Which raises the question: what the would these Marie Antoinettes have to do before they stopped seeing hundreds of millions as a baseline salary? They're hardly starving; they're currently limited to $500,000 — or about $1400 a day — by the terms of the bailout.

To put that in perspective surgeons earn about $330,000 at the top end, according to the American College of Surgeons. And that was a survey from the boom days of 2006. The highest paid nurses in that year got about $60,000. Does William Dooley, the head of AIG's financial services division, the same division that drove the company to catastrophe, and who is among those the Wall Street Journal report is threatening to quit, provide more good to society? (That was a rhetorical question. The answer is no.)

Anyway, two of the executives, heroes both, have changed their minds over the weekend and decided to soldier on with mere hundreds of thousands of dollars and some risk of losing a lucrative severance. That leaves three whom we invite to send in their rationales for demanding more money.

AIG is not alone; last week Bank of America announced that it would pay back $45bn bailout money, primarily so it could lavish silks and ivory on a new chief executive.

When AIG was bailed out to the tune of $150 billion last year, we were told it was necessary because of the "systemic risk" to the economy that would have been posed had the insurance giant gone into bankruptcy. Turns out $61 billion of that bailout went straight to banks that AIG owed money to, including $14 billion to Goldman Sachs. They would have gotten pennies on the dollar had AIG been allowed to fail, but after the taxpayers stepped in, the banks demanded to be paid in full. And Timothy Geithner, who was running the Federal Reserve Bank of New York at the time and the de facto chief of AIG, caved to those demands. Why? Because the credit rating agencies had a gun to his head.

The Special Inspector General for TARP has released the report of its investigation into exactly why Goldman and the other banks AIG owed money to didn't take a haircut after that bailout, and the extent to which AIG's credit rating was a ticking time-bomb throughout the ordeal is astonishing. Keep in mind that in 2008, if you wanted to sell an insane securitized mortgage concoction premised on prospective cash flow from monthly receipt of soiled envelopes full of change mailed in by hobos, Standard & Poor's, Moody's, and Fitch would have rated it as investment grade. Here's a 2007 IM exchange, uncovered by congressional investigators, between two S&P employees regarding one of the phantom collateralized debt obligations that killed the economy:

S&P Employee #1: btw-that deal is ridiculous

S&P Employee #2: I know right.. model def does not capture half of the risk

S&P Employee #1: we should not be rating it

S&P Employee #2: we rate every deal

S&P Employee #2: it could be structured by cows and we would rate it

S&P Employee #1: but there's a lot of risk associated with it – I personally don't feel comfy signing off as a committee member.

But when it came time to rate AIG's creditworthiness, that ratings agencies suddenly became exacting arbiters of fact, and their cascading downgrades and threats of further downgrades drove Geithner's decision-making as he bailed out AIG and negotiated with the banks AIG owed money to:

On the afternoon of September 15, 2008, the three largest credit rating agencies-Standard and Poor's Financial Services, Moody's Investors Service, Inc., and Fitch Ratings Ltd.-downgraded AIG. On September 16, 2008, because of concerns that an AIG bankruptcy could cause systemic risk to the entire financial system and the American retirement system, the Federal Reserve Board, with the support of Treasury, authorized [the Federal Reserve Bank of New York] to lend up to $85 billion to the firm....

Once the bailout got started, Geithner's choices were limited at every turn by how the ratings agencies would react. When negotiating with the banks, he considered threatening to let AIG go under—thereby inducing them to take what they could get from the government—but decided not to because if word got out, the credit agencies would react by lowering AIG's rating, which would in turn spark a round of defaults:

[The New York Fed] was further concerned – as it was throughout the AIG rescue – about the reaction of the rating agencies. While threatening not to support AIG might have been useful for purposes of forcing concessions by the counterparties, it could also have been viewed by the credit rating agencies as an indication that the [New York Fed] and the U.S. government was not standing fully behind AIG, which could have had a negative impact on AIG's credit rating.

