Lehman CEO Gets Paid - And I Don't Care!

One of the biggest bankruptcies in history is that of the Lehman Brothers. Beyond the fact that it was one of those that no one would have expected, its former CEO received a handsome severance package to compliment his already extravagant lifestyle. I know this ruffles a lot of people's feathers, but not mine.

I think most people take issue with this because they feel he's being rewarded for running a company into the ground and subsequently ruining the lives of almost everyone beneath him. Retirement savings have been lost along with jobs, homes, and entire futures. I, however, don't blame this failure on one person.

I can't understand how people can take a complex issue with many different parts and reduce it down to accuse one individual or small group of individuals, while ignoring the larger problem at hand. The fact is, the reason they went down is not because of the executive bonuses. They went down because they were heavy in sectors that were crunched.

Fuld is not being rewarded. He had a contract and it's just being fulfilled. If people had a problem with his contract, they should have addressed that when it was first written, not just after things have gone downhill. Nobody cared about the size of the severance packages several years ago. It's only now that people want to complain about the fact that these packages weren't regulated or capped in the past.

"This isn't how the real world works!" I've heard. Is the real world just the world that most people live in? Because in that case, they're right. What does that say about where we should be?