AIG to Pay Out Millions in Bonuses

clipped from www.nytimes.com The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year. Word of the bonuses last week stirred such deep consternation inside the Obama administration that Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner told the firm they were unacceptable and demanded they be renegotiated, a senior administration official said. But the bonuses will go forward because lawyers said the firm was contractually obligated to pay them. The payments to A.I.G.’s financial products unit are in addition to $121 million in previously scheduled bonuses for the company’s senior executives and 6,400 employees across the sprawling corporation. Mr. Geithner last week pressured A.I.G. to cut the $9.6 million going to the top 50 executives in half and tie the rest to performance.

AIG almost had me with their argument that they were legally obligated to pay the bonuses. Then I got to this part.

"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 M. Liddy, the government-appointed chairman of A.I.G.] wrote Mr. Geithner on Saturday.

Yeah, they've been freakin' brilliant so far. When it came to bailing out car companies, the talk was about all the concessions union workers were going to have to make; they absolutely had to renegotiate their contracts. When it comes to Wall St. execs, they get every dollar they were promised -- no renegotiation is possible.

What exactly is the big freakin' difference between these two groups of employees?