Now that TPM's reporting the likelihood those bonuses will be paid to avoid expensive legal battles, that leaves us with few options to mitigate the public outrage.  It's like someone  put a lid on a pot of boiling water, but did not turn down the heat. 

Something's going to boil over.

One of the best ways to simmer this down would be to automatically invite every bonus recipient, foreign OR domestic, to pay a visit to one or another pertinent congressional committee, and those who refuse to show up willingly could be compelled to do so, especially those domestic "bonees".

Put a high personal-privacy price tag on those bonuses, so that in the future, brokers will consider their actions seriously BEFORE they collapse the markets, rather than after it is too late, and rather than obediently rolling over for their CEO's in these fraudulent schemes, they might temper their greed with caution and offer those CEO's some practical resistance.

As the story unfolds, I am even more convinced this is hush money to assure none of those brokers will spill the beans on their bosses.  If we have no option but to pay the bonuses, then lets follow up with some investigations that use the same list to get to the bottom of the economic debacle we are struggling to climb out of.

Their rather difficult catch-22 is that, to hush them up, the "boners" will identify the "bonees" for all the world to see, especially if Cuomo gets his lists.

We should include a very nice formal invitation to visit Congress, with every bonus check.

Just had another deep thought;  are these bailout bonuses just hush money to keep the brokers from exposing those CEO's? 

It would explain why those CEO's seem so impervious to public opinion, they would rather suffer the slings and arrows of outrageous criticism than have a gaggle of brokers running to the SEC with tales from the dark side.

The NYT   and our venerable blog host both agree this morning that the AIG billion dollar bailout bonuses that they're doling out to the architects of the economic collapse has gotten "The People" in a furor.

And for good reason.  If some of these dollar figures are true,  we are watching "stimulus" money going right back into the same hands that created the problem in the first place. And those sleazy brokers will either tuck those millions away, far removed from anything resembling "economic stimulus" and into their off-shore accounts where they won't pay taxes, or they will head for Dubai to lounge in the sunshine along with their pals from Halliburton.

And there is no doubt what the public is thinking. The subject changes from one person to another,  but the essence of our complaints remain similar.

How many parents facing rising tuition for their children might have preferred that money was going to colleges and universities to offset those increases? 

How many more would rather see those funds going to small business as "survival grants" or small business loans, which would immediately effect the economy with that mystic thing called "stimulus".

Instead of paying these broken brokers for greedily enabling the devolution of our economic foundations,  we should be putting every "red" cent (did they always know we would be spending a deficit?) into actual economic stimulation.  But allowing these thieves to simply pass it along to their pernicious and completely culpable  "Brotherhood of Brokers" is obscene and profane, to anyone but members of that economic animal house.

It is no wonder the MSM AND the blogs are in agreement (thus far) on this issue,  usually when that occurs, the public tends to benefit.

But I suspect these greedy rich will prove their ill-gained supremacy in this matter, and like Marie Antoinette tossing cake to the rabble, they will make some token gesture to quiet public criticism.

This time, they may just be too late for their crumbs to satiate the public anger.  Their arrogant assumption of entitlement in the face of universal decline can only lead to some sort of guillotine, if not one of iron, it might very well be one of political power.  If the Republicans do not reign in "Bush's Base" of no-bid book-cooking millionaires and billionaires, they may see their party's mysterious missing head lopped off on a chopping block.

But, considering all the talk that there's no real "leader" in the Republican party, maybe that guillotine has dropped.  They are headless already.