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.

A new Treasury Department watchdog group's report says that all the cheeriness and fabricated positivity surrounding the bailout only raised false expectations and ended up further harming the economy:

By stating expressly that the 'healthy' institutions would be able to increase overall lending, Treasury may have created unrealistic expectations about the institutions' condition and their ability to increase lending.

See, America? Never trust the government. It's full of liars who want to flush your hard earned money. Also, don't even dream that we'll get out of this mess, because we're irreparably fucked and should just give up now.

Steve Fishman's profile of Rattner, for which the Quadrangle Group founder did not submit to an interview, is a fairly astringent psychological assessment of the New York Times reporter-turned-banker as a calculating overachiever whose desire for power is frustrated by the fact that he's a cold, distant, and has no real friends. Which is pretty much what we'd imagine of anyone who once dated Judith Miller. But while Fishman's takedown seems devastating, it basically lets Rattner off the hook for his involvement in a scheme to pay off consultant Hank Morris to drive New York pension fund business to Quadrangle, portraying the deal as poor form rather than illegal. Rattner is credited with a masterful capacity to snow reporters, owing to his having been one himself. Whether he applied those powers to New York or not, he certainly got what he wanted: The first major profile since his sudden and still-unexplained resignation waits until the very end to get into the stuff about how Rattner paid a middleman and granted a movie deal to the deputy comptroller's brother-in-law in order to get his hands on pension money, and downplays the significance of the charges.

More interesting to Fishman (and still interesting to us), is the stuff about how everyone thinks Rattner is an arrogant prick. "In some weird way," a colleague told Fishman, "he kind of knows that once you get to know him, you won't like him, and I don't think he cares. Which is really useful if you want to get ahead."

Why wouldn't you like someone who decided, when he was a reporter at the Times, that he deserved the status, power, and money that had been acquired by the idiots he covered?

"It begins to get on you after a while that [as a journalist] you are writing about people who have more power than you, more influence and more money, and are not any more capable," [Rattner's wife] told The Washington Monthly. "Why in God's name are you trailing them around the world and writing about them when you are smart enough to make the money and have influence commensurate with theirs?"

Sounds like a great guy. Rattner has apparently struggled all his life with the fact that he's a dick, and even undertook the help of a professional to help people like him more.

At Quadrangle, colleagues had confronted him about his manner. He was distant and haughty and they didn't like it. So Rattner hired an executive coach, Art Gingold, and worked with him for a couple of years until he left for Washington. It was essentially a likability course. "He took to the feedback as diligently as anybody I've coached," says Gingold, who declined to discuss personal details. "He studied, almost memorized it. He really took it to heart." Gingold helped Rattner change his behavior, and gave him pointers. Now Rattner walked down to people's offices. In meetings, where he'd been business-only, he now opened with, "Good morning, how was your weekend?" He took junior people to lunch. "It sounds simple and obvious, but wasn't [to him]," says Gingold.

The whole, "How was your weekend?" trick opened doors for Rattner, and he eventually landed his dream gig: Helping America (after enriching himself to the tune of up to $600 million) by working for the government on Barack Obama's auto-bailout team. But even better than the job was the fact that, finally, he might make some real friends! It was like moving to a new high school:

While upending the car industry, Rattner tried out his new personality skills. This was a fresh start with people who didn't yet have a view of him, he told a friend, and he fought his tendency to be cool and remote. He was proud of himself; the guys really seemed to respect and to like him.

So even if he had to resign under a cloud and might even end up under indictment, at least Rattner got some personal validation out of the deal. Which is better than the investors in Quadrangle got: The most damaging tidbit in the story is the fact that for all his wealth, his publicity, his friendship with Arthur Sulzberger, and his reputation for extraordinary competence, Rattner's fund does no better than municipal bonds:

Quadrangle's annual statement from 2008, a copy of which was obtained by New York, shows that after eight years, investors in the first $1 billion fund had just about got back their initial investment. There was still considerable "unrealized value," as the illiquid assets are called, and if you add that in, the returns beat a poorly performing stock market over that time, though they still wouldn't have outperformed a municipal bond. "We've had lots of investments that have disappointed," says Damon Mezzacappa, a former vice-chairman at Lazard and an investor. "Quadrangle was okay, not great."

Neel, a bald preppy jerk with a couple years of experience as a Goldman I-banker, was Hank Paulson's choice to head the bailout operations because... well, no one is sure, even now. But he worked very, very hard, we are told (he slept in his office!), and we all felt so bad for him when congress yelled at him. Well, Friday is his last day at Treasury. And he'd like you to know that everyone who yelled at him for not keeping any sort of track of what what actually happenening to the goddamn money he handed out like Halloween candy or even deigning to explain the rationale behind any of his actions secretly thought he is a hero! Even Dennis Kucinich, who yelled at him for four hours.

