Boo-hoo. Poor AIG employees are suffering unfairly from the public outrage over executive bonuses.

Look, we know these guys aren’t the culprits. The bad guys are too powerful (Hank Greenberg & Co.) or have skipped town.

So, yes, we know that the letter writer isn’t the  problem. BUT….

He and his colleagues ARE senior people who worked at AIG  while rampant fraud/crime was prevalent at other divisions. Did any of them say anything or do anything about it? AIG was involved in repeated infractions of the laws, over decades – a lot of which had already been exposed to the public eye or was being prosecuted.  These guys didn’t know? Give me a break. And sez who the other divisions did nothing shady? How much do we really know?

Even if they themselves didn’t do a thing wrong, in light of their company’s centrality to the whole financial crisis, they should have had enough decency to have refused their bonuses.  Where’s their public spirit?

Yes, the whole bonus fracas is a distraction and purely symbolic. But symbols are important. And people are understandably outraged.

Instead,  we get this rather narcissistic letter in the Times that tells a single personal story.

Dear me, senior managers at a major financial firm work 12-14 hours, do they?

So do a lot of people who don’t get that kind of compensation.

Tough. There’s a serious problem and everyone has to contribute what they can, especially the people directly involved in the crisis.

Notice how the NY Times has been playing the bonus story.

Read this story by Allen Salkin

He says AIG rage isn’t healthy – chill it, you yokels.  Interesting. I checked through Mr. Salkin’s archives to find out if he’d ever commented about politics so directly. But no. The only time since 2000 Salkin ever had anything to say about politics was recently – to try to douse rage over AIG and to defend their executive salaries (you need 500k to live in New York, he says here).

Thousands of people in the financial industry were killed in the 9-11 attacks. President Bush went on a rampage in Iraq that killed thousands of US servicemen and women and mutilated tens of thousands of them, in addition to killing over a million Iraqi  civilians and reducing the country to near rubble in many areas. It was, arguably, a genocide. Since the 1990s, the financial industry in New York has created huge bubbles of fraud and crime that have destroyed the life savings, income, credit, and productivity of  millions of people and firms all over the globe and has set off what looks like a global depression that could last for years. Did Allen Salkin at any time tell any of the frenzied speculators, corrupt regulators, and slavering real estate salesmen who pushed all this on the public to take a yoga class and chill? Did he tell them that lying, cheating, swindling, cosmic looting and mass murder are “not healthy”? No, I don’t recall he did.

Had New York journalists been doing their duty ( a central discipline necessary for practitioners of yoga) in the past two decades, I doubt the world would be in this mess.

Selective high-mindedness isn’t reason speaking. It’s servility to power masquerading as spirituality. Don’t fall for it.

The outrage over the bonuses was a distraction, yes, but it symbolized for struggling working class and middle-income people what’s wrong in the let-them-eat-cake world of the financial elites. To treat their outrage (which was also carefully orchestrated by the administration, by the way) as simply populist feeling gone mad is strangely and suspiciously selective.

Full disclosure: Salkin called me for comments for his piece. I said roughly what I said above. He didn’t use those comments.

PS: Nice to see Karl Denninger thinks along the same lines.

I have no idea who Denninger is but his take on things is almost identical with mine (dollar contrarian, psyop-savvy).

PPS: I note that Matt Taibbi wrote a post on this same letter and posted it on Alternet the day of this blog post.