OUTRAGE

Before tonights rant begins, I'd like to set the mood, if you will, with a short anecdote about an only tangentially related topic.  A blog foreplay of sorts (bloreplay?).  

Being the proprieter of a Blog that nobody reads, I have a curious regard for something I will call the record.  Like the internet is kind of this place called the record.  Its a place where you can basically have this huge party if you like, but everthing you do is registered, preserved in binary, in this kind of public memory of you.  And that is why it is the record.

So I imagine this record as being a really active place, almost like a huge traffic interchange.  Ideas are thrown out of speeding cars into a digital ether.  Right in the middle of the record sit the annals of our history. 

But out here, on the fringe of the record, it is pretty quiet, and dark. The streetlights don't work and very few people ever drive through.  

But even though the record doesn't really give a shit, I like to put into it as if it does.  

So this post...this post I'd like to have for the record.

It is outrageous... Outrageous that we spent an entire news cycle talking about $165 million in bonus pay.  It is an embarassment for the press that a week after the AIG counterparties are publicly outed, not a single news outlet is talking about this on their front pages?  

I mean, and I never ever dreamed I would say this, but thank God for Eliot Spitzer! 
(Also, shouts to the Fortune site, the Wall Street Journal and Gretchen Mortgensen.)

But the rest? Really.  Pathetic.

50 BILLION dollars of the 170 BILLION dollars in AIG obligations have already left the building so that counterparties can be made whole at 100% of what is due.  And now congress spends a day moaning about how much? Less than  1% of what we are on the hook for?

Is everyone in on this?  What is going on here? Have we lost our collective mind?

Heres my Santelli moment:

Hey, congress...yeah you, and that means you dude.  Loud, indignant guy. You.  The one that wanted our money 'on the street, NOW'. That guy.

Why don't you try doing your job?  Instead of the theatrics, why don't you call Mr. Liddy back down, yesterday, and ask him along with,  I dunno, Thain, Blankfein, Paulson, and whoever is at Societe General and Duetsche Bank- if they care to join us- to explain, in a normal conversational tone,  why it is that they should be made whole on the bets they took out that the entire world economy would do what it just did?

Are you guys listening out there? 

Why are taxpayers paying these poeple everything they are asking for?  Why is no one talking about this?

I'm asking- for the record.