greed..in the open and even in the dark..

In a way there should be no surprize in reading this:

The American International Group, which has received more than $170 billion in taxpayer bailout money from the Treasury and Federal Reserve, plans to pay about $165 million in bonuses by Sunday to executives in the same business unit that brought the company to the brink of collapse last year.

The average person on the street knows all about the greed that exists. Just because a company gets the government's (meaning the taxpayer's) money, does it mean that their greed will stop? Ofcourse not. Who looks like the fool here? Only the government which tries to help out the companies and the overall economy by giving out billions and billions.

These companies fooled the government with phrases such as their "companies were too big to fail". Ha. It is the ego's of the executives that was too big too fail. The average hard working person gets laid off at the drop of a hat but the executives keep getting fatter with all the money. It is true that not all employees will get an equal amount of money.

The bonus plan covers 400 employees, and the bonuses range from as little as $1,000 to as much as $6.5 million. Seven executives at the financial products unit were entitled to receive more than $3 million in bonuses.

Even if some employees get only $1000, the combined total makes things outrageous. But this is not the only company doing this. Plenty more. But what will all these executives who get million dollar bonuses do with the money? Buy bigger houses, bigger gas guzzling cars?

Greed fuels greed. And the average person can't do anything about it. Ofcourse, if one combines the above story with this Globe and Mail story about the shrinking number of newspapers in North America, then that means fewer papers will be covering such news resulting in fewer people following the story.

"It means that more things will happen in the dark," said Paul Starr, a professor of sociology and public affairs at Princeton University. "Certainly the Web made certain things more available than they have ever been before, at a lower cost. But availability is not the same as exposure. I don't think there's enough of a protection of democratic accountability."

So if an openly published heading about the bonuses getting paid to the executives will not result in any action, then imagine how much more money will disappear into their pockets if no one covers the story?