When is a bonus not a bonus? When it’s an award

Just when I thought Wall Street attitudes toward undeserved “corporate bonuses” couldn’t get any worse, someone comes along to prove that there is no bottom to the blind greed.

I was sickened enough when, last week, so many Wall Street types went on the cable news networks to defend such bonuses as necessary to ensure that all those multi-billionaire CEOs continue to do their jobs, even if some of these CEOs ran their companies into the ground. (Isn’t a multiple million-dollar salary enough to motivate you to do your job?)

The Barack Obama administration is right to limit corporate bonuses as a restriction on bailout packages. You want the people’s money to rescue your ailing company? The least you can do is NOT throw money at failed, and already rich, corporate bigwigs.

And if anything, the recently passed stimulus package doesn’t go far enough. As reported by the Associated Press, the stimulus bill penalizes companies that paid out executive bonuses of more than $100,000 after receiving bailout money last year. My vote would be to eliminate executive bonuses altogether. With the economy in meltdown, this is no time for half-measures.

Worse yet, there is nothing in the bill that address executive “awards,” which brings us to corporate America’s latest attempt to cheat the system.

The Huffington Post got a hold of a tape of a conference call among executives of soon-to-be-merged financial giants Morgan Stanley and Citigroup’s Smith Barney. During the call, Morgan Stanley co-president James Gorman blatantly reassures his cohorts that they have figured out a way around the “bonus” issue.

"There will be a retention award. Please do not call it a bonus," said Gorman, as quoted on the audiotape. "It is not a bonus. It is an award. And it recognizes the importance of keeping our team in place as we go through this integration." (http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2009/02/11/bailout-recipients-giving_n_165624.html)

An award? The only award these guys should get is for excessive chutzpah!

Described on the tape as “very generous,” the awards “will be calculated based on performance numbers from 2008 instead of 2009, when the merger is expected to be completed. That decision virtually guarantees an increase in the size of the awards,” reports the Huffington Post.

As Gorman put it, “I think I can hear you clapping from here in New York. You should be clapping because frankly that is a very generous and thoughtful decision that we have made. We spent a lot of time kicking this around. We could easily have done it from the point of closing, which is obviously going to be somewhere in the latter half of this year or around the middle of the year. But we just decided ... that it was right thing to do, to give you that certainty that it would be based off '08. '09 is a very difficult year. ... So that degree of anxiety, which many, many of you have emailed me about ... is now off the table."

Since Morgan Stanley and Citigroup were given more than $60 billion in government bailout money, the only thing that should be off the table is any government bailout money. Aren’t these people paid enough to get them to stay put and do their jobs?

And if these companies can get away with this, it’s time to go back to the drawing board to make sure nothing that even resembles bonuses, awards, whatever you want to call them, is allowed.