Vic Socotra

20 March 2009

Tar and Feathers

(Dome of the Capitol)

I was in one of those meetings with the government yesterday in the big aluminum breadbox across the river that put things in focus.

We were talking about in important financial initiative that will ensure the health and comfort of the program I work. I should say that we were listening and the Government was talking. That is the way it works. We feign interest, and they yack.

It was an earnest meeting, with a lot of concerned citizens in expensive suits hanging on the words of the young bureaucrats.

It was a little surreal, but that comes with the territory here. We all go about our little affairs, like the Mexican paving crew that is laboring mightily, pouring concrete and cursing in the early gray light down below the window.

It was brilliant sunshine when I walked from the Commissary parking to the building, one of those energy-producing mornings that makes you feel grand about being alive.

The meeting must have sucked all the air out of that part of the District, because when I got back to the long polished corridor with the big glass walls there was nothing but low gray clouds and rain.

I took off my jacket and folded it neatly under my arm so that only my shirt would be soaked when I got back to the Bluesmobile. The Blackberry give me thirty e-mails as I sat shivering in the driver’s seat, and I poked at the infernal device my my thumbs as the big V-8 warmed up and listened to the radio.

The nice woman at the newsroom told me that the House voted 328 to 93 to levy a 90% tax on bonuses paid by any company that has accepted more than $5 billion in bailout money, and had the temerity to honor existing binding contractual obligations to its workers.

Noted tax evader Charlie Wrangle (D-NY), led the way in the House. He chairs the Ways and Means Committee, a body with broad authority on just about anything that strikes its interest.

Charlie’s zeal about this is a little inexplicable, since just a couple days ago he was saying he was reluctant to use the tax code this purpose.

He has also previously sought donations from A.I.G. for a public policy institute at City College in New York that will bear his name, assuming the institution survives the current crisis.

In fact, the list of people beholding to A.I.G. is pretty spectacular, and thoroughly bi-partisan. President Obama is one of the big ones, as is Secretary of State Clinton. But John McCain is right there as well.

The Senate bill is said to be a little more draconian, though I am confident that I could have things backward just like the legislators.

Senator Chris Dodd (D-CT) should be a key player on this, but he is silent on the matter- or at least he is now, since he was responsible for inserting the provision that protected the bonus payouts in the relief legislation to begin with.

Now, I imagine you are as irritated as I am about the idea that tax dollars are going to the people who ran the banking industry into the ground. I think the leadership should have some sort of public humiliation, bad haircuts maybe, or bring back tarring and feathering.

But for the Congress to suddenly stampede and pass post-facto confiscatory laws revising legal contracts….well, that is more than a little unsettling, isn’t it?

And the “fat cats” they are talking about include some folks who were counting on a Thousand dollar pay-out to cover the bills?

Show me the boogey men, please. Maybe we could tar them one by one, and start only with the ones with more than three houses, like Senator McCain and Rep. Wrangle.

Wouldn’t all this suggest that our legislators are little more than a mob with really scary powers? And that it could really be harmful to your health to be the object of public scorn?

I mean, who is next? Defense Contractors?

About half-way through that meeting I was in, they started talking about a billion dollars or more than was needed to do something. Someone had the good sense to start laughing.

“Remember last year when that seemed like a lot of money?”

We all had quite a chuckle about that, and when I finished clearing the e-mail off the handheld device, rolled the Bluesmobile back west toward the river.

I wondered why we have such an inability to concentrate on things that matter. The bonuses, a one-time $165 million vestige of previous predatory embarrassments, is decimal dust compared to what needs to be done, and all our alleged leaders can do is posture in front of the cameras about the meaningless.

Why don’t we have a long discussion about the defense of marriage? Wasn’t the issues of gay people wanting to be as miserable legally as everyone else so important that we ignored the house that was burning down around us all?

I drove past the white marble of the dome of the Capitol, which inspires not so much my patriotic feelings as a sense of dread about what those fine Americans who work under it are going to do next.

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