A Bonus

I've been having an email discussion with a person close to me about teachers and their compensation.  I pretty much espoused the same positions I took over my 10 years on a school board, negotiating several collective bargaining agreements.  They had a lot to say about the unfairness of merit pay systems and the poor preparation of many children who do not come into the classroom ready to learn.

So I think the government has provided an answer----massive money for education as part of the stimulus and retention bonuses for teachers.  If AIG is too big and too important to fail, and we, the taxpayer/owners of the corporation have no say in compensation, how much more important is the huge education industry??  And surely no one would argue that we should ever, in any way, short-change the children.  So my solution is to get back all the AIG bonuses, or at least the half of them that their C E O requested they repay, and divide that money among all the teachers----no questions asked, just like in the financial sector's compensation where performance apparently does not matter.  And if the government wants to be really generous to these people who make such a difference, they'd make these bonuses exempt from income tax as well!!

Onto the Bandwagon

I've been refraining from putting my (last) two-cents into the latest blathering about bail-outs because I'm trying to see how they work---whether the economy starts to show some signs of positive movement or not.  But the latest bonuses at AIG really take the cake.  How do people who ran a company into the ground so far that it has required not 1 but 3 bailouts deserve jobs, let alone bonuses??  Since the US now owns something like 80% of AIG, maybe we ought to VOTE on bonuses and who should be running the company.  Isn't that what stockholders do?  AIG management says these are "retention" bonuses, necessary so they can retain the "best and brightest" people.  I wonder how the company would have fared with someone a little dumber---maybe they wouldn't have made such poor bets and lost so much money.  After all, wasn't it written about Enron that they were "the smartest guys in the room?"   So how do AIG and Enron compare?  Wonder where we'd be if they had bailed out Enron................Yeah, I'm more than a little afraid.  Aren't you???  

And we call our dogs "pirates".......