American taxpayers hold little doubt that AIG executives are swindlers and criminals of the highest order, deseving decisive condemnation and swift justice. Have people forgotten outrages perpetrated by these incompetent charlatans who expended obscene millions of initial bailout dollars on executive luxury junkets?

By any stretch of imagination, no one receives guaranteed bonuses. Throughout the industrial world, bonuses hinge on two universal suppositions: competence and profits. Companies issue them as merited rewards for outstanding performance. Furthermore, the size of bonus packages centers on generated profits.

AIG executives meet none of those criteria. Moreover, why would any company fear losing “key executives” responsible for its demise in the first place?

Despite Washingtonian gobbledygook, no “binding contractual obligations” exist when bonuses revolve around money extorted from hard-working taxpayers. The word “extorted” is fitting, since AIG, holding the nation’s economy hostage, blatantly views taxpayer funds as a means to further its own deceitful and subversive agenda. If the legalese-spouting community has problems with this assessment, then justice in this country is an illusion.

It is time to stop pampering AIG and other incompetent enterprises at the expense of our nation, and bid them farewell.

Thomas Jefferson brilliantly remarked, “It is incumbent on every generation to pay its own debts.” Having lived a fantasy for more than 40 years, reality now confronts us.

This nation survived the Great Depression, spawning the “greatest generation this country ever produced.”

We can do so again, and be better for it.

Roger R. Turcotte, Lewiston