Bankers branded "shameful"

President Obama in a speech called Wall street upper management's behaviour "shameful" based on their spending 20 billion of the bailout money on bonuses, and at a time when most of them are "having" to let people go. There are rumours, which I hope turn out to be fact, that legislation may be passed that will allow the state to claw back some of the bonuses paid to top management in times such as these.
I really do not understand the mentality of these people, are they mentaly retarded? They are always arguing that they demand their high salaries because of what they are able to bring to large organisations and the bonuses, which are multiples of their salaries, are based on their performance. Yet, there does not seem to be any accountability clauses in any of their contracts. For example, a top executive joins a company and he gets a high salary. On top of that he will be promised a large bonus each year and then on top of this bonus there will be an additional performance bonus which is based on how well the company will do under his stewardship. However, the metric for this performance ie how well the company is doing is fundamentaly flawed. All that is looked at is has the company made a large profit this year, is the share price moving up and have we paid a large divident. The problem with all that is that short term objectives only are being measured and not the long term. A policy of clawing back bonuses would be good so that an executive that has met the short term objectives but has failed in the long term, like these bankers, can be made to return past bonuses. This would improve the model of executive compensation I feel and would make it a more realistic performance based bonus