I just saw an article on the BBC website about our dear friend Mr. Madoff, which says "Madoff's lawyers have argued to a US appeals court he should be released as he had not fled while under house arrest at his Manhattan penthouse."

My thought: "Past performance is not necessarily indicative of future results" - lock him up!

I agree that the AIG employees should be fired and charged with fraud. The one that said that the bonuses were not for perfomance but retention should serve the longest since he obviously lied to congress. Also, these people should be tried by their peers after they are fired. Of course, their peers are other unemployeed people whose chance at jobs in the near future were shattered by the greed of the AIG employees.

Wednesday Evening on NPR I heard that when a company was in difficulty, it was common to offer retention contracts to make sure an employee stayed until a specific date. So, those were legal contracts put in place by the last administration, and that would be the reason, some employees had already left the company.

Those toxic items were sold all over the world by US. I wish someone would come out and explain very clearly to the average person how important it is to bail out other countries and how AIG is an important global company.

I have no special knowledge, but I felt we were in financial trouble a couple of years ago, although not to this extent. I have been following it all very closely, especially during and after the night it all went south.

It is such a distraction from all the serious problems we have.

What is happening with the stream today. It's breaking up all over the place; both the silverstream and the MP3. can't even listen to it.

The site is ridiculously difficult to navigate. There should be a link, front and center on the home page, to comment on the show that is currently being aired!

That said, why do you give so much airtime to Neanderthals like Bill? This "my taxes pay for lazy slobs to eat steak and lobster" meme doesn't merit a response - he is so hopelessly ego-centric that facts and logic will mean nothing to him. Also, I'd like to see you call people more often on anecdotal "evidence" - it may be an anecdote, but it ain't evidence.

All that said, I love your show and all that you do. Sorry for the gripe-fest.

I think the caller's idea that the whole AIG fiasco is quite simply another Enron scam is not far fetched. Also Thom's saying that the bonuses are a reletively insignificant part of a bigger picture is right on. However, saying that going after the White House conspirators is where we should be focused is also small beans compared to an even bigger picture.
We have a situation likened to the Titanic sinking as far as sustatinability of our population versus the available resources of our planet. Those at the top are basically grabbing the few available lifeboats and lining the nest with the ship's provisions.
Starting a passenger revolt to prosecute the guilty crewmembers does not change the inevitable, foreseeable crash.
The sources that fuel our energy wasting American Dream are running out..
Without an unlimited supply of undergound fossil fuels we can no longer supply the raw materials to meet the needs of an ever growing population.
We turn to our Government and Industries and ask them to implement changes for our future. However, the powers that be are overrun with special interests run by dinosaur industries.
The Solutions are readily available, and many are in fact public domain. Since you can't patent ideas that are already freely available, it is not in the interest of industries to develop them.

The Heliostat you referred to in New Mexico is no more.
There were several experimental Heliostats built at Los Alamos, but that program has been discontinued. There aren't any large scale Heliostats in America to the best of my knowledge. I know India built one recently.
Obama talks about developing "Solar Panels": one of the least effective methods of extracting solar energy from the sun. A large scale Heliostat is one of the most efficient methods, next to biomass.
The Los Alamos Heliostats generated electricity via steam turbines. You could build a Heliostat large enough to melt down glass and aluminum and make mirrors and structural parts to manufacture more of them. With a self perpetuating system, you could soon have enough Heliostats in place to provide all of our energy needs for free.

With unlimited free energy, the powerful energy companies become obsolete and fade from existence from our government and our industries.

There are many more readily available technolgies which could make us not just energy independent, but with an energy surplus.
We are wasting too much time focusing on patching the problems instead of exploring Solutions.

I told myself before the election that if Obama was elected I would try to stop griping and complaining about the government and try to be more constructive for a change. After some dissapointment, I slipped right back into full gripe mode. It's hard to sit down and only write down constructive changes insead of just saying how this is wrong and that is wrong after some 20 odd years of Reagan, Bush, Clinton, etc.