The Tragedy of Modern Air-Conditioning

The tragedy is that because of air conditioning, the windows on the building on Wall Street are sealed.


The photo is apropos because of this item (from Rising Hegemon):

AIG executives spent $500,000 at an exclusive resort just days after the U.S. government agreed to spend $85 billion to protect the giant insurer from collapse, according to Rep. Henry Waxman, the California Democrat who chairs the House Oversight Committee.

Jump, indeed. According to Waxman:

Rooms at this resort can cost over $1,000 per night. Invoices provided to the Committee show that AIG paid the resort over $440,000, including nearly $200,000 for rooms, over $150,000 for meals, and $23,000 in spa charges.

Socialism for the rich. AIG is taking tens of billions from the Treasury while the retirement accounts of Americans are taking a beating. $1,000 a night hotel rooms for those greedy fuckers.

Meanwhile, over at Lehman Brothers, they paid three departing executives $20 million in "special payments" at the same time that those fuckers were begging for a Federal bailout.

The choices the rest of us have for retirement boil down to three things, or a combination of them:

1. Spend less now and save more.
2. Work for more years than you planned.
3. Plan on living a more austere life after retirement.

All because those greedy bastards in the financial system, with the connivance of Phil Gramm and the Bush Administration, trashed all the rules on prudence so that they could grab as much money as they could.

In a just world, there would be a telephone pole sunk into the Mall, just in front of the steps of the Capitol Building. A cord of wood would be piled around it. Phil Gramm would be tied to the pole and burned at the stake.

Greed is a human weakness. Lessening the controls and oversight allowed greed to take hold. Even those who may have wanted to be prudent were overriden by the greedy. Those who enrichened themselves at the expense of their shareholders as things were tanking should be forced to pay it back.

Should they refuse, they run the risk of this:

There is a lot of anger out there and if things don't turn around, there will be a hell of a lot more as people realize that what they worked for all of their lives has been swept away by the greed of a relative handful of people. There will be calls for justice, for retribution, for vengeance, for blood.

We may be at a risk for a terrible time in our history.