AIG Dream Team Holds White House Hostage

GM is practically dancing a jig and mouthing "yassuh, boss" every time they call Washington for emergency cash, while AIG's "Dream Team" impetuously suffers its way through the humiliating process of asking our government for a new truckload of greenbacks. Maybe the management at GM didn't read the same "How To Be Successful In Business Without Really Trying" books as the execs at AIG. You know the ones I'm talking about, where they impart the famous dictum, "in order to get people to give you money, you have to act like you don’t need it."

GM can't get the 20 or 30 billion or so that it says it needs to stay open unless everybody in its food chain - employees, suppliers, bond holders, executives - gives something up. The kind of restructuring they are going go through is a lot like going through a bankruptcy, except there's no judge involved. Even the smart people at GM, the ones considered to be the brains of the operation, have to give up their pound of flesh. I guess this would be the "old fashioned" way of asking the American public to lend a hand when things in your business have gone horribly wrong on your watch.

The attitude that seems to permeate the culture of AIG - "we are impervious to our mistakes" - is the thing that has Americans of every stripe ready to tar and feather anybody with an employee badge from the insurance giant. When we see this kind of arrogance and self centeredness from a company that will need 200 to 300 billion dollars by the time this is finished just to become a shell of its former self, it gets the nation's collective dander up.

The ideological terrorists who crashed those planes into the World Trade Center have had much less impact on our economy and our national psyche than our own homegrown financial terrorists who are reporting to work today at AIG, these Americans of ours who feel so strongly about deserving bonuses for being smart and wrong that they are willing to hold the country hostage in order to get it.

I don't have a problem with paying an office professional more than assembly line technicians because the professional can do complex quadratic equations in his head and manipulate computer models with impunity. What I do have a problem with is the disconnect we have fostered within this group of people when they feel that they are entitled to the reward just for being smart - not for being smart and right.

You won't see this in any study, because the only dysfunctional culture we will identify by name in this country is always in a ghetto, but my own unscientific years of observation in the suburbs has shown me what you already know but may not want to articulate - that the arrogant, reckless and entitled attitudes being displayed by the execs and the rank and file at AIG, who are mostly college educated white men, is homegrown right here in our nation's own suburbs.

If you want to see for yourself, take a ride to your nearest upscale suburban area around the time school gets out and park your car at a gas station near a high school, or next to a Starbucks.

When you grow up in isolation from the factories and warehouses and power plants, when you are cloistered in a bubble of perpetual youth that has no room for the old, the infirm, or the mentally ill, when you are segregated from the people who make the deliveries when you click your mouse, the thing you know as reality is different, different enough for you to believe that the people who turn wrenches and lift boxes and operate heavy equipment need you more than you need them.

Congress could horsewhip AIG CEO Edward Liddy today in their congressional hearing, the way they used to do to runaway slaves - shirt off, blood streaming down his back, the cries of agony echoing across D.C. - but it won't change the way his people think about what they've done, or how absolutely wrong they have been, or how much their errant calculations are responsible for taking America's economy to the brink of disaster.

Whether we can convince AIG's "Dream Team" that this alternate universe they think we live in - the one where it costs you all your marbles when you are dead wrong - is really the real world remains to be seen.

Professor Obama Lectures White House Press

I called my buddy immediately after President Obama exited his press conference, before the commentators could begin to start telling us what we just saw.

"My man," I said, "did that Negro talk his behind off or what?"

"Man, I fell asleep. I just woke up."

"You're in good company. S. was asleep before the president finished answering the first question. Dude, the damn dog was yawning at the TV."

My buddy paused, letting a small yawn of his own pass. "He's going to have the reporters scared to ask questions with answers like that."

I've never really been a fan of these kinds of things, because they usually are more about style than substance. Multi-dimensional thinking is what I want in my president. Someone who has the capacity to use the entire capacity of their brain power when things go wrong – not just the left side, or the just right side, or the just damn middle, but the whole entire thing.

President Obama transformed into Professor Obama before our eyes, segueing from reading his remarks from the teleprompter to answering questions from the press. Professor Obama proceeded to take over the question and answer session with a fifty minute performance. At times, it seemed like he was teaching freshman seminar classes in economics and political science.

It was very impressive at first, but by the end of the evening the president's wide ranging answers had become a bit pedantic, with the length of his comments threatening to try the patience of even the most dedicated political junkies.

"You probably felt like you were back in law school watching this," I said to my buddy as we joked about the president's "around the world in eighty days" method of not exactly answering the questions he was posed.

