March 18, 2009--Tea Party

Again, yesterday at the Green Owl.

We arrived late and the only two seats available at the counter were up front right by the cash register. The one compensation for sitting near such a busy spot is the chance to say hello to those arriving and departing.

We were schmoozing with Harvey about the recent Shuttle launch—among other things he’s the area’s resident expert on all things involving space flight—when someone we hadn’t seen for a while showed up to place a take-out order.

He was sputtering under his breath as he approached the counter as if talking to himself. Though a few others who wander in are famous for holding these kinds of phantom conversations, we had never seen Tim (I’ll call him that) do that or so agitated.

“Are you OK?” Rona, the solicitous-one asked.

“Those sons-of-bitches,” he muttered, not to her or anyone in particular. But then he caught himself, noticing Rona nearby, and said, “Sorry. Pardon my language. It’s just that I’m besides myself.”

“What’s going on? You seem so upset.”

“I’m more than upset. It’s those A.I.G bastards. Again, sorry. This is no way to be talking with a lady present.”

We had always known him to be very well mannered. “No problem, Tim. I know what you mean. Their behavior is outrageous.”

“It’s worse than that if you want my opinion. It’s criminal. If I had done at my job what they did at theirs, I’d be looking for a new line of work. Even though I always had to work my ass off I never ever even heard of bonuses!” The veins in his forehead were visibly throbbing. I was hoping he ordered decaf. He didn’t need any more stimulation.

“Me too,” I offered, trying to calm him down, “None were ever available to me.” I was concerned that he would give himself a stroke.

“And can you believe it the people getting the biggest bonuses all work in the division that came up with those derivatives that bankrupted the company. And I heard on the TV this morning that though those bonuses we supposed to be ‘retention’ bonuses,” he snickered, “at least eleven people who got them have already left the company.” He spit as he spoke, “Some retention. They took the money and ran. Bastards!”

He looked sheepishly over at Rona to see if she was upset with him. She had by then gotten off her stool and reached out to touch his shoulder. He leaned close and whispered to her, but loud enough for me to hear, “You know what we need?” She shook her head. “Another tea party. That’s what we need. And I’m not kidding.”

I only wish Tim Geithner and his boss would come down to the Owl one morning and hang out there. Because they’re not getting it. It would help them get the tone right when attempting to respond to the emotion that is running rampant about the A.I.G. bonuses. (Or minimally read the attached New York Times article.)

Geithner yesterday came up with his version of a plan to recover the money—not from the individuals who got money that they didn’t deserve (except perhaps contractually) but from the company: dun A.I.G. itself, he is said, for the $160 million. As if that’s at the heart of the problem.

It’s not that the company stole that money, which after all is peanuts compared to the real money A.I.G. itself stole, but they gave it to so-called executives who didn’t deserve it.

To people who should have been fired for bankrupting the company and this country and cost each of us thousands of dollars.

Geithner should be beating the drum about how outrageous this is and how we need to figure out ways to get the money back from those specific incompetent individuals. Even the hapless Congress is doing better in this regard!

Geithner is approaching the practical and political problem as if it’s about the money, when it’s, duh, about the outrageous rewarding of individual employees. It’s about corporate behavior that symbolizes what was allowed to go wrong in the pseudo-economy since Ronald Reagan’s time. About the consequences of irresponsible deregulation and unbridled greed. And how this artificially advantaged financial manipulators at the expense of hard-working people.

We have to deal with and expiate what’s making those working people like Tim so justifiably crazy. Geithner doesn’t begin to get that

And, sad for me to say, neither, it yet appears, does President Obama.

Yes, he is a better speaker, but it is not a good thing that the public is now wanting to know “What did Obama know and when did he know it.” We know the last time a president was questioned in this way.

We now know the “when”--that he learned about the latest round of bonuses last Thursday. But he did not say a word about this until Monday when he slipped in a few dispassionate comments before announcing his small business initiative. And this seemingly only after his surrogates on the Sunday talk show circuit failed to quell the rising public ire. Then, when Obama spoke to the nation on Monday, he didn’t even look into the TV camera and express his outrage directly to us—as usual he was shifting his head side to side, like at a tennis match, while reading from his teleprompter.

I like his calm, his Hawaiian cool—it shows he is not rattled by all the crises swirling around him and this has the affect of helping to keep the rest of us calm—but when it comes to the bonuses, he is effectively tone deaf.

He doesn’t seem to get it that for almost all of us who are truly scared about what is going on with our jobs, our savings, and our economic future, those of us who don’t have a clue about the meaning of credit default swaps or mark-to-market accounting, getting millions of dollars in bonuses when they are to say at the least not deserved, is an emotional lightening rod.

And unless Obama can react to the rising anger less reluctantly and more passionately, there will in fact be a tea party. One that he will not be leading.

He needs to remember that we enthusiastically elected him to bring about change. About this, he needs to do the