"Don't take it personally," Kucinich (D-Ohio) told Kashkari behind closed doors after grilling him during a separate marathon session on Capitol Hill, according to people who were present. "I think you're doing a great job."

Dennis is a really nice guy, so we don't necessarily doubt this happened, but the thing is Neel was not doing a great job. But hey, look who else is proud of Neel!

"I deeply admire the guy," Treasury Secretary Timothy F. Geithner said in an interview. "I think he's a person of integrity. He's creative, pragmatic and gets stuff done. I think he's an A-plus public servant."

We are all so proud of him for doing an incredibly tough job not very well. Go away.

"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.

Charles Rangel said AIG executives were "getting away with murder" on the floor of the House today in support of the bill, which would tax the bonuses at 90 percent. But a substantial subset of the scoundrels will get away with murder anyway, according to Bloomberg:

The legislation wouldn't attempt to impose the tax on foreign employees of companies such as AIG, said Ways and Means Committee spokesman Matthew Beck. Many of AIG's bonus recipients work in the London office of the credit-default swap unit.

The London office lost as much as a half a trillion dollars betting on exotic derivatives. Joseph Cassano, who ran the renegade unit for eight years, earned a total of $280 million while running it into oblivion. At least seven London office executives have been promised payouts of $3 million each. It's not clear precisely how much of the $165 million in bonus money is headed overseas, nor how much of that has been paid out thus far. But whatever has been paid is not coming back.

People are angry! So mad! They're mad at AIG, for taking all the government's money, and then giving out bonuses to the idiots at AIG who made all the mistakes that led to them needing to take so much government money. And all the Obama people can do is go on TV and say "there's nothing we can do!" Which just makes people even angrier!

There is a rich history of inarticulate anti-elite rage in this country, and an even richer and scarier history of radicals and charlatans tapping into that rage for their own nefarious political purposes.

There is the populism of CNBC, where rich television personalities and commodities traders all consider themselves to be, you know, "everybody." This is the world where the elites simultaneously consider themselves to be both common men and the "winners" enraged at having to subsidize the "losers." They are actually not worth complaining about, too much, because in its current form CNBC exists mostly as a sad sideshow, which is still not quite just punishment for its crimes during The Long Bubble, but let's keep in mind that no one without money takes CNBC seriously and nowadays no one has money, anymore.

Still, their populist rage toward Obama (with "CNBC" now representing basically the entire moneyed, financially literate class) is incoherent: Obama is handing money hand-over-fist to your failing institutions, and asking only marginal concessions in return. If he were to let them fail, as other populists might have it, you'd certainly be a bit put out.

But it's on Fox where the real attempts at articulation and co-option of anti-federal government populism are happening. Glenn Beck feels your pain and reminds you that you're not alone! Then he spends an hour stoking white rage at the liberals who marginalize real Americans, or whatever.

But when people like Mike Huckabee claim Barack Obama's bank bailout plan is the sort of thing Lenin and Stalin would love, you gotta wonder what they're even attempting to accomplish. Right-wing economic populism works best when its directed at foreigners and the other. You know, Pat Buchanan raving about the Mexicans and the Japanese. When you start encouraging people to get pissed off at bankers you're just leaving the door open for people like Bill Wharton, the editor of Socialist Magazine. Billy has a very entertaining editorial in the Washington Post yesterday about how we should be all be so lucky to have a real socialist president.

Socialists support nationalization and see it as a means of creating a banking system that acts like a highly regulated public utility. The banks would then cease to be sinkholes for public funds or financial versions of casinos and would become essential to reenergizing productive sectors of the economy.

The same holds true for health care. A national health insurance system as embodied in the single-payer health plan reintroduced in legislation this year by Rep. John Conyers Jr. (D-Mich.), makes perfect sense to us. That bill would provide comprehensive coverage, offer a full range of choice of doctors and services and eliminate the primary cause of personal bankruptcy — health-care bills.

See? Doesn't that all sound so nice? Doesn't that sound like the best answer to right-wing pundits' sputtering rage at Wall Street bonuses and how the Obamas don't have a plan to bail out main street?

So if Obama wants to head off this supposed populist insurrection, he should probably seize all the banks.

How did the bankers get to Washington? Did they carpool? Who knows, but they got there, to say they're soooo sorry about how they wasted all the bailout money on hookers and bonuses to buy hookers.

