US Fed's move is the bigger problem

[bridgit]

'It couldn't always have been like this. No, the country today would be a far different place if across the span of American history had the nation constantly chosen to focus on the most picayune of arcane and unimportant irrelevancies, as it's doing currently with the AIG bonus controversy, instead of on matters with some actual import.

It's early in the evening of June 5, 1944 - the day before the D-Day landings in Normandy, in Supreme Allied Commander Dwight D Eisenhower's Goodge Street Headquarters in London. The general is addressing his senior staff.

"Men, we are at a truly momentous crossroads in history. Tomorrow we commence America's crusade in Europe, wherein the New World, fired by the tradition of liberty and justice it inherited from the old, returns to liberate the Old World from the most barbarous brand of tyranny and injustice ever seen by man. We must not fail; or falter, we must ... "
"Excuse me General, but we can't invade tomorrow."
"Can't invade? Why? Will the weather hinder our paratroop landings?"
"No sir, it's not that?"
"Have the Nazis moved Panzers to Caan?"
"No sir."
"Well, what is it man?"
"It's our tanks! They don't have cup holders! We can't invade France with tanks that don't have cup holders!"

And as a two-year debate is initiated over whether the cup holders should be adjacent to the tanker's right or left knee, the Germans construct their atomic bomb, go on to win the war. "For want of a nail ... the battle is lost" an old verse goes, here, for want of a cup holder, the Nazis would have conquered the world.

At occasions like the present, the American people act much like the dyslexic idiot savant Raymond Babbitt in the 1988 movie Rain Man. He couldn't shake a monomaniac fixation on the TV show People's Court or the alleged superiority of his K-Mart underwear; America can't seem to lose its fixation, its rage, over the issue of the US$165 million of bonuses granted to members of the American International Group (AIG) financial products division (AIGFP), the sector of the 90-year-old company that so mismanaged the writing and trading of the newfangled financial product called credit default swaps ( CDS) that the company has been forced to accept $180 billion in Federal Reserve and US Treasury largesse since last autumn.'

http://www.atimes.com/atimes/Global_Economy/KC21Dj03.html

[DCKit]

1. Now at $218 million and climbing.

I'll be among those cheering when the DOJ and the auditors step in.