Democrats to CEOS: You fucked up, suck it.

[urthenrampage]

I dare anyone to denounce this as "unfair."

http://stlouis.bizjournals.com/stlouis/stories/2009/01/26/daily79.html

"Zomg but mistar frittars tehy r rasponzable and wize frea-markit leedars whu ernd teh sebentyjillion dollrz!"

Yeah, how bout that free market folks. Hows that working out for you? Big business totally looking out for the general public

Comments

[outoforder2day]

Or, you know, let the free market work and put them out of a job instead of rewarding bad business decisions with bailouts...

[colossus716]

The problem with that strategy is lots of innocent and hard working people get the shaft, while those who made the errors still have their massive salaries and savings accounts to fall back on... Especially when this compounds across multiple markets, and thats what makes this less than clear cut.

[outoforder2day]

I'll start with a reply to this because it's easier...
If a company fails, it doesn't mean that everyone automatically looses their job. Companies get bought out all the time based solely on their assets and holdings.
That being said, yes many people will loose their jobs and no that doesn't affect the clear-cut nature of the decision. It sucks, people will suffer, and people will move on. But by monkeying around in the system without thinking on it long and hard, the government is going to make matters worse, not better.
My opinion, the entire c-level team should be fired without additional compensation contract or not. The board should have all their perks cut since they obviously failed to ensure the stability of the company. The company should be sold to an interested party or liquidated per standard rules.

[coderanger]

The problem isn't the bailouts, it is how footloose they are. Handing a check to people that clearly have made at least a few bad business decisions isn't kosher. If they want public money thats fine, but I expect the government to 1) get equity and 2) get control. If we are saying they need to be protected for the public good thats okay, but then they have to surrender to the will of the public (which is what democratic government is theoretically supposed to represent). We also need to learn from this. Any company which is too big to fail ( a la AIG) is too big to be allowed to exist. We need to go Ma Bell on a lot of these guys. So basically all of these companies should be broken up into independent entities and the CEOs become public servants (with the salary to go with that position) until such time as they can repay their debt to the taxpayers.