And Geithner's cursory attempt to get the banks to take a haircut—the "negotiation" with Goldman Sachs consisted of one telephone call, according to the report—was conducted under duress because he feared another downgrade was imminent:

The intent in creating Maiden Lane III [the vehicle by which the banks were paid off] may similarly have been the improvement of AIG's liquidity position to avoid further rating agency downgrades, but the direct effect was further payments of nearly $30 billion to AIG counterparties, albeit in return for assets of the same market value. Stated another way, by providing AIG with the capital to make these payments, Federal Reserve officials provided AIG's counterparties with tens of billions of dollars they likely would have not otherwise received had AIG gone into bankruptcy.

In other words, we bailed out AIG because if we didn't, the credit ratings agencies would throw it in to bankruptcy by being honest for once in their lives about its financial condition. And we paid out $61 billion to Goldman and other banks because if we didn't, the credit rating agencies would have downgraded AIG and screwed up the whole bailout. They lied us into a collapse and rated us into a bailout. Oh, and now they're doing about $400 million in business rating securities for the Fed's Term Asset-Backed Securities Loan Facility, which requires that securities purchased through the program have to be rated by two or more "nationally recognized rating agencies."

AIG collapsed last year in part because it had written insurance policies on billions of dollars in stupid bets made by Goldman, Merrill Lynch, Deutsche Bank and others. Since it was functionally bankrupt, last September AIG thought it would be able to convince those banks to accept significantly less than face value on the credit default swaps it had sold them. How much less?

[Elias] Habayeb, 37, was chief financial officer for the AIG division that oversaw AIG Financial Products, the unit that had sold the swaps to the banks. One of his goals was to persuade the banks to accept discounts of as much as 40 cents on the dollar, according to people familiar with the matter.

Then a funny thing happened: The New York Fed opened an $85 billion credit line for AIG, staving off bankruptcy with a massive influx of taxpayer dollars and effectively taking control of the insurer. Habayeb was pushed aside as chief negotiator with Goldman and the other banks on the issue of how much AIG owed for those swaps and replaced by Tim Geithner, then the chairman of the Federal Reserve Bank of New York. Geithner had a different opening position:

Geithner's team circulated a draft term sheet outlining how the New York Fed wanted to deal with the swaps.... Part of a sentence in the document was crossed out. It contained a blank space that was intended to show the amount of the haircut the banks would take, according to people who saw the term sheet. After less than a week of private negotiations with the banks, the New York Fed instructed AIG to pay them par, or 100 cents on the dollar.

We'll never know how much Goldman would have accepted in the end, or how much the other banks would have accepted, or if one or all of them would have forced AIG into bankruptcy. But we know this: AIG's target was 60 cents on the dollar, and after Geithner turned on the taxpayer-financed spigot the banks got everything.

The logic of the decision, according to an analyst quoted by Bloomberg, was driven by the fact that some banks claimed that they needed the full amount of what AIG owed them or they risked failure.

One reason par was paid was because some counterparties insisted on being paid in full and the New York Fed did not want to negotiate separate deals, says a person close to the transaction. "Some of those banks needed 100 cents on the dollar or they risked failure," Vickrey says.

Goldman Sachs was not one of those banks. In March, CFO David Viniar told analysts on a conference call that Goldman's exposure to AIG was hedged: "There would have been no credit losses if AIG had failed." So if Geithner had negotiated a separate peace with Goldman—perhaps using the same sort of bullying tactics and arm-twisting that the Treasury Department and Fed had shown toward Bank of America and other institutions while trying to keep the financial system alive—he may well have gotten them down to $7.8 billion, the 40-cents-on-the-dollar haircut AIG thought it could get, and saved taxpayers $5.2 billion.

Geithner made the decision in total secrecy. He tried for months to keep the list of counterparties to AIG secret, and Bloomberg reports that the New York Fed ordered AIG executives not to file SEC documents that would reveal details of how the swaps were being handled: "Don't you think your counterparties will be concerned?"