Congressmembers had lots of good questions for them too, like "are you implying that Citigroup lost their minds?"

In the end, capitalism was saved because The People had the opportunity to annoy the heads of some banks for a while.

Kraus had excellent timing. He signed on as a top executive at Merrill Lynch in May, negotiating a $50 million pay package, with much of that guaranteed if the company was sold. He didn't officially start until September. A couple of days later, Merrill CEO John Thain sold the company to Bank of America for $50 billion, triggering a $25 million payout under Kraus's contract.

Bank of America got a $25 billion capital injection from the government. Kraus resigned and collected his cash, taking a job as CEO of AllianceBernstein, a money-management firm. And then he bought, for an estimated $37 million, an apartment at 720 Park Avenue from Democratic fundraisers Carl Spielvogel and Barbaralee Diamonstein-Spielvogel.

Let's be clear: Kraus got this apartment fair and square: He suckered Merrill Lynch into a pay guarantee, and had the gall to hold Merrill and Bank of America to his contract, even though he only worked a couple of days.

Bankers deserve bonuses — but only when they really earn them. Thain, who arguably saved Merrill Lynch from the disastrous fate of Lehman Brothers and Bear Stearns, declined to seek a bonus this year, but he would have been justified in getting one. Kraus got a bonus, but he didn't earn it. He did nothing illegal. He just did something unseemly.

The 5-bedroom spread technically belongs to Kraus's wife, who was listed as the purchaser. But given the circumstanced of its sale, I like to think it belongs to all of us. Behold the splendor of the People's Palace.

That's the conclusion of Fortune editor-at-large Carol Loomis, who looked into the AIG mess and concluded it may take far longer than a year to untangle all of AIG's derivative contracts. She should know: She's good friends with financial supergenius Warren Buffett, who dealt with similar if smaller-scale problems at an insurance company he owned. (She even writes the annual report for Berkshire Hathaway, Buffett's holding company. Hey, anything for a source!)

What does this mean for the rest of us? Look forward to more headlines like "AIG Spends $343,000 on Secret Seminar" — remember the Phoenix junket AIG splashed out on, in the midst of a taxpayer-funded bailout? — as the byzantine compensation practices of the insurance industry become everyone's business. Great: We get all of Warren Buffett's headaches, without the accompanying billions and billions of dollars.

For that reason, writes Keen in the Daily Beast, we should not spend billions of dollars upgrading U.S. Internet connections. Expanding broadband access to the great unwebbed, at a time when the economy is in the tank, will just lead to the spread of halfbaked conspiracy theories and the rise of populist anger.

Wait, what happened to blogs stopping the rise of Hitler? Oh, well, Keen's a bit of a snob: He doesn't like blogs, YouTube, MySpace, or basically anything on the Internet that anyone else likes. But we had no idea he was actually, provably stupid.

First of all, let's get real about the broadband plan. It's not going to get that many more people on the Internet. Already, 90 percent of U.S. Internet users are on broadband. The ones who aren't are mostly happy with their dial-up connections, which they use to check email and download photos of their grandkids. And people who aren't online are generally old rather than poor. Anyone a demagogue would want to reach, they already can today.

No, what the broadband stimulus package really amounts to a bailout for phone companies, which would otherwise have to spend their own money upgrading their networks for higher capacity. This, in turn, will allow for faster delivery of online video.

And who's going to pay for all that video? Why, advertisers. And finicky advertisers are far better regulators of loopy extremists than the government will ever be. They hate controversy! As do Internet companies, if only because it means having to spend money on customer-service personnel. So much easier to let the community flag a video as "offensive" and take it down.

So the Father Coughlins of the world will be left broadcasting low-resolution bile over the slowest of connections, constantly running into bandwidth caps. Meanwhile, safe, apolitical pablum will zip speedily over government-subsidized lines, safely narcotizing the masses. Sure, we have plenty to fear from a national broadband plan. But it's not Andrew Keen's racist, classist paranoia that he might run into someone poorer and less white than him in a chat room.

Congressional Democrats are now banned from saying "stimulus," because it's a dumb Washington term no one likes, and because, as we all know, if they don't call it that it isn't that. Perception equals reality! (That was true of our entire financial system for many years, btw.)

Rahm Emanuel seems to have sent the memo out, and people are still adjusting. Nancy Pelosi almost said stimulus the other day! But then she caught herself: "We're not using the word 'stimulus,'" Nancy said at a press conference.

Of course, Democrats do have a legitimate excuse for giving their economic policies a new label: their economic policies are actually different!

