America's Middle Class

Finally, someone wrote the article that says what I have been railing about for the past few years. Not only are the middle class jobs disappearing, but the impacts on African-Americans will be devastating.

Remember AIG?

Great short piece on AIG in yesterday's New York Times.  Essentially, in the negotiations over who was going to run AIG and how it was going to be managed, AIG beat the federal government.  We have loaned AIG billions and billions of dollars with no control over spending, much less management of this insurance behemoth.  

I think about my father, giving me an allowance.  Every week he would go over how I was going to spend the money, line by line, down to the candy I snuck from a local dime store.  But here, we lend money without any clue how to retain control.

And really the issue isn't the bonuses or the past, it's about the future.  It's whether this company can manage it's way out of a paper bag from here on in.  In a larger context is whether our government is being consistent in the micro-managing of the Chrysler and GM and yet hands off of the very culprits who were in the epicenter of this financial tornado.  While we can heap blame over the futurists at GM, Chrysler, and Ford not seeing an end to cheap oil and building smaller, more fuel efficient cars (and hello, who bought those cars?), 99.9% of the blame for this depression lies at the wing-tipped feet of the financial industry.  Yet they still seem amazingly in control of their daily work world and continue to lobby Congress and the Administration for lax regulation on them and tough bankruptcy laws on the very victims of their follies.  

What is up with that?