From The Virginian-Pilot
By Daryl Lease

For days now, I’ve been standing rather sheepishly amid an angry mob of American taxpayers, awkwardly shifting my pitchfork from hand to hand, unsure what I’m supposed to do with it when I’m not waving it in the air.

Now, at last, I know.

The answer was inadvertently supplied to me by JPMorgan Chase. It’s been in the news lately for its plans to spend almost $120 million to buy two new corporate jets and another $18 million to renovate a hangar at Westchester Airport outside New York City.

When ABC News aired a report on JPMorgan Chase’s plans, the angry mob of American taxpayers – still fuming over all those bonuses at AIG – began a-grumbling and agitating anew.

The financial giant, you see, received $25 billion in federal bailout money from the Troubled Asset Relief Program. And this – this – is the thanks we get? Two fancy new jets and a fancy hangar?

“It’s a remarkably boneheaded decision,” corporate watchdog Nell Minow told ABC. “It’s completely tone deaf.”

But the folks at JPMorgan Chase quickly barked back at the watchdog and ABC’s riffraff-rousing report. A bank spokesman told The New York Times that the new jets are merely replacing two of JP-Morgan Chase’s four existing corporate flying machines.

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