for us.
