Screaming For Blood While Rome Burns

FARK's slogan is "It's not news, it's FARK" but as with other fake news outifts like the Daily Show, there are occasional turds wisdom excreted from its bowels. One recent shouting match turned up some interesting mind pellets. It was attached to a link to Matt Taibbi's rant telling off an AIG executive who wrote an open letter bemoaning his company's reaction to AIG's recent bonus scandal. The ensuing thread went as you might expect with people dividing neatly along idealogical lines with right wingers defending the AIG executive and left wingers defending Taibbi. But a half way down the thread, there were links to two interesting Slate articles examing AIG from another angle. By taking a look at one of AIG's deals with Goldman Sachs, the articles point out that while we are all screaming for people's heads over $160 million dollars worth of bonuses while AIG funnels billions of taxpayer funded bailout dollars to its trading partners which themselves have also received billions of taxpayer funded bailout dollars. 

In other words, we have one scandal which is essentially distracting us from something much bigger and much worse. Taibbi sees this as one big conspiracy designed to shift power and money to Wall Street. But it doesn't need to be a conspiracy in order to be an outrage. And that seems to be part of the problem. We are all so busy getting outraged over the latest Wall Street scandal that we are ignoring the real problems which have lead us into the economic hole in which we are stuck.