Anger Management

The country has a lot of anger, building up higher and higher, and just waiting for a target to land on. Obama can sense this, and he is trying to discharge the lightening bolt by offering up sacrificial lambs (aka scapegoats). First he tried to incinerate Rush Limbaugh and now he is trying to draw the lightening down to strike AIG. Trouble is, after you call out a lynch mob, you gotta have a real lynching, leaving bodies swinging from lampposts. Otherwise you just look wimpy.
I think AIG is going to skate out of this more or less intact. Ed Liddy, the cleanup guy, came across well on TV. He claimed he was stuck with the bonuses by previous management. He had run the offending bonuses by the Feds and gotten something between a "do your own thing" and an OK. Treasury and the Fed have not contradicted Liddy, so he is creditable. Liddy made a fair business case for what he called "retention bonuses". I'm not fully on board with Liddy about that, but he did make a case. So far, Treasury says they are going to deduct the $160 million worth of bonuses from the next $30 billion bailout payment. That's 0.5% and won't make that much difference in the larger scheme of things. It is a far cry from bodies hanging from lampposts.
Obama made this media theater. He could have told Liddy "cancel those bonuses" and made it stick. He didn't. He wanted a circus and he got one. Doesn't look like he is going get real blood out of AIG. He might get a "tax all bonuses away" law thru Congress, but that won't satisfy the voters like throwing some Wall St stock brokers/gamblers into jail would.