Yet Democrats say the program will go far beyond a simple stimulus to a comprehensive approach that mixes tax policy, road and bridge building, alternative-energy projects and technological improvements that will have far-reaching consequences. It should not be equated, they say, with a program that provides eligible taxpayers with a check to cover a quick trip to the electronics store.

By the time Obama actually takes office, of course, his plans will be referred to as "Natural Economic Enhancement."

We haven't had a good, hopeful, vague name for a vast array of far-reaching policies lately, have we? A "New Deal" or a "Great Society" would really be useful right now, for historical framing purposes. This one should be called Project: Unicorn.

Ron Suskind, whose work chronicling the Bush administration has basically been the best political journalism of the last eight years, is responsible for that legendary phrase. In a 2004 piece for the New York Times Magazine, Suskind quoted an unnamed Bush aide (Rove?) as saying this:

The aide said that guys like me were "in what we call the reality-based community," which he defined as people who "believe that solutions emerge from your judicious study of discernible reality." ... "That's not the way the world really works anymore," he continued. "We're an empire now, and when we act, we create our own reality. And while you're studying that reality—judiciously, as you will—we'll act again, creating other new realities, which you can study too, and that's how things will sort out. We're history's actors…and you, all of you, will be left to just study what we do."

That is basically the mission statement of the Bush presidency. Let the political wing dictate policy, and fit the facts around that policy. Deny the legitimacy of information that doesn't fit your worldview. Create your own reality! It's been fun. It got us into Iraq!

And the financial bailout bill was originally sold in the same way Iraq was sold. The problem was laid out along with its solution. The solution was needed urgently. The solution involved handing over unprecendeted power to the executive branch without oversight. Experts disliked this plan!

So Congress, which is now controlled by Democrats, actually sort of did part of its job, and passed a modified, more responsible version of the bill.

And now, weeks later, Bush has done something weird and unprecedented: in calling for nationalization of US banks, Bush has actually given in to "experts" like economists who called on him to do something that didn't fit with his political ideology!

And it only took him eight years to become a vaguely semi-responsible president. Good work, reality-based community! You really asserted yourselves there, eventually, after the damage was already wrought.

Among other things, he has focused on working with American banks toward adoption of a less-risky system of mortgage-based bonds that is popular in Europe. And he moved to a larger office, with room for sofas and photos of his favorite ski slopes around Lake Tahoe.

Telling!

Mr. Kashkari, who grew up near Akron, Ohio, is a first-generation Indian-American. His parents had grown up in poverty in the Kashmir region of India before becoming an engineer and a doctor and coming to the United States.

Revealing!

In graduate school, he designed a solar-powered car that was driven across the country.

Superfluous!

"I'm a free-market Republican."—Kashkari, at an American Enterprise Institute conference, Sept. 19, 2008

Unnerving!

First: it's not a bailout!

“The hurdle is overcoming the word ‘bailout,’ ” said R. Bruce Josten, executive vice president of the United States Chamber of Commerce. “It has continued to be used by members of Congress. You see it in the press today all over the place. This is not a bailout; this is Treasury buying toxic assets that they will dispose of over a period of time and resell.”

This doesn't stop internet commenters from being upset!

A CNNMoney.com blog post about the Bush plan announcement generated 2,200 comments, with greed being the most common theme. The site’s news story about those comments was headlined, “Mad as hell.”

But what do The Poors think of all this? The Times went to a barbershop in the Bronx to find out!

If disgust, or horror, at the bailout was universal, there was not unanimity on what had to be done. The owner of the barbecue stand, Dwayne Johnson, 50, said he was outraged that many members of the Congressional black caucus had voted against the bailout.

“They voted no, they don’t have that right,” Mr. Johnson said. “The only way you can help the community is get it passed. If you’re the president and you can’t get 10 votes to pass it, then that’s bad. If you’re Obama, you can’t get 10 votes, that’s bad.”

Midaglia Rodriguez, 60, said that she worried that a new Depression was just over the horizon, and that she believed the bailout was necessary. “It should go through, to fix the situation,” she said.

Street-smart wisdom! Thanks, guys.

And what do The Ridiculous Riches think of the crisis? The Times went to a privately owned resort island to find out!

To many local residents, the island has become a cautionary tale. If a falling tide lowers all boats, they say, then Sea Island’s woes reveal the faltering economy’s toll on even the wealthiest, best-protected regions of America.

“Now we know how Detroit feels,” said Harry Aiken Jr., a bar operator on neighboring St. Simons Island. “Everybody knew Sea Island was overextended, but we thought they could always just sell more property.”

Sigh, yes, of course. Good one on your requisite "incredibly out of touch asshole quote" there, Robbie Brown.

