This phony, populist outrage over the AIG bonuses is really becoming ridiculous. They make it sound as if AIG’s top executives just took the bailout money as bonuses and ran with it. But that’s nonsense. First of all, the bonuses in question amount to barely 0.1% of the bailout that AIG received. Second, there are managers and there are managers… the ones getting these bonuses, are they the top level managers responsible for AIG’s demise, or are they the managers running, say, a successful branch office of AIG insurance?
Of course answering these questions might require some investigative journalism, some thinking, some hard explaining… not the kind of stuff the soundbyte journalism of the cable news universe likes. Glad I am not going to be home tonight, as I will not even accidentally watch the populist tripe of Lou Dobbs on CNN as he, no doubt, will take his turn at expressing outrage. Now if instead of spewing indignation, he actually took the trouble of locating a typical AIG executive who received a bonus and sat him or her down for a meaningful interview… of course I am quite willing to bet that this is not going to happen, not on CNN nor anywhere else… with the possible exception being BBC News.