As long as the counterparties are happy, right? Another thing that makes Goldman happy is "dark pools." Matt Taibbi has flagged a white paper the firm is circulating in D.C.—and posted on its web site—arguing straight-faced that transparency and free flow of information are not good things when it comes to equities markets, and that billions of dollars in secret transactions to which only obscenely wealthy bankers are privy are healthy. Because real-time public disclosure of huge transactions could hurt Goldman's bottom line:

In traditional exchange trading, bids and offers are public, and this transparency helps buyers and sellers to achieve the best price.

For some market participants, however, the openness and transparency of the equity market actually mean they are unlikely to achieve the best price.

Instead, Goldman argues, regulators should allow "so-called dark pools" of "non-displayed liquidity" so that they can do whatever they want to, when they want to, so the schlubs don't find out about it until it's too late and they've already parted with their money. This is actually posted on Goldman Sachs' web site, publicly.

CORRECTION: We initially misread Bloomberg's report that AIG wanted banks to "accept discounts of as much as 40 cents on the dollar" as meaning they wanted to banks to accept as little as 40 cents on the dollar. In fact, AIG wanted banks to accept as little as 60 cents on the dollar—a 40 percent discount. We've adjusted the figures in the post to reflect that.

If you know how Goldman employees will be spending their taxpayer-financed bonuses this year, let me know: you can e-mail me at the address below or post to the #goldmanproject page.

The New York Times reviews Feinberg's "delicate dance"gett with AIG, Bank of America, Citigroup, Chrysler, and General Motors executives over how to fairly compensate them without their heads winding up on pikes and carried through streets filled with burning trash by enraged unemployed people. The solution was drastic—a 90% cut in cash pay for the top 25 executives and an average of 50% cut overall at each firm—and tough to get to. One reason is that AIG wasn't really sure how many millions in taxpayer dollars its executives were skimming into their own pockets:

A.I.G. refused to cancel some pay contracts that fell outside Mr. Feinberg's purview. At one point, A.I.G. executives expressed frustration with the contracts. A.I.G., they said, was having trouble identifying just who its most highly paid employees were.

Were they actually getting cash from the U.S. Treasury, and people were just carting it home in grocery bags, or something?

The failed executives fought back against the restrictions valiantly, but to no avail. How do you expect to retain your best failures if you don't pay them competitively?

Bank of America was particularly concerned that it might lose employees if Mr. Feinberg restricted pay. The bank was in the midst of integrating its operations with those of Merrill Lynch, which it agreed at the height of the crisis last year to buy.

When Bank of America submitted the names of top executives to Mr. Feinberg, its representatives pointed out that 45 of the top 100 employees at the bank and Merrill had left.

You see how that works, right? The only way to keep people is to pay them millions of dollars. If you stop paying them millions of dollars, they will leave. Bank of America's evidence of this is that 45% of the people to whom it was paying the most millions of dollars left. Q.E.D.

The top 25 executives at each of those companies—as well as GM and Chrysler's financing arms—will have their cash salaries cut by an average of 90% under the guidelines, and total executive compensation will have to decline by an average of 50%. At AIG, according to the New York Times, no top executive will make more than $200,000.

Of course, the companies will still be free to compensate their executives with (worthless) stock, as long as they are restricted from cashing it in immediately.

This is all very exciting. The prospect of AIG executives getting by on just four times the nation's median household income is, well...satisfying. On the other hand, these people always find ways to enrich themselves, and we have a feeling they'll continue to do so. The firms subject to the rules are the recipients of the most dramatic bailout actions—run-of-the-mill TARP recipients are exempt.

We wonder, since Citigroup is under the restrictions, whether they'll find a way to claw back the $126 million that Robert Rubin skimmed off the company during his eight years there.

The really funny thing about the rules is that AIG is bound by them, because it was the recipient of a $173 billion bailout, which was necessary because if AIG collapsed, then all the firms it owed money to would collapse. So we bailed out AIG so that it could then pay out $50 billion to two dozen companies whose stupid bets AIG had insured, and those companies are prepping massive 2009 bonuses—Goldman Sachs got that $13 billion pass-through bailout, for instance—while AIG execs are getting a lousy $200 grand. The world sure is funny, sometimes.

