Outrage! AIG Still Seeking to Pay Bonuses

AIG still “owes” executives and employees a bunch of money in bonuses. The company plans to pay executives $2.4 million next week . (These are “performance” bonuses, BTW. Imagine how much they’d get if these executives had been performing well.)

But some of the real outrage is over AIG’s insistence that it still pay “retention” bonuses to AIG’s Financial Products division . Here is what CNN Money reports about that particular division :

AIG-FP is the division that wrote insurance contracts on shaky derivatives that were at the root of the company’s near-collapse.

I’m sorry. These are the folks we want to keep at AIG? Corporate accountability has all but disappeared. Remember when bonuses were paid as, well, bonuses ? Now it appears that executives and even employees feel entitled to them, no matter the economy, no matter how mediocre (or even terrible) their actual performance actually is.

Most small businesses understand that working this way is a short road to ruin . However, I suppose when you have the resources of a huge financial services company and the backing of the U.S. taxpayer, your compensation possibilities are limitless.