Whining Winners

by digby

Here’s a very interesting piece in yesterday’s New York Times Magazine about the pay czar’s trials and tribulations in trying to get these TARP availing Masters of the Universe to understand that the gravy train was over (for a year or two, anyway.) It’s a rather shocking spectacle replete with the usual whining about how these poor overworked multi-millionaires deserve their millions because they can’t go to their kids soccer practices (as opposed to the stupid parasites who also missed such precious moments because they have to work two jobs… to make ends meet and are now “at liberty” to attend because they don’t have jobs at all.) The obtuseness of these guys knows no bounds:

Now he’s on to deciding specific pay packages for 2010 for the top 25 executives at the shrinking list of companies left under his control. A.I.G. is once again his toughest customer. Those who got the reviled cash retention bonuses last year are due — under those contracts — to get the same bonuses this March. Feinberg still can’t stop the payments, but he has been threatening to pay those executives practically nothing, as he did this year, if they take the bonuses instead of agreeing to roll them into stock.

“If he tries that a second year, these guys are just going to start to come in late and leave work early,” says one of the people representing A.I.G. in the Feinberg process. “They’ll quietly look for other jobs. And six months or nine months from now they’ll be gone. Why should they stay? They’re already millionaires. Do you think a hundred- or two-hundred-thousand-dollar salary means anything to them?”

Why even bother working if all you make is 500k a year? Might as well go on food stamps and watch soap operas all day ferchristsake.

Feinberg is extolled as a successful mediator in the piece, which the writer, Stephen Brill, seems to think was necessary in order to keep the process on track. Perhaps it was, but my hackles rise at the notion that these epic, selfish failures were considered so valuable that they had to be coddled in any way shape or form. Those who were responsible for the failure should have been fired and those who had profited previously from the fraud should have been told to take it or leave it. That this wasn’t done is just more testament to financial elite backscratching…

But the outright fraud that seems to have been perpetrated by these AIG executives, with the Treasury and Feinberg’s acquiescence, truly is shocking. It turns out that these executives wouldn’t take their humongous salary in stock because they and everyone else knew that the stock was worthless. Well, I shouldn’t say “everyone else” because it was trading at $30.00 a share at the time. I’m no expert, but that just doesn’t seem right. (Of course, they are far too big to fail, so maybe it isn’t such a bad bet after all …)

This no accountability elite culture is a fetid, teeming mess that’s going to cause some severe blow back if somebody doesn’t get a grip on it. You just can’t run a society where the entire ruling class is exempt from the consequences for their actions. Bernie Madoff just does not suffice as the ritual sacrifice.

Read the whole article if you have time. It’s a window into the mores of the Masters of the Universe and the people who serve them. Like the DC Villagers, they have convinced themselves that they are just hardworking stiffs, trying to get by on a few million a year and they’re hurting right now because, by golly, people just don’t understand how much regular guys like them have lost. But they also shouldn’t have to follow the laws or be subjected to the standards the rest of the working stiffs must do because they work so much harder and are so darned special and talented. They are bipolar.

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