MUST READING: HYPOCRISY AMIDST THE ECONOMIC CRISIS

A NY Times Op-Ed piece of Wednesday, March 25, is must reading. You can probably find it on line, as the Times has not yet proceeded with its tentative plan to charge for web access to at least some sections of its venerable and of late electronic pages.

Headlined, Dear AIG, I Quit ! the article is in fact a letter of resignation sent the day previous by Jake DeSantis, an Executive Vice President of AIG Financial Products, to the beleaguered firm's President, $1-a-year man Edward M Liddy.

Scrupulously fair, and giving credit to Mr Liddy and his selfless service as appropriate, but also hard-hitting, DeSantis lays out the case for the bonuses deserved by him and many of his colleagues who worked hard and brought profits to their firm. He also excoriates those vicious and even threatening attacks on those individuals - and outlines his and these colleagues' resentment over Mr Liddy's "failure to stand up for us in the face of unfair and untrue accusations" from media and elected officials.

We feel the only thing more regrettable than Mr Liddy's submitting himself to the intemperate and hypocritical cries of Congressmen in their ivory tower Committees (the same individuals who had obviously neither read the bill permitting the bonus payments nor heeded the several months of comment about bonuses that preceded it) is the nauseating self-righteousness of NY State's Attorney General, the ambitious Andrew Cuomo, (potential candidate to take on a very weak Governor in a primary challenge) whose posturing and revealing of names of bonus recipients endangered not only these men but their entirely-blameless families.

We also regret that Mr Obama did not immediately say that while he found the appearance of the bonuses odious (as he has the right and doubtless the obligation to do pace his friends and controllers on the left) that their sum is small potatoes, irrelevant to the solution of the financial crisis, a distraction for purely political purposes and an example of how government "oversight" of large enterprises in a supposedly free-market environment is anything but.

And these are the folks who now are telling GM and the rest of the auto manufacturers how to conduct their affairs...