[Photo via Flickr by Joshua Davis.]

"I think they saw that the world was about to fall off it's axis" Sorkin told Charlie Rose last night, when asked why AIG was bailed out. The amount of time to make decisions to try and pull markets from the edge of economic armageddon was less than hours, it was mere moments. Conversations in hallways between meetings that would attempt to pull a careening market from falling off a cliff. They couldn't possibly have time to weigh the consequences of their actions. They were simply in triage mode. Crack the chest of the American economic system, resuscitate, and worry about fixing the broken ribcage later.

Shotgun marriages for Goldman Sachs and Morgan Stanley were sought after Lehman Brothers collapsed. Lehman accused JP Morgan of freezing $17 billion in cash and securities that belonged to the embattled firm on the night before it's failure.

A year and a half later there is not a single regulation on the books. Nothing has been done to prevent the same crooks from robbing the store, leaving markets in the same vulnerable position it was before the collapse. Sorkin describes how financial behemoths are "answering to the shareholder, not the community, and that is a huge issue. What's right for the community might not be right for the shareholder." Self regulation is still simply voluntary, and our government naive enough to think they won't try it again.

Guess what, they already are. Sorkin breaks the bad news "Many of those toxic assets are still on the market, and they're bidding them up even higher." Wonderful.

Sorkin describes "a great scene where Ben Bernake and Hank Paulson go into the White House, and President Bush tells them, at some point you're going to have to tell me how this happened."

We're still waiting.

Oh hell, we'll say it's good: A full $1.5 billion of that profit is going to AIG's primary owner, the federal government. So we can afford Cash for Clunkers after all! It's like Uncle Sam found a sawbuck in an old (red-white-and-blue) coat pocket.

But it won't last—AIG says business is still suffering from "weak economic conditions and the lingering effect of negative A.I.G. events earlier in the year." The "negative AIG events," you will recall, culminated in an orgy of outrage and threats of violence against the company after it redirected taxpayer dollars to the executives who engineered the financial collapse in the form of bonuses. So if AIG's apparent turnaround ends up being temporary, remember—it's your fault.

It's more evidence, in case you needed it, that the federal bailout was little more than a collossal plunder, and all we're doing now is shifting tax-payer money around from failure to failure in service to the goal of keeping executives employed so they can still afford to stay at places like the St. Regis.

Here's how it works: You get a job, in order to make money. The federal government takes up to a third of that money in income tax. But don't worry, it's for your own good! Even though you are making money, AIG is not, so the federal government gives $85 billion of the money it took from you to AIG, which then spends $440,000 of it at the St. Regis on $210 spa treatments and $1,600-a-night rooms. AIG also gives $2.3 billion of that to CItigroup, because it owed them insurance payments on bad bets Citi had made. Oh, but we totally forgot to mention—even though Citi is getting paid all that money from AIG, it still wasn't making any money, so the federal government took another $45 billion of that money it took from your paycheck and gave it to Citigroup.

And then, even though the St. Regis is getting all that money from AIG for their retreats, business isn't so good, in part because of the public uproar over AIG paying all that taxpayer money for its retreats. Which means its owner can't make good on the $70 million owes to... Citigroup! So Citigroup takes over the St. Regis.

But! The St. Regis is a money pit, because of all the aforementioned outrage and on account of the fact that nobody has any money or jobs, and that the executive class-types who still do have jobs are too scared by all that outrage to book any retreats there. So Citigroup is actually losing money on the St. Regis. From the Los Angeles Times:

Becoming the owner of the resort will be expensive for Citigroup, which now will not only have to pay interest on the $230-million first mortgage, but also cover St. Regis' operating losses.

And Citigroup losing money is a bad thing, because, even though they made $4.3 billion last quarter, they're still in really bad shape, and probably won't make much money any time soon. Or so they say. But they do make enough money to offer executives $2 million per year. But just forget about that for now.

