In France, decades of socialist policy have resulted in a sense of entitlement amongst workers, while decades of monetarist policy in the US and UK have resulted in a sense of entitlement amongst managers.
After the embarrassment of expensive, taxpayer paid, corporate retreats and huge continuing compensation, this week, the bottomless, bail-out money pit, called AIG, used their PR machine to congratulate themselves publicly, that bonuses and salary would be reduced for top executives.
To highlight the sleight of hand here, in case you missed it, they used tax payer money to make themselves look self-sacrificing, while not sacrificing anything but tax payer money. But the real chutzpah is that they aren’t even doing that really. As this story in the FT reveals, AIG are burying compensation in large ‘retention bonuses’, and releasing this news over Thanksgiving to hide it further.
I am in France, for a month, where I have already just about gotten into a fight for shouting at someone tagging a 17th Century building in broad daylight.
Sadly, in France, where the state gives you so much, it breeds a culture of entitlement which reveals itself in the little things, like people not bothering to pick up dog shit, or rich looking kids out shopping, carrying bags of purchases from expensive stores, defacing three century old buildings right in front of the cops (that was the scenario). Of course, there is graffiti in America, just as there is dog shit, but there are fewer punks at street level, with an endemic sense of entitlement.
In America, where the state gives ordinary people way too little, people tend to be polite and pick up their dog shit. There is, however, a different culture of entitlement there, and it is at the corporate level where the private sector has given so much for so long. Ironically, rather like ordinary French people, for non-ordinary people like AIG management, the state is now giving them so much. A tax payer bailout of AIG is surely necessary, but it has been justified so that ordinary people suffer less, not management.
Technically, AIG executives may be behaving within the law, if only because the law hasn’t caught up with what’s currently happening. In moral terms, however, they are behaving in a manner much worse than some self-entitled punk defacing an ancient monument. The manner of what they are doing is also very different – they are trying to cover up their mess.
As everyone knows, its the coverup that gets you.
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