Salvatore Genovese

You don't make peace with your friends, you make peace with your enemies.

You don't honor contracts with honest people, you don't have to, they do what they agreed without the need for contract enforcement. You honor contracts with incompetent thieves. Otherwise, you don't honor contracts. The whole point of a contract is to induce cooperation in people who don't trust each other.

If you delivered work for a consulting customer, and the customer refused to pay so you went to court, would you consider it relevant if they introduced evidence that you were an incompetent thief in general, even though you honored every part of your contractual obligation to the contract at issue?

Whether AIG bonus recipients should be in jail cells, or whom they share the cells with, is not relevant either. That someone is a felon doesn't mean they lose rights under all private contracts.

I'm not defending the bonuses. But the contracts were listed in public SEC filings, and the government gave AIG the money, knowing that $160 million of it had been promised to top executives, just as the government knew billions had been promised to big banks and investors who bet against subprime. The only thing they didn't know was how upset people would get about it. So now they're pointing fingers everywhere else.

Taking the money back a year later without any legal basis is more damaging to everyone than paying the bonuses and firing the government workers who wasted taxpayer money. If anyone should give the money back, it's the people who gave it away in the first place.

What gets me is the people who screwed up are the ones yelling as if they were the victims.

My sentiment exactly.