3/18/2009

Welcome to the Party, Bitches (Fiduciary Outrage Edition):


Really? Is this really the straw that snapped that fucker's spine? After all this time, after billions of dollars simply tossed into the ether over in Iraq, after paying Dick Cheney's cronies at Halliburton billions in no-bid contracts, after KBR overcharged the US government hundreds of millions for its "services" in Iraq (and after it was given a $70 million bonus while it was under investigation by the Justice Department in 2005), after money wasted hand over fist, bad over good, endlessly, it's this? AIG giving out about a tenth of a percent of its bailout money to top executives is what's gonna finally make Americans go nutzoid? Goddamn, we're adorable.

To put this in perspective: it's like a parent giving you ten bucks and then being pissed that you tossed a penny into a wishing well. "Next time," that angry parent might say, "next time you'll only get $9.99." Lesson learned, eh?

Most of us out here on the left have been in an uproar for, oh, shit, let's say a couple of decades over the criminally large amounts of money corporations have been giving executives, especially when they would do vicious shit like rewarding CEOs after the aforementioned bastards slashed thousands of jobs to help the stock price stay elevated. Now it's Republicans calling for an auto da fe' on AIG's top brass, with Charles Grassley "rhetorically" suggesting suicide and Fox "news" dicks calling for torture or public execution. (It probably doesn't hurt that AIG primarily contributed to Democrats.)

So why the hell not? Let's all shake our collective fists in our grand moment of joined socialist outrage. Who knows when it will come again? Now how about some action that really capitalizes on this anti-capitalist moment?

(And it ought to be pointed out that the New York Post front page is missing a comma.)