Angry Washington, D.C., angry America

by James Oliphant

Anger has been all the rage here.

Members of Congress, the president, the guys who sell half-smokes on the corner, anyone you talk to -- they've all been tripping over themselves to express their volcanic ire at those weasels at American International Group who accepted million-dollar bonuses.

It's gotten so bad that Sen. Charles Grassley -- Chuck Grassley, for goodness' sake, a homespun Iowan who rocks a sweater vest like no one else -- called on the AIG executives to do the honorable thing: resign or commit ritual suicide.

Hearing Grassley say that is a little like seeing Elmo show up in "The Pit and the Pendulum."

Lawmakers raced each other last week to come up with ways to get the money back: legislation to take 35 percent, 70 percent, heck, let's make it 90 percent of the bonuses. That left the politically powerless Republicans, who have been trying to leverage the issue as best they can, saying things like, 90 percent? We can get all your money back! We'll go that extra 10 percent!

AIG's embattled chief executive, Edward Liddy, came to town Wednesday, and if he could have displayed the heads of some of the bonus recipients on a pike in front of the House committee set to grill him, he would have, just to blunt the abuse he knew was coming his way.

We've come undone.

See the full report on anger in the Tribune and here in the Swamp:

By week's end, President Barack Obama, for one, seemed to try to distance himself from the torch-and-pitchfork gang, saying on "60 Minutes" that he would not govern out of anger. (Of course, a few days earlier, he had told reporters, "I don't want to quell anger. I think people are right to be angry. I'm angry.") Those on Wall Street wondered if Congress was sending the right message to businesses here and abroad by so actively trying to interfere in contractual relationships. And this week, senators seem to be displaying less outright bloodlust than their brethren in the House.

Then, there was the matter of proportion. The $165 million in bonuses constituted less than 1 percent of the money the federal government has pumped into AIG to try to keep it solvent. Two weeks ago the plague upon the land was congressional earmarks, which, again, made up about two percent of the mammoth spending bill Obama signed into law.

The question is, why? Why are Americans so overheated at the--gasp!--audacity of professionals in a big-money industry believing they should be compensated accordingly? Why do workers at the insurance giant now fear for their lives?

It is reminiscent of the last full-blown episode of public outrage, roughly a month or so ago, when the public turned on the Octomom. Like AIG executives, she went into hiding. Even worse, her publicists quit.

The cable-news wisdom says the outrage stems from your hard-earned tax dollars ending up in the pockets of executives who helped trigger the near-collapse of the economy. And who can say that's misplaced? Although your tax dollars prop up a lot of things where other people benefit, like publicly financed stadiums that enable athletes and owners to make millions.

It's more than that. In the cases of the AIG executives and the Octomom, much of the public believe they somehow gamed the system, used your money to enrich themselves. They found an angle and played it.

And maybe you are tired of being played, by outsourcing and off-shoring, by companies avoiding ways to pay taxes, by having your salary and benefits cut. But maybe it's more basic than even that.

Maybe it's going to an ATM and discovering you have to pay $3 for the simple reason that you have chosen a portal to the electronic banking system that isn't affiliated with your bank. Or forking over a dollar for a bottle of water on a flight. Or being confronted by this Hobson's choice: You can pay a bill for less if you do it on the Internet, or you can pay more to talk to someone. But in either case, you will be charged a handling fee for paying your bill.

The companies that seek billions in federal aid cannot stop nickel-and-diming us. Enough of that piles on, especially in hard times, and something's gotta give.

In the case of those AIG executives, it looks like they're the ones who will now be doing the giving. And perhaps if we can just get Alex Rodriguez to forfeit the rest of his Yankee contract, the rest of our $14.3 trillion economy will take care of itself.