Stoking Outrage

I don't like to write about politics but I am very disturbed at the deliberate stoking of populist rage against the people whose jobs are to unwind that  mess at AIG.  It's inciting mob violence and it has to end.

Busload of Crazies to Tour Homes of AIG Executives This Weekend…and ACORN’s behind it

ACORN if you remember has signed on to be a "national partner" in the 2010 US Census despite its history of voter fraud and  bullying  intimidation of banks and prior ties with the Obama campaign.

Even the powerful Democrat and chairman of the House Judiciary Committee, John Conyers who formerly supported ACORN now proposes hearings on the activist group after accusations that ACORN engaged in a pattern of crimes ranging from voter fraud to a mob-style "protection" racket.

Katie Orlinsky for The New York Times

Yes, the $165 million in bonuses handed out to executives in the financial products division of American International Group was infuriating. Truly, it was. As many others have noted, this is the same unit whose shenanigans came perilously close to bringing the world’s financial system to its knees. When the Federal Reserve chairman, Ben Bernanke, said recently that A.I.G.’s “irresponsible bets” had made him “more angry” than anything else about the financial crisis, he could have been speaking for most Americans.

But death threats? “All the executives and their families should be executed with piano wire — my greatest hope,” wrote one person in an e-mail message to the company.
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By week’s end, I was more depressed about the financial crisis than I’ve been since last September. Back then, the issue was the disintegration of the financial system, as the Lehman bankruptcy set off a terrible chain reaction. Now I’m worried that the political response is making the crisis worse. The Obama administration appears to have lost its grip on Congress, while the Treasury Department always seems caught off guard by bad news.

And Congress, with its howls of rage, its chaotic, episodic reaction to the crisis, and its shameless playing to the crowds, is out of control. This week, the body politic ran off the rails.

There are times when anger is cathartic. There are other times when anger makes a bad situation worse. “We need to stop committing economic arson,” Bert Ely, a banking consultant, said to me this week. That is what Congress committed: economic arson.

How is the political reaction to the crisis making it worse? Let us count the ways.

Mark Steyn calls it The Outrage Kabuki. 

In between appearances on Jay Leno and his “March Madness” picks, Barack Oprompta also found time to compare AIG executives to suicide bombers:

I think it's more Chicago Razzle Dazzle, but the Canadian Financial Post asks Is this the end of America?

As an aghast world — from China to Chicago and Chihuahua — watches, the circus-like U.S. political system seems to be declining into near chaos. Through it all, stock and financial markets are paralyzed. The more the policy regime does, the worse the outlook gets. The multi-ringed spectacle raises a disturbing question in many minds: Is this the end of America?
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One test of whether we are witnessing the end of America is how many more times Americans put up with congressional show trials of individual business people and their employees, slandering and vilifying them for their actions and motives. And for how long will they tolerate a President who berates business and corporations as dens of crime and malfeasance? If the majority of Americans come to accept the caricatures of business as true, then America is closer to the end of its life as a global leader, as a champion of markets and individualism.
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Reform of health care, environmental policy, education, energy, banking, regulation — every nook and cranny of the U.S. economy has been put on alert for major change. Expansion of government spending, plunging the U.S. into unprecedented deficits, is without parallel. In economic policy, through regulation and control of energy output, financial services and monetary expansion, the U.S. government has embarked on a fundamental reshaping of America. It is designed, in short, to bring on the end of America.

The spillover effect of all this on the rest of the world promises to be dramatically disruptive.

UPDATE  Thank God, the protest was a bust - one busload and 20 media vans