My buddy groaned audibly, as if I had dredged up a painful memory. "Yeah - he's a professor alright."

"Man," I said, "Obama was excited to be there. There was fire and enthusiasm in his monologue. It was like the trip to Elkhart was his warm up, like the day trips used to be back on the campaign for his big night time rallies that were more likely to be on prime time TV for free."

President Obama put the "bully" in "bully pulpit last night, using his celebrity and his breadth of knowledge to shape practically all of his answers to press corp questions into vehicles for his main themes - creating new jobs, easing the credit crisis, stabilizing home values, and getting some kind of expansion in our economy to counteract the current contractions.

If you didn't know these were his main themes, you were probably asleep too.

I was actually surprised when he didn't somehow turn the question about Alex Rodriguez's admission of steroid use into yet another illustration of how his economic recovery plan was going to help the citizens of Elkhart, Indiana, and by extension, the rest of America.

The other thing about the sheer amount of verbiage contained in President Obama's responses is the indirect effect it will have on reshaping the media narrative. In addressing all of the things he touched on for the next few days, the news media will have to jettison some of the "strife between the parties" storylines, effectively removing the Republican message from the forefront of the public's minds at a time that is crucial to the passage of theeconomic recovery bill.

S. woke up after the ninth or tenth question. She got a little perturbed towards the end, when I mentioned that the press conference, the one we'd both figured would be over in half an hour, was coming up on the sixty minute mark.

"What? This thing is about to mess up my shows."

Dancing With The One Who Brung You

After listening to the TV pundits and reading the opinion columns the last few days, all of them railing about the failings and deficiencies of President Obama with hyperbolic vigor, a vision came to me.

I imagined that instead of Obama, we had President John McCain standing behind the White House press room podium, intoning, in the manner of Ronald Reagan that "the fundamentals of the economy were sound."

I pictured Vice President Sarah Palin on Meet The Press, stumbling over an incoherent explanation of exactly how a proposed trillion dollar tax cut package actually creates those jobs we need to boost our ailing economy.

They would be facing the same problem President Obama has - a Congress dominated by leaders on both sides of the aisle who have come to worship the rigid, severely restricted boundaries of their respective ideologies. Tax cuts, which seem to be the only tune Republicans can all whistle together, don't mean a god damned thing to you if you have no job. Funding projects slated to start three years from now, which appears to be a constant theme running through the Democrats list of proposals, mean even less.

Which means your president can be as bold and as visionary as Jesus - and get the same kind of bloody reception.

Or he can try to figure out how to get a passable economic recovery package in front of the members of Congress, which means appealing to their political needs and desires. Coming back to the nation empty handed with his Boy Scout values intact is not an option for President Obama.

He has to "dance with the ones who brung him", even if they are a little embarrassing.

Both political parties are fooling themselves with the labels "liberal" and "conservative" – almost all of their members are centrists, men and women who don't have the guts to back anything but the party Kool-Aid if their lives depended on it. I don't know why they even waste time swearing themselves in, because the things they pledge to honor and uphold in that ceremony simply do not occur.

The president needs to get his hands on a pile of cash, metaphorically speaking, that can be allocated in ways we haven't tried before, even though the last two piles we've spent on the banking industry, another a method we haven't tried before, hasn't shown any immediate relief. The president needs the ability to intimately influence the distribution of these dollars, and he needs it now.

And the pile needs to be a lot bigger than the one Congress has come up with, not to solve our problems, but to even have a chance at stemming them. Two trillion dollars is the bare minimum, and even that may not be enough. I'd add another five hundred million just to mess with the deficit hawks, who have been swooning like Scarlet O'Hara over the thought of borrowing one more dollar when we already owe so much.

But there is no one in any country in the world except the United States that really believes we have the capacity or the will to pay our deficit off – and frankly, they don't care, because they like getting the interest.

It is almost painful to watch men who appear to have common sense look so pained when they talk about the enormity of the deficit, as if it is some kind of moral failing, inconsistent with our nation's values, when it is in fact an exact reflection of who we are and what we believe, because if we don't believe in anything else in America, we believe in "buy now, pay later."

"Buy now, pay later" is why the banking crisis hurts so much.

So man up, representatives of the people, and represent something besides some god damn slogans for a change. Hand your president the biggest pile of cash you can gather, and tell him he has our lives in his hands. Find every program and agency available that can begin deploying any infusion of cash they get in 90 to 180 days - not just the "shovel ready" ones, but the "classroom ready" ones too, to start retraining all of us whose jobs are never coming back.

