One of the people whose opinions on current issues I always find compelling, is Phil Greenspun. Phil’s not afraid to look an issue in the mouth and tell us what the issue looks like to his informed eye, even if everyone else is calling it a non-issue or a gobydoggle. His insights are compelling because they’re reasoned with logic and are based on simple, verifiable facts. In a blog post yesterday Phil said
AIG has been in the news again, this time for bleeding taxpayers out of hundreds of millions of dollars to pay employee bonuses for a job well done in 2008. Most egregiously, the very division that bankrupted the company is sucking down $165 million in 2008 bonus. Is there some sort of contract that would require the company to pay these bonuses? The company essentially went bankrupt in the fall of 2008, though the U.S. governnment tried to avoid the actual word “bankruptcy”. When a company goes bankrupt, it doesn’t pay most of its obligations under old contracts and certainly does not pay bonuses to the employees who ran it into the ground (not for moral reasons but simply because it no longer has the cash).