The New York Times editorial page's lending of space to former AIG financial vice president Jake DeSantis' plea for "us all to reconsider our anger toward the poor overworked employees of his unit" has incurred some of Matt Taibbi's trademark wrath (Alternet, 3/26/09):

He acts like he's a victim because he didn't get to keep his after-tax bonus of $742,006.40 in the middle of a global depression. And he really loses his fucking mind when he writes:

None of us should be cheated of our payments any more than a plumber should be cheated after he has fixed the pipes but a careless electrician causes a fire that burns down the house.

First of all, Jake, you asshole, no plumber in the world gets paid a $740,000 bonus, over and above his salary, just to keep plumbing. Second, try living on a plumber's salary before you even think about comparing yourself to one; you're inviting a pitchfork in the gut by even thinking along those lines. Third, Jake, if you were a plumber, and the electrician burned the house down--well, guess what? If you and that electrician worked for the same company, you actually wouldn't get paid for that job.

Schooling DeSantis on life "in the real world," Taibbi tells him that "when your company burns a house down, you're not getting paid by that client": "It's only on Wall Street, where the every-man-for-himself ethos is built into an insanely selfish and greed-addled compensation system, that people like you expect to get paid in a bubble--only there do people expect their performance bonuses no matter how much money the shareholders lose overall, no matter how many people get laid off."

Responding to a Washington Post op-ed in which one Martin Feldstein "explains how Obama's proposed limitation on the deductibility of charitable contributions by upper-income taxpayers is a horrible idea," Jonathan Schwarz (A Tiny Revolution, 3/25/09) asks

What does Feldstein have to say about the tax code change? Well:

In effect, the change would be a tax on the charities, reducing their receipts by a dollar for every dollar of extra revenue the government collects. It is hard to imagine a rationale for taxing schools, hospitals, medical research budgets and arts organizations in this way.... The proposed tax change would apply to married couples with incomes of more than $250,000....

I dunno. I think one rationale for taxing charities in this way is that the government somehow has to come up with the $180 billion it just handed over to AIG.

Seeking a reason for this logical disconnect, Schwarz looks to the Post's identification of Feldstein as simply "an economics professor at Harvard University [and] president emeritus of the National Bureau of Economic Research" and notes "one affiliation the Post left out": "Martin Feldstein is a longtime member of AIG's board of directors. He's also a member of the board's finance committee."

Wondering  at the "remarkable class solidarity" displayed by U.S. elitists, Robert Parry (Consortium News, 3/22/09) hypothesizes that "this may help explain why the Washington Post's editorial writers penned three editorials last week decrying the populist outrage over the AIG bonuses":

The first editorial on March 17, entitled "Bonus Blowback," purported to share the public's outrage but came down on the side of paying the bonuses. "We hope that the president is setting the stage to do whatever it takes to answer legitimate protests about AIG without adding to the existing dangers or jeopardizing the necessary rescues of the banking sector still to come," the Post said.

The next day in an editorial called "The Big Bash," the Post expressed stronger annoyance with the "'populist' backlash" against the AIG bonuses. The Post wrote:

No matter how morally satisfying, taking back bonuses now … would probably accelerate the exodus [of AIG executives], with the likely effect that the country would lose much more money on AIG than it would otherwise....

The relevant policy question here is not whether we feel like spending $165 million on bonuses; it is whether doing so will help wrap up the AIG rescue as cheaply and quickly as possible.

By March 20, the Post editorialists were starting to fume, equating the irresponsibility of AIG's risky bets on derivatives with the angry reaction from politicians and their constituents over the bonuses.

In an editorial entitled "Washington Gone Wild," the Post chastised Congress for trying to recoup the taxpayers' money by imposing a 90 percent tax on bonuses at firms that took significant government bailout funds.

Parry concludes that, being " too cozy with their brethren on Wall Street," Post editors "may share too much of what might be called a class interest... to understand how justifiably angry Americans are... at both the financiers who took the economy over the cliff and at the politicians and pundits who bogged the nation down in the bloody quagmire of Iraq."

Listen to the latest edition of FAIR's radio program CounterSpin: "Robert Johnson on AIG Bonuses" (3/20/09).

You can accuse some in the media of paying too much attention to the bonuses at AIG, but on ABC's newscast they've been doing the opposite--trying to tell people to stop talking down "our" company.

ABC's World News With Charles Gibson, March 17:

CHARLES GIBSON: Let me turn to Betsy Stark. There is an awful lot of, I guess you could call it AIG bashing going on. But as a lot of people pointed out today, there's a real danger in this, because everybody in this country has a vested interest in AIG succeeding, because we, the taxpayer, essentially own the company, right?

BETSY STARK (ABC NEWS): That's right, Charlie. American taxpayers own 80 percent of AIG now, and their best hope for recovering some of the tens of billions of dollars that they've sunk into the company is for the government to sell off AIG's many good businesses. But if the AIG name continues to get dragged through the mud, it's only going to run down the value of those businesses and make it harder for taxpayers to get the very best price, so the outrage is understandable, but it comes at a real-world cost.

ABC's World News With Charles Gibson, March 18:

CHARLES GIBSON: And one more thing, you and I talked last night about the fact that all of us, the taxpayers actually own AIG. And as this controversy goes on, we may be driving down the value of the company we own. You've talked to insurance people, I know, all day long. What do they say about that?

BETSY STARK (ABC NEWS): You know, the irony is that taxpayers could be cutting off their noses to spite their faces. Their anger is justifiable, these people say, but they have got to keep sight of the fact that they are talking about $165 million in bonuses, and they have got a $170 billion investment to protect. That's what they own.

CHARLES GIBSON: All right, that's what we all, in effect, own. Betsy Stark, thanks very much.

If one really took this argument seriously--don't criticize things owned by the public--then wouldn't all sorts of things be off limits?