Try to expand your horizons beyond the narrow confines of the yesteryear platforms your respective political parties cling to far enough to be able to actually see the people you say you represent. Because the bills they get in the mail don’t come in red or blue envelopes. The groceries they buy don't end up in red or blue bellies.

You might not want to dance with one you brung, but the jobs you save this time, Congressmen and Congresswomen, may be your own.

The Most Watched Black Woman In The World

Alright - Anxious Desperate Real Housewives of Atlanta is over, at least until next week, but I've already seen too much of them in the last two days to watch a Reunion: The Real Housewives of Atlanta show next Tuesday.

I'm ready to get back to "The Most Watched Black Woman In The World" program, starring Michelle Obama, premiering next January on every news channel on the planet.

The good thing about the White House is that it produces as much spin on the First Family as the producers at the Bravo! channel do for their Real Housewives franchise. One of the things that used to be a real sore spot among black folks, especially in the seventies and eighties, was the way black people were portrayed on TV. One bad image was one too many for a lot of us, who felt that with so few roles in TV, anything that negatively portrayed black people was perpetuating the very inequalities we were trying to eradicate.

You don't here as much about this these days - whether or not a lot of that has to do with the demise of UPN I don't know. But I can still watch an entire night of TV and see no black actors in starring roles.

Reality TV is scripted, with exaggerated personality conflicts, artificially contrived settings, and the most provocative editing decisions you can find outside of the Fox News studio, all done in an effort to force their preconceived storylines to pay off with a big bang. Bravo! will play these shows to death for a few more weeks before bringing something else into their rotation.

The White House spin machine will just be getting started. Michelle Obama will not be on TV as much as her husband, but she will be on there a lot, talking about real issues and real problems facing American families. The most watched black woman in the world will be on camera in her own hair, wearing tasteful accessories and keeping her cleavage to herself. The producers of her clips will have a mandate from the Office of the President to leave all the bloopers, bad angles, and awkward sounding phrases on the cutting room floor. What the cumulative effect of seeing thousands of positive minded clips and soundbites of this image of a black woman will be, I can't say.

I'll just be glad to finally see THIS kind of spin begin.

Measuring The Drapes At The White House

Barack and Michelle Obama took a spin around the White House today with George and Laura Bush. I'm not usually one for photos, but man, it sure looked good just seeing these two walk through the door.

I guess John McCain was right - they were already "measuring the drapes" at the White House - along with setting up a top shelf "transition" website called change.gov, selecting a few key staffers, holding a press conference, and compiling an exhaustive list of items that could be changed immediately, by executive order, without going through Congress, in the first few days of the Obama presidency.

Not bad for the first six days as president-elect.



I'll give him a gold star if he makes it back home in time to help his daughters with their homework.

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Does Obama Need To "Man Up"?

Shaft could never be elected president.

And if you go down the list of all the activist firebrands who have championed our causes for decades, there are very, very few who would even come close to fitting the bill.

There is a reason why Jackie Robinson integrated baseball, the same reason why Sidney Poitier was the first moneymaking leading black man – because they were “safe” black men with almost superhuman levels of emotional self control. However much we might want to believe that America has learned to accept its diversity, refusing to see what is right before our eyes is foolhardy, to say the least.

But a lot of people out here, a lot of black people, in fact, see Obama’s appealing nature, his tendency to turn the other cheek when he is attacked, and his willingness to concede when he is wrong as weaknesses.

Does Ken Chenault kick ass and take names at American Express?

Hell no.

He does what every other chief executive officer does - he works through the proper channels. Which is what Obama will be doing if he gets elected.

Let’s face it - the "O-Man" is a professional waffler - from his level of expertise, it looks like he's been wavering between "almost" and "maybe "his whole life.

And he can have a tendency to overthink things, as if we are a captive audience like his students used to be.

But if you add up all the things that are wrong with him, they still pale in comparison to all that's right. I don't care all that much about his policies, because I know as well as everyone else does that Americans won't go for anything too far from the middle of the road, no matter how good a salesman the president is.

What I care about is our young black boys - my vote will be cast for Obama so they can get to see this brown faced man in his ever present blue suit behind that White House podium, or when he is crossing the East Lawn to get into the White House helicopter, or when he is huddled with the rest of the world leaders at a G-8 conference - because the reality is, too many of our young boys get the majority of their info from TV, where Shaq and Kobe and McNabb and T.O. dominate the airwaves. Where rappers posture, swagger, and stick out their chests at unseen enemies.

And where you can still see Shaft late at night on the classic movie channels.