- What do the Wall Street bankers who are poised to cash their multimillion dollar "bonuses" think as they see the devastation in Haiti on their HD flatscreen TVs?
- How quickly will Sarah Palin and Dick Cheney as well as Glenn Beck find the nefarious link to President Obama? He surely caused this or allowed this or didn't respond quickly enough.
- Is Mark McGuire hoping this disaster pushes his ugly mug off the 24hr news cycle?
- Is Simon Cowell aware of what's happened?
I know my random thoughts are gauche, and I apologize to all "who may have been offended" as well as the poor, poor victims of the earthquake. May our Lord guide the steps and hands of the relief workers as they strive to do the impossible.
5 comments:
My forecasts last week were not totally accurate, but were close.
Don't know about the investment bank employees who allegedly receive huge bonuses. But the banks themselves all stepped up and contributed a few million to disaster relief.
And while the right wing pundits I mentioned didn't make news saying anything obtuse, that didn't keep some others that I left out from doing just that. Rush Limbaugh and Pat Robertson not only stuck their respective feet in their mouths, they managed to reap the ridicule of virtually every other pundit and network who heard and replayed endlessly what they said.
And Mark McGuire and Simon Cowell haven't been seen or heard since the Haiti earthquake.
Keep up the tough but necessary work, rescue teams ! God go with you.
If you were "gauche" then Heaven help me. The Right makes a very big tad-do about their record of giving, esp. in contrast to the record of giving of the Left. I would ask what percentage of total income that giving by the banks / individuals were, and what the Tax Codes say about say about said giving. Essentially i am questioning if the giving was not just "in their interests"? Don't get me wrong, i myself have not given, and i am only trying to debunk the veneer of generosity, not making an argument that giving should occur. There is a marked difference, in terms of valuation of the giver, between giving which is in one's interests and helps them, and that of compassionate giving that recognizes socio-economic disparity and desires to rectify that disparity (at cost to one's self). In this the record of the Rights giving amounts to little, and so does even that of the Left, arguably.
And let's keep in the mind the bonuses were granted as a contractual obligation, not as a result of performance. It would seem to behoove those that failed to carry out their contractual obligations to make that show contrition not by denying the bonus but by donating it.
Ah, but I would argue that the banks' obligation to fulfill their "contractural obligation" to their employees was abrogated by those same banks taking TARP bailout money. They, in effect, had declared bankruptcy, if not technically. And this made, in my mind, their requirement to overcompensate their biggies moot, even though they had entered into some kind of formal contract to that effect prior to admitting to the world that they couldn't manage money as well as they pretended.
Ah ha! I forgot this position. But, in terms of the law, is it a contract they signed with employees or contractors, and are either contractual obligation considered the same as the relationship/obligation as to a debtor? I definitely don't know. In terms of the "should/ought" well that is a different matter and i agree. But when a company declares bankruptcy do they still have to pay employees?
Oh, I understand that they prefer to hide behind the "contractural obligation" ruse. And they may have a narrowly technical legal right to do so. But on the overall moral stage, not so!
As for bankruptcy, I think when this officially occurs that creditors line up and are prioritized somehow as to who gets "first" money and who goes next, etc. Don't know where employees fall, though I'm sure it's not at the very top of the list.
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