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Polinomics 101: A Big Week for Federal Follies

March/21/2009 "Polinomics"
It was hard to keep your eye on business this week, what with the incredible fist-banging-hair-on-fire-garment-shredding-rhetoric of both Republicans and Democrats in D.C., which was occasioned by the revelation that the very folks who brought on the need to bail out AIG Corporation with at least $170 billion in taxpayer money (yet to be collected from us) would be receiving some $165 million in “retention” bonuses.
  • Never mind that this $165 million payment represents only one-half of one percent of the recent Congressional Spending Orgy.
  • Never mind that the Congressional Budget Office reported that the budget deficits will average almost $1 trillion a year over the next decade, which is $2.3 worse than the administration is predicting.
  • Never mind that the guy they are now blaming for knowing about the bonus debacle (Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner) is the same guy that couldn’t figure out his self-employment tax when his employer sent him a cheat sheet on how to do it; that was O.K., but knowledge of the unpopular bonuses . . . oh no!
  • Never mind that Mr. Geithner is home alone, with no assistants in the Treasury Department to help because of now-impossible ethics hurdles.
  • Never mind that the issue of the toxic assets that pollute the financial system continues to languish.
  • Never mind that while no one was looking, history was made on Thursday, when Federal Reserve Chairman Ben Bernanke printed $1TRILLION so that the Fed can begin buying debt from the Treasury; yes . . . that means moving money from one pocket to another; so Bernanke is either a world class genius or scarier than Alan Greenspan.
  • Never mind that it was New York Attorney General Andrew Cuomo who uncovered the bonus mess by reading the documents that the media failed to read and report on . . . and it looks like he’s still diving for the iceberg itself: if you want to know who did what at AIG, log on to Cuomo’s Media Center section of the AG website.
  • Never mind that the media still refuses to investigate the tough and most relevant question: the relationship between government and our failing financial institutions.
And the Biggest Never-Mind of All: An embarrassing number of this week’s Caterwauling Congressmen (Dems and Reps), who were determined to “punish” the greedy, voted for the recent omnibus spending bill that made this greed possible. So far none has stepped forward to say that he or she actually read the 1,000-page document, along with its 10,000 pages of reference material. God knows what will pop up next.

The Congress-Members-as-Populists-Parade was really quite a sight to behold this week: almost as interesting as watching a wild-west sheriff try to clean out the whorehouse by shooting the piano player.

Stay tuned . . .