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.

On Corruption

Living in Chicago, I've been hearing and reading about political corruption all my life. These days it has become somewhat fashionable to talk about Chicago corruption. I don't think that anyone in Chicago, myself included, was hugely surprised by the recent scandal with Illinois governor Rod Blagojevich trying to sell Barack Obama's senate seat. Shocked by the shamelessness and brazenness of the attempt sure; but not surprised. There was a reason why the guy's approval rating was down to 13% before the scandal broke.

And this is the part that fascinates me about the whole scandal. It seems to me that while corruption has long been tolerated in Chicago, incompetence is not. Chicago mayor Richard Daley isn't exactly known for honest and open government. In fact the Daley name is widely regarded as synonymous with big city corruption. But Daley still enjoys relatively high approval ratings despite having been repeatedly battered by scandal. The difference is that Daley actually gets things done. When I think about Daley, I think about Millenium Park and the renovation of Navy Pier, huge projects which Daley used to beautify Chicago. When I thought about Blagojevich, if I thought about him at all prior to his current scandal, I usually thought about his last big scandal involving his father in law Richard Mell or of his mishandling of the Chicago Transit Authority's budget crisis. I literally can't think of a single positive thing to say about Blagojevich right now.

And in the end, that's the difference in the fate of these two pols. One is barely hanging on to his career and will likely be gone in a few months, the other is merely "vulnerable" despite repeated scandals. My brother is a suburbanite who loves right wing talk radio and a few years ago local talk show hosts were frothing at the mouth about the Daley Machine and why he kept getting re-elected. Any Chicagoan could have told them why—for all of his flaws, Daley has actually done a pretty good job as mayor—at least from the perspective of a city resident. While it may not seem like the best way to pick a local leader, it beats picking a guy who gets beaten by a snow storm.