Let me count the ways

I have been having way too much fun writing stuff I actually know something about lately. But it’s time to get back to the serious situations that confront this nation. However, rather than dredge up the Cramer v Stewart dust up I want you to know that I am all over the latest confrontation which pits the lovely cross-in-her-cleavage Laura Ingraham against the “curvy” Meghan McCain, the twenty-something daughter of the seventy-something Senator with the same name.

Just kiddin’.

I would be quite happy to never hear the word “transparency” again and most especially in connection with the behemoth, mind-boggling boondoggle that is our economic nightmare right now. It’s the numbers. The media throws them around the way weather channel chicks talk about temperatures across the country. La di dah, $50 bazillion here. Ho hum $700 billion for this. $Who cares, 168 B for them. What gets my goat about that last number which is what the chatterers are saying that AIG has already paid out in bonuses with at least seven execs getting over 3 million each for “performing”* so well, is: they freakin’ lost $41 billion! How cool is that by the way. Your bonus is tied to how much you lose. To my point, MoveOn has an email circulating that says the bonus amount for AIG is $450 million. O well.

Of course we know that AIG is scheduled to get about 1,000 times the 168 number in bailout relief. No less a reliable source than Chuck Todd thought that amount is 1 percent rather than the .001 percent it is. People in that biz just don’t care and then they try to come off as caring so much by saying “BBBBillion” with an omigod look on their face like they can hardly believe it. Then on Monday morning BarackO spoke to small-business types in the White House and iterated Secretary Geithner’s sucking-up statement about how wonderful small businesses are and that they are the backbone of the economy and held out an injection of $386 million to facilitate loans to them. Whoopdy freakin’ do. That means they will get a little more than half of what the AIG crooks are getting. One third of a Billion dollars. We spill that amount in Iraq every month. It gives me an eye ache.

In his most excellent book, “Inside the Emerald City”, Rajiv Sandrasekaran details what a disaster the Viceroyalty of Jerry Bremmer was in the Green Zone of Baghdad during the early years of this hideously unpopular war. The pompous and dictatorial Bremmer replaced career professionals with party loyalists and flunkies in the same way that he was picked. The amount of money that was wasted, lost and pilfered is measured in the tens of billions and in one instance palates of 100 dollar bills wound up “missing” and of course was never found. But the point is that nobody knows what the numbers are. Iraq costs “between 10 and 12 B per month.” Wouldn’t you think that the pentagon with all their resources could figure out where every dollar goes and not have to guess with in a couple of billion what the monthly tab is? I would think after 6 years of this war they would have it down. I can’t get over how comparatively paltry that number for helping small businesses is, and yet very specific. Perhaps the Admirals and Generals could sharpen their pencils and help us with this one.

And what was the real amount that Bernie Madoff made off with, $50 B or $65 B? It’s no big deal unless you’re a small business guy and you look at the difference between the first number and the second and realize that it’s FORTY-FIVE times the size of the help being offered for honest loans for SBA loans. Wifey Ruth’s independently earned fortune has gone from 68 to 100 million according to the sneering punditry who justify the new tally by throwing in a couple yachts, a $39,000 rug (big deal) and some “fine silverware” (amount not disclosed). She had the sand to say that she earned that money as the bookkeeper for the family ponzi business and salted it away. Doing the math it actually does make sense that the bookkeeper would only make a hundred mill for a company raking in 50 to 65 billion.

In a society where high school kids don’t count their change, can’t add simple fractions or do common multiplications tasks, it shouldn’t surprise any of us that the general public doesn’t seem to care about numbers. They may be thinking, let the liars lie. There’s nothing I can do about it.


*AIG says the money is a “retention bonus,” to keep these good people on the job to “wind down” (ever what the hell that means) various units and that these people are under non-negotiable contracts. We now know 53 of them left anyway and got bonuses anyway. This is definitely a pants-on-fire moment.