Why do these people still have jobs?

We know how it is. When we work, we have to produce. We have performance reviews, regular feedback, and we certainly hear about it when we screw up.

But run a bank into the ground, and you get to keep your job:

It's one of the ironies of the U.S. financial bailout: The banking executives now managing billions in taxpayer money are the same ones who oversaw the industry's near collapse.

At banks receiving federal bailout money, nearly nine of every 10 of the most senior executives from 2006 are still on the job, according to an Associated Press analysis of regulatory and company documents.

Even top executives whose banks made such risky loans they imperiled the economy have been largely spared any threat to their jobs. Less fortunate are more than 100,000 bank employees laid off during a two-year stretch when industry unemployment nearly tripled, bank stocks plummeted and credit dried up.

"The same people at the top are still there, the same people who made the decisions causing a lot of our financial crisis," said Rebecca Trevino of Louisville, Ky., a mother of three who was laid off from her job as a Bank of America training coordinator in October. "But that's what tends to happen in leadership. The people at the top, there's always some other place to lay blame."

It's hardly a surprise that workers and managers experience a recession differently. What's new is that taxpayers are now shareholders in the nation's bailed-out banks, yet they lack the usual shareholder power to question management decisions or demand house-cleaning in the executive suites.

[snip]

But the financial bailout has forced no such consequences. AP's review of the more than 200 publicly traded banks that received bailout money found that about 87 percent of the top three executives in 2006 — typically the chief executive, operating and financial officers — are still on the job.

And that number is deceptively low, since those few executives who left their jobs often did so because they retired — or died. Several stayed on as directors or in consulting positions.

I'd like to ask something of the people dreaming of a Palin/Wurtzelbacher ticket in 2012: Would you mind looking up the ladder at the people who are really screwing you over and stop looking down the ladder while these people pick your pockets?