Because if Citigroup doesn't get better—and by "better," we don't really know what we mean since they made that $4.3 billion last quarter, but whatever—then the federal government might have to take more of that money from your paycheck and give it to them. Or even if it doesn't get more bailout money, it's still bad because the federal government owns about $27 billion worth of Citigroup. And the more money Citigroup makes, the more money it pays to the federal government, and the faster the federal government returns that money to you—just kidding about that last part.

To recap: The federal government owns a big piece of the obscenely expensive hotel that AIG executives spent hundreds of thousands of your dollars on after you bailed them out, and it's losing fucking money on it. The most important lesson to be learned here is this: If you soak a bandana in urine and wrap it around your face, it will mitigate the effects of tear gas. It's gross, but it works.

Illustration by the inimitable Steven Dressler

Rebecca Chapman was teaching her kids about rapacious capitalism and its miscontents by getting them all mad about AIG's excesses, but then, as good teachers do, she turned the tables:

"What if you were an AIG employee?" she asked. Imagine if you had not been involved in the deals that ruined the company but were left to clean up the mess. What if you had to pay back money you felt you had earned? What if your family had received death threats?

One boy raised his hand.

"Can we write them and let them know that it's going to be okay?" asked the boy, who clearly doesn't have a 401(k).

Oh Christ, obviously the correct answer to that is "NO you may not, what are you, a Republican?" But this was in Texas, so they let the kids do it, and it was literally the only good thing that happened to AIG this entire year so far:

"There were more than a few moist eyes and tight throats," employee Patrick O'Neill wrote back to the class. "To have reached out to us in such a heartfelt way is really a testament to your individual and collective humanity."

Gerry Pasciucco, the current leader of AIG-FP, also wrote to say that the gesture had deeply touched his battered staff. He signed off with a simple message:

"Fourth graders rule!"

In a movie the world would now hug AIG and we'd all move forward as friends, but in the real world this just causes people to seethe in populist anger more. Where are the letters to the poors?

Jake DeSantis broke the dam with a nauseatingly self-serving New York Times op-ed Wednesday (for which, by the way, the Times confirms he was not paid). Then emboldened AIG execs in London called the cops on Andrew Cuomo and the Security Traders Association of New York wrote an error-ridden letter to Congress (cc'd to "Barak Obama"!) arguing that taxes are bad, even on AIG bonuses.

Now comes "FlyYak," the wife of an AIG IT executive who worked in London, writing on her LiveJournal page: "[O]ur government betrayed us, painted us as thieves and threw our co-workers in Connecticut to the mob." FLyYak, whom Business Insider believes to be Jan Ellen Harriman, wife of Banque AIG executive director Paul Harriman, spins a sad, sad tale of life in a "very pretty velvet lined cage with a megalomaniac"—that would be AIG Financial Products division chief Joseph Cassano—"holding the key."

Sent to London on a 2 to 3 year commitment, half a house left in storage in CT, we have been here 'indefinitely' for 11 years pushing 12. We were unable to press for anything more than the ex-pat package we were given at the beginning and lost even housing support after the first 5 years.
Our housing costs rose to 5 times what we paid in Connecticut. The salary did not.

Raises were only given in the 'bonus'. So imagine having to pay 5 times your mortgage or rent on your current salary with the promise of the rest of your compensation to come once a year, in December. How do you leave that job?

Do you leave in December and disrupt your children's education? Well, not without a very good reason.
Do you leave at the end of the school year and essentially throw away 6 months of under compensated work? Not likely.

Another LiveJournal AIG scribbler in London, who goes by the name EdisonRex, makes the same complaint:

In the financial industry, generally there is a nominal salary paid, and then a bonus. The salary never changes - mine stayed the same for 15 years. Worse, being an expat, I was paid in dollars - taxed at UK rates (40%), and subject to FX rate fluctuations that have ranged from $1.60 to the pound in 1998 to $2.10 for a while in late 2007. It did not help us to save much money against the eventuality of losing the job and then being stuck in a foreign country with a toxic CV. The bonus was what got us through the year, though, and through careful budgeting, we were able to stay afloat. We didn't make all that much money, especially for London, and especially as an expatriate. Our house in Fairfield Country cost us $2100 in mortgage payments in a month, which meant we could live off the salary. The smaller house we have in London, as far out as we can live without being too far from my son's school, is around $10,000 a month, and utilities and taxes cost another $1800 a month. My son's school is about $30,000 a year. He cannot actually go to any others, he has to go there.

