The Oxford Encyclopedic English Dictionary defines "bonus" as "unsought or unexpected extra benefit." This is the definition in the 1991 edition. Well, it couldn't be further from reality today. Bonuses are now negotiated like salaries and stock options. On one corporate board on which I sit I found that senior executives were ripshit that they had gotten the lush premiums they'd received last year when they almost made the company's projected numbers. But this year, like with nearly all public firms, they didn't come close. Now, downgrades in profits and actual losses were altogether common in 2008. In many enterprises, however, directors could see (and demonstrate how) particular actions by particular employees negatively effected the bottom line, very negatively. And still they want some lush bounty.

In many of the widely disbursed counting houses that have received federal money so that they could survive their own phantasmagoric smash-ups, the bonus structure has, more or less, survived intact. (I bet no one has really looked into whether declining public companies that are not on the federal tit are also still doing business as usual with bonuses; my surmise is that they are.)

But the administration has been caught in flagrante delicto by the A.I.G. psychodrama. Imagine trusting this truly criminal company to do anything on its own. The passing out of bonuses will not be the last and and is certainly not the worst of its transgressions. There is the slipping under the table of $90 billion of U.S. Treasury bailout funds to Goldman, Merrill, Societe Generale, Deutsche Banke, UBS, Barclay's. Why should these companies have been rendered whole on their contracts with A.I.G. when that company was fundamentally bankrupt? As it turns out, however, all of this was known during the Bush administration. In fact, much of it was negotiated with Henry Paulson, the secretary of the treasury, who had been Goldman's C.E.O. before arriving in Washington with about $700 million, much of it in Goldman stock. Did that have anything to do with the lush arrangements Paulson oversaw with A.I.G. and its creditors?

There is a hero in this saga, and it is Andrew Cuomo, the attorney general of New York. He went to court to get the names of the A.I.G. bonus beneficiaries and got them. This will be a precedent for other companies and banks. Cuomo is positively eloquent about the claims that contracts are sacrosanct forever. "They are not. If the fundamental financial condition of a corporation change its obligations also can change." That's what courts are for.

Reuters has a completely understandable story, "Goldman's share of AIG bailout money draws fire." Read it. It will calrify intricate matters.