What it comes down to here is that AIG and its band of criminals (particularly in the London CDO/CDS shop) wrote a box of contracts which not only guaranteed them bonuses regardless of performance, but also made certain that failure to pay up would blow up the whole system. Frankly, it is no different on a philosophical, logical or moral level from a welfare recipient holding a gun to a government employee and demanding money regardless of anything.

Important difference between welfare recipient and AIG/FP is that welfare recipients have been determined by the government to have met criteria for receiving welfare that were written and decided upon before and independently of the individual with a gun applying for his benefits.

As a recipient of entitlement benefits, I resent the asserted equivalence between the two classes of recipients. And speaking as a citizen, I can’t readily agree that our government’s actions are likewise philosophically, logically or morally equivalent across the cases of the two groups.

Sean Penn as Joe Wilson.
Marcy as Emptywheeler, fastest live blogger in DC…

I don’t know. Do you think Marcy looks enough like EW to play the role? Heh.

More useful and (more importantly) more likely to succeed would be a move in Congress to harness the broad-spectrum of populist anger at AIG and the bonuses and quickly enact both re-regulation of the financial markets

I like this idea very much. We don’t have the really unified political power on Capitol hill that we need, so this kind of populist uprising could enable some DFH House members (if there is such a thing) to write the regulations without interruption or limitations.

If we, taxpayers, now “own” the contractual liability and obligation then we need to see every contract and be able to publish a list of names of those benefiting from the contractual fulfillment. Show us the notes AIG.

Maybe we’ll discover a pattern or a clear connect-the-dots as we study the list of names we are obliged to pay.

I don’t know if it’s essential for the public to see that list, but certainly the government should have it. There might be some foreign names on the list too.

You know, now that I look back on that PPT, I badly want one of these fuckers to be captured on tape saying, “what are they going to do? let us fail? we’ll screw them. we’ll take out grannie and main street and so on if they try to dissolve us.”

THAT might finally get us to pitchforks.

The “smartest people in the room” would suddenly look like the vilest, stupidest f’ing people on the planet. Doug Feith would look intelligent by comparison. Heck, even Osama bin Laden wouldn’t seem so dangerous by comparison.

i’m positive the government is trying to get a handle on this situation, but it’s a shoe that hasn’t dropped; what if the failure of AIG cascades to these manufacturing companies because they are bought into these “swaps”?

Yeah, the economy is held hostage. Of course, you have to wonder what kind of people run such a company and would threaten their own nation with disaster if they don’t get the complete bailout, despite all their stupidity beforehand.

Call me a Tin Foil Hat wearing DFH lunatic, but I’m damned if I don’t suspect that there’s a connection between the London — totally unregulated — oil swap markets, and the fact that it was AIG’s London division that got into real trouble.

That and perhaps the fact that in a speech not so many months ago at his Labour party congress, PM Gordon Brown said London would become the world’s financial capital. Hmmmm.

Such an appointment would constitute an event of default under Banque AIG’s derivative and structured transactions

I don’t get this. Are they simply defining the terms of “default” to their advantage, saying not paying bonuses amounts to a form of “default”?