Here are the basic complaints, and why they are desperate and stupid:

1. Andrew Cuomo is extorting us! He's holding a gun to our head! If we don't give back the bonuses, he will release our names and we will be at the mercy of the horde!

Actually, three AIG execs were named by the New York Post earlier this month. At least two of them have since returned their bonuses. So the damage—the release of their names—had been done, but they gave the money back anyway. Clearly they weren't extorted by Andrew Cuomo. It wasn't him they were afraid of so much as the hordes themselves, who might have gone nuts if they'd kept the money. It's actually a healthy social dynamic called shame, and sometimes it overcomes even the need to send your son to a $30,000 a year school. Also, that bonus money is currently sitting in your bank account. You're just mad we're mad about that.

2. We were promised that money! We stayed at our jobs, which we would have otherwise quit!

An understandable complaint, but it doesn't go very far seeing as how, absent the bonuses, you are in exactly the same position you would have otherwise been in except you've had a job for the past year, which is more than 8 percent of Americans can say, thanks to you.

3. The bonuses were really our salary! We were paid a nominal salary throughout the year and then a big payout before Christmas!

Geez, sounds risky. What kind of moron would work on a compensation schedule like that? Oh, you would! I guess it really sucked when the company had a bad year or something, like losing $180 billion, and the bonuses evaporated.

4. We were innocent bystanders! It was all Joseph Cassano!

Yes, that does suck. But, generally speaking, the employees of bankrupt companies are always innocent bystanders who suffer for mistakes made by the people who ran the place into the ground. You should be treated differently why?

5. You can't pass a punitive, retroactive tax on us! It's not fair!

We wouldn't have had to tax you if you'd have given back the bonuses. Ha!

6. We worked really, really hard at AIG! It was hard to work there! Our jobs sucked!

You didn't work hard enough. My job sucks, too.

7. How am I going to pay for my house in London and my house in Connecticut without that bonus?

Fuck you.

[Via Business Insider, photo by Axlotl].

Now we know better: You have to yell at cable news pundits on television to fix all financial problems. Or at least do some kind of video YouTube mash up thing.

Also, "the White House is now black/we gotta take the radio back" is vaguely Public Enemy c. 1990. (What's a "radio?")

[via Wonkette]

This is exactly like calling the cops to report that someone stole your drugs. But proud upper-crust Brits aren't giving up the trappings of aristocracy as quickly as that pansy Jake DeSantis.

From Reuters:

[A] compliance officer for the Banque AIG unit in London went so far as to ask UK authorities from the Serious Organised Crime Agency (SOCA) to probe whether demands to return the payments could be considered extortion, according to emails obtained by Reuters.

One British executive told Reuters that the requests to return the money constituted "blackmail," adding, "There is no moral reason to give it back."

That's cool, British AIG execs. Given the way the locals have been voicing their pique, you're going to lose that money one way or the other.

[Photo by Mariano Colantoni.]

Mayer's previous attempt to pretty up the customizable iGoogle homepage with designer looks fell flat. At a press event for this week's Game Developers Conference in San Francisco, Mayer showed off less girly "themes" for iGoogle featuring videogames and professional sports. In designing the FIFA soccer theme, however, someone forgot that tarnished insurance giant AIG still had its logos on Manchester United players' uniforms. Oops!

Here's Mayer briefing the press on the new designs:

One witness declared her top "hideous." Another offers the following commentary: "Something a Palm Beach retiree would wear to a VFW ball. Also, roots showing badly." Meow!

1. There, there, honey. Shut up and look at the butterflies. Our future is safe with AIG.

2. You want your child's finances to be as secure as their car seat. That's why you've gone with AIG. Because you also bought a defective car seat.

