The Boston Globe compiled a heartbreaking collection of images from around the world as everyone is impacted by the Great Recession. The pictures tell a painful narrative of workers in China lining up for a jobs fair and workers in the US lining up for a jobs fair. Abandoned homes and buildings around the world, and in California, where unemployment is hitting 12%. Families being evacuated, and people living in tent cities.

This is why the economic recovery must happen, and why the GOP’s obstructionist ways need to stop. We are foreclosing on our American Dreams.

–Caroline

Jake DeSantis, a former Executive Vice President of AIG, sent in his resignation letter to the NYTimes, which published it. In it, he writes that he feels entitled to receiving and spending his bonus pay of three quarters of a million dollars, despite an effort by both the company and the Attorneys General of NY and Connecticut to recover those bonuses, which have fallen on the backs of American taxpayers. It provides valuable insight into the minds of financial services execs:

You’ve now asked the current employees of A.I.G.-F.P. to repay these earnings. As you can imagine, there has been a tremendous amount of serious thought and heated discussion about how we should respond to this breach of trust.

On one hand, I can understand that he’s doing a job for not much money ($1/ year under the current system to repair and salvage AIG) or compensation and that he might feel betrayed that his stocks in AIG also took a dive. But let’s think about the larger breach of trust — the one between AIG consumers and American taxpayers, and the company itself. There would be no company or bonuses to rescind if the company had failed. While he might be part of a functioning unit within AIG, his anger should go toward not the American people but the credit default swaps folks who made the faulty decisions and the AIG leadership who signed off on increasingly risky investments.

Why isn’t he giving the money back to the taxpayers, and instead directing all of it to a nonprofit which helps those impacted by the global economic crisis?

This is not a tax-deduction gimmick; I simply believe that I at least deserve to dictate how my earnings are spent, and do not want to see them disappear back into the obscurity of A.I.G.’s or the federal government’s budget. Our earnings have caused such a distraction for so many from the more pressing issues our country faces, and I would like to see my share of it benefit those truly in need.

Well, that’s noble and all, but like I said before, the federal government is the one who bailed AIG out, and it’s simply reclaiming the money that we’re all paying for to prop AIG up long enough to figure out which organs are actually transferable and functioning. I think of it like surgical triage after a car accident. AIG was the responsible party, they arrived at the hospital pretty much DOA and they’re donating their organs in the better interests of science so that some other person might live. The Feds are the doctor who is trying to determine if any of the organs are worth saving, so the patient is just barely living on borrowed time.

Of course, this is probably not a perfect analogy, but in my layperson’s mind it works.

AIG is living on borrowed time, and while it’s unfortunate that employees who did nothing wrong are suffering, so are the rest of the American people. We didn’t sign up to be shareholders in your company, and we’re just trying to make the most of a bad situation. We recognize that you probably don’t enjoy your current perch either, but all we’re asking for is some common sense.

– Caroline