Golden Parachute

GM has now joined the soup line with the federal mortgage giants and AIG. It seems if you are a big enough failure you can extort the world economy into paying for your lunch.

I wonder how long it is going to take for members of Congress to start asking failed executives to repay their mega-bonuses. Executive bonuses are a drop in the bucket compared to collosal fiscal reversals, but it is the principle of the thing. Why reward failure? It is distasteful to Americans, and painful to watch when one's own parachute is in tatters.

Of course it will be argued that the bonuses were earned in better days when the economy was right side up, like last summer. The execs made their numbers, brought in the profits, and that is why they got the atta-boys. It isn't their fault the economy is determined to sink like a sounding blue whale.

And that is just the point, isn't it. If the failure of global economies is too big to lay at the richly paneled door of the executives, then probably the previous run-up in the economy wasn't really their doing either.