3. This ad comically features the tagline, "The clock's ticking." Yes it is.

Please refer to these whenever the temptation to feel sorry for AIG arises. [Mep Report's YouTube page, via Agency Spy]

The AIG executives in Britain are basically ignoring Cuomo's populist hardball, given the relative lack of outrage in their country.

But Cuomo announced that nine of the top 10 bonus recipients will return the money! And 15 of the top 20 in the financial products division! Victory!

See? Mob rule Democracy works.How much money was returned, you ask? Like, of the original $165 million? Fifty million dollars, give or take. Another $80 million went to foreigners, and there's $35 million in unreturned U.S. bonuses.

Cuomo would like the Americans holding the latter money to know he is conducting a "risk assessment" about releasing their names/addresses. Emphasis on "risk."

AIG's brand has become hopelessly tarnished after a government bailout and controversy over bonuses issued to executives in the financial-products group which wrecked AIG's balance sheet.

But what will replace it? AIU, the name going up on AIG's Water Street building? AGLA, the name given to a Nashville-based subsidary?

Company flacks are giving various reasons for the changes: The lower Manhattan building housed an insurance subsidiary unrelated to the tarnished financial products group, yet drew many protests because of its prominent sign. The Tennesee office is getting rebranded because insurance brokers are having trouble drumming up business under the AIG name. But let's be honest: Who sees these nameplates more often than anyone else? The employees who walk under them every day. The renaming is for their sake as much as anyone else's.

Here's an AP video of a freshly unsigned AIG building:

(Photo by Getty Images)

A political group supported by organized labor is planning a bus tour of AIG homes this weekend, according to a front-page New York Times story on the fate of these sad, bonus-dappled plutocrats. The leader of the group, Connecticuit Working Families party, promises to try and not "foment... unnecessarily" all the anger and "rage about what's happened."

He just wants to take a bunch of unemployed and foreclosed-upon people with nothing to lose, put them on a bus, and show them exactly what they're missing, and who to blame.

Anyway, the Times' story has precisely one secondhand report of a death threat, one angry neighbor in a driveway and a couple of pissed off Connecticut residents. None of the various Connecticut police departments contacted by the newspaper has heard anything about any sort of danger to these rich guys.

But still, let's feel anxious and a little ashamed of ourselves, on behalf of these wealthy executives. All that stands between them and terrible, fearsome populist mobs are their private security guards, their lawns, their state-of-the-art security systems, several flights of probably marble stairs and the entrenched political/law-enforcement establishment they bought over the past couple of decades, when the gettin' was good.

(Well, it's pretty good now, actually. When they gettin' was amazing.)

Have we really been reduced to asking Eliot Spitzer to be an expert on "visceral" outrage? Leave aside his paid dalliance with call girl Ashley Dupré, or the money-laundering regulations he violated in arranging to pay her.

Here's the real outrage: Spitzer, by clamping down on Wall Street's biggest investment banks, drove their best and brightest to hedge funds, where they pursued even wilder schemes which eventually brought down their former employers. Yes, he stopped one category of abuses — while setting the stage for a whole new one. And up until the whole whore thing, it worked out great for him, landing him in Albany. But you'll never hear him discuss his "awareness" of his own role, as a supposed reformer, in helping bring about today's crisis.

"At this moment, with emotions running high, it is important that we proceed diligently, with care, reflection, and sober judgment," Cuomo said in a statement. Oh, now, after whipping the mob into a froth that has AIG employees fearing for their lives, the politician is concerned about care and judgment. Or maybe he's afraid for his own safety — now that he has that list of names he's been promising the public he'd extract from an unwilling AIG, and he's keeping it from them.

This is how it looked shortly berfore 5 p.m. For at least a few minutes, the URL dodd.senate.gov returned a blank page with the words "not an error"; now it appears to be working again. Dodd's been catching heat lately for lying about his role in the legal loophole that allowed AIG executives to be paid bonuses after $175 billion or so in federal bailouts.

While Dodd's site was down, the rest of the Senate web site appeared to be functioning normally. Hacking into a .gov web site is serious business that can get somebody into serious trouble. Maybe he's just preparing to redesign — or resign.