And what do The Angry Voters say about this terrible bailout? The Times asked some random constituents!

Alisa Arnold, 42, a flight attendant from Jacksonville Beach, Fla., was having pizza on a layover in Providence, R.I., on Tuesday (and brought her own Diet Coke with her to save money), said she was afraid that the government was not telling Americans just how bad things could get.

But Ms. Arnold also thought it was possible she was being manipulated by that very sense of fear.

“I hope I’m not being scared into supporting the bailout,” she said.

Ha ha! By who, the Times? Yes, lady, you are being scared into this, by everyone.

And what does The Man On the Street say? The Times runs a multimedia Man On the Street feature to find out. It is sad.

So, to sum up, The Man On The Street thinks he is screwed.

Oh no! The financial sector exploded! The market is, uh, failing! "What do we do" is the response of, like, economists. Politicians know the important question is "WHO DO WE BLAME." So liberals jumped on deregulating Conservatives and President Bush and evil Wall Street fatcats and so on. Conservatives, oddly, also blamed most of those people, except for a small but vocal subset who blamed this collapse of everything on... poor black people?

Several days ago, Neil Cavuto, host of Fox News' Your World, proclaimed, "Loaning to minorities and risky folks is a disaster."

On WorldNetDaily, a compendium of loopy half-truths, pundit Drew Zahn declared that "when federal regulators demanded parity between racial groups in lending, the only way to achieve a quota would be to begin making intentionally bad lending decisions."

The conservative National Review Online trotted out a favorite whipping boy, the Community Reinvestment Act, claiming that the legislation was the result of "racially inflammatory campaigns" that forced banks to "make mortgages available to people without much in the way of income, assets or credit."

The CRA option has the bonus of pinning blame on black people and Bill Clinton!

But, hah, none of this is true, at all. The CRA just affected banks and thrifts, which are regulated. "The heart of the crisis was caused by unregulated and lightly regulated mortgage brokers and independent mortgage bankers and affiliates that are not subject to the CRA," says law professor Michael Barr. Tyler Cowen puts it thus: "Did policies such as the Community Reinvestment Act significantly worsen the housing bubble and the subsequent collapse? Basically not, although in my view these were bad policies for other reasons." There's your talking point, and he provides some supporting evidence.

Our favorite debunking comes from Ta-Nehisi Coates:

I know very little about economics, but I know quite a bit about people. 1.) Folks who use single cause logic to explain gigantic complicated phenomena are almost always lying, ignorant or children. 2.) Folks who peddle victimology for giants ("the banks were forced to do it") while decrying the victimology of individual humans ("the white man forced me to do it") are also usually just lying. The Blame The Negroes (BTN) theory satisfies both criteria.

He goes on from there on the "ugly history" of the sort of argument the CRA thing represents. As always, he's worth reading.

But, of course, through the fault primarily of greedy lenders, many of the worst subrime loans went to minorities. ("The Center for Responsible Lending, a nonprofit research group, examined 50,000 subprime loans nationwide and found that blacks and Hispanics were 30 percent more likely than whites to be charged higher interest rates, even among borrowers with similar credit ratings.") So the crisis hits homeowning minorities disproportionately (culture of ownership!). A good, serious, liberal 'bailout' bill would renegotiate the terms of those mortgages and keep those homeowners out of foreclosure. The Paulson bill didn't have that, but the Dodd-Frank-Paulson bill had some (arguably mostly cosmetic) provisions to protect homeowners.

Still, the bill was largely seen as more helpful to Wall Street than, in the memorable words of last week's Weekend Update, Martin Luther King Boulevard. Black members of Congress felt pressure to oppose the bill from Black talk show hosts and their constituencies, because the bill was seen as, you know, welfare for rich whites while they get nothing. And, hilariously, the white right-wing voters who called on their GOP Members to vote against the bill presumably now think the money was needed to bail out the blacks who got us in this mess. And the Jews who own the banks!

So the Congressional Black Caucus voted 18 pro, 21 against the bailout bill. Which is not quite decisive but it's still telling.

And did work on the Bailout bill really need to stop completely during the Jewish holy days? Even leaving aside the important work of Banking Committee chairman Barney Frank, Jewish congress members voted 20 in favor and 9 against, so presumably their absence would've made the final vote even more decisively against.

(Remember, of course: Black and Jewish congressmen are more likely to be Democrats, and thus more likely to support the bill to begin with. And keep in mind also regional differences!)

SO to sum up, a Democratic bill needs more Black support to win without Republicans, who we should probably just give up on because they think Black people are to blame for this.