Hog Nog

As ailing Wachovia Corp. waits to see whether it will be acquired by Wells Fargo & Co. or Citigroup Inc. -- possibly with taxpayers paying the tab for hundreds of billions of dollars in bad loans -- some of the company's top producers will depart Saturday for an all-expense-paid cruise of the Greek Isles. This is a sales spiff that best rainmakers earned. But is it right for Wachovia to let them go to Greece on the company's tab when Wachovia's mortgage side is so far underwater that it's as good as failed thanks to all the pay-option ARMs?

But wait! There's more...

AIG flops like a fish out of water, then gets a bunch of money from the Federal Government, then its executives go binge at fancy L.A. spa St Regis for bunion sanding and coffee enemas, then it ask for more money from the Fed -- gets it -- then AIG executives promptly plan a second binge to the Ritz Carlton in San Francisco... which was cancelled about two hours ago because of media scrutiny.

Now let's pause for a moment and pull that one through the bull-shredder just a little bit... Please forgive a humble killjoying wet-blanketed gnat on the buttox of the great Woodstock of all bailouts, but I would have felt much, much better if the thing had been cancelled because cancelling it was the right thing to do... the only right thing to do... in light of the fact that American freaking taxpayers now own about 80 percent of the company. To quote my first cousin quoting Mr. Bob "E.D." Dole's comments from the 1996 election: where is the outrage? Where is the fury? Integrity is mugged and lying bleeding in some back alley.

The White House called news of AIG's second love-in 'despicable.' In light of current events, I call it about a half step short of treason.

Enough games. Ladies and gentlemen, we woke up a few weeks ago in the middle of a fight for our financial and freedom-loving lives. What's it going to take to get us regular Americans riled up enough to demand a change from luxurious devil-may-care business as usual? Have we all become too soft-taco to care at sufficient depth to be heard by the powerful new elites? Is there any trace left within us of the forefathers who fought and died for the freedoms we were born into and summarily pissed away?

Until three weeks ago, I completely dismissed every conspiracy theory I ever heard; I figured we were goons enough, as a culture, to do ourselves in without help from anybody, and that to even dream we had anyone else to blame but ourselves would amount to an insufferable and arrogant lack of accountability. But sadly, so sadly, today's headlines are so wretchedly dire that I find myself wondering if we could be experiencing the workings of anything else.