Make Wall Street Execs Pay for Cleaning Up the Mess They Made - Uses the epa's PolluterPaysPrinciple

[Shallah Kali]

http://www.alternet.org/workplace/102942/let%27s_make_wall_street_execs_pay_for_cleaning_up_the_mess_they_made/?page=entire

Add in the bonus billions that went to power-suits below the top-five level, and this total mounts much higher. All these execs didn't make their billions -- for the most part -- by cooking books. They made their fortunes taking reckless risks. The clawback provisions now on the books, unfortunately, won't recoup a dime from any of this recklessness. Does all this make clawbacks an over-hyped deadend? Some analysts don't think so. Appropriately reconfigured, they feel, clawbacks could be an important tool for attacking the concentration of income and wealth at America's economic summit.

One of these analysts, veteran Massachusetts attorney E. Michael Thomas, believes that a clawback offensive could help fund a substantial share of the Wall Street bailout. Thomas is proposing that any firm receiving bailout dollars should be subject to the "clawback of executive incomes, management fees, or stock options for the prior seven years, to the extent necessary to fund that company's bailout."

The key to the Thomas clawback approach: a political willingness to apply the "polluter pays" principle from existing environmental law to the bailout.

In the 1970s, Thomas notes, lawmakers had to decide how to pay for cleaning up the nation's toxic waste dumps. They decided that they weren't going to waste taxpayer dollars trying to prove individual enterprises at fault. Instead, they would operate under the principle that any enterprise that derived economic benefit from dumping waste at a site would be expected to help pay for the site's clean-up.

That same principle could be applied, via clawbacks, to the Wall Street bailout. These clawbacks, says Thomas, wouldn't require "an assessment of guilt or culpability" on any one executive's part.

"Instead," explains Thomas, a past recipient of the EPA's top public service award, "the clawbacks would reflect the simple policy judgment that the executives who derived economic benefit from creating the conditions that necessitated the bailout should pay for it."

They polluted the market so they should be the ones to pay. they broke so they should pay to fix it.