Why can't Republicans get their message straight re: AIG? On one hand, we have Chuck Grassley's team, siding with the 99%'ers (i.e. the 99% of the country that is NOT morbidly rich) calling for AIG execs to do the honorable thing and commit seppuku, while on the other, we have Rush Limbaugh and a seemingly much smaller cabal bucking the populist trend, defending the bonuses with the usual ideological idolatry of Small Government Conservatism.
Why the schism? Why the departure from the usual Republican talking-point synchronized media blitz?
Jumping fold in 3... 2... 1...
I think we are witnessing the first TRUE fracture between components of the Republican coalition.
The AIG fiasco has driven a wedge between:
A) Right-wingers that have maintained a vestigial sense of non-self-serving social morality, i.e. not their xenophobic fear of teh evil gays and atheists, but a real sense of moral outrage at the sociopathic greed these executives proudly epitomize, and
B) Free-market conservatives who have invested their entire careers into the notion that the Market Solves All Problems On Its Own, and who have more to loose than anyone has even mentioned this week, anywhere, AFAIK.
For a premise has been stated over and over again since this bonus scandal broke, and has apparently been ceded, silently, by the right:
No one is questioning the notion that AIG, and its Financial Products wing in particular, were in large part responsible for the economic meltdown.
No one is saying, "AIG did nothing wrong, it was the Liberal CRA and the Minorities Who Took On Loans They Couldn't Afford, or the Crushing Liberal Regulations That Strangle Job-Creating Corporations."
No, AIG was the Credit Default Swap equivalent of Mr. Sham-Wow, selling a productized lie: That, for a smallish fee, you can ELIMINATE RISK from your portfolio. It only took a few months for that empty promise to unravel to such an extent that the entire world is suffering the effects.
Rush Limbaugh & co. MUST defend the plot of land he's squatting on: That nothing and nobody can impede his attempts to gain more wealth. (Does Rush even try to pretend to support Upstanding Christian Morals?) Regulations impede his attempts to gain wealth. Terrorist attacks impede... Taxes impede... Unions impede... etc. etc. etc.
A fundamental message underscoring the AIG bailout/bonus scandal is that it utterly destroys the myth of a self-regulating free market... The fatal flaw in the defense of such a system is that greed and corruption, both personal and collective, will eat away at and eventually destroy the system from the inside, like a cancer.
When you think about it, it is obvious why the Free Market could never succeed for all participants, even in the absence of malicious greed. If you accept the simple premise that wealth tends to beget wealth, you can use an equally simple metaphor to mentally model the system: Mass and gravity. If wealth attracts wealth like matter attracts matter, then regardless of how smoothly distributed wealth has been, small perturbations in the density of mass/wealth (i.e. the haves vs. the have-nots) get accentuated over time, amplified, until nothing is left but large bodies consuming small fry, but whose ultimate fate is to be eaten by black holes of unimaginable mass/wealth.
In other words, in an unregulated market, it's not even Survival of the Fittest.
It's Survival of the Fattest.
(Until they collapse under their own weight and take out the neighborhood.)
fpg