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Corporate Media Journalists Just Love Rich Guys
by
Dave Lindorff, thiscantbehappening.net | 09.24.2008
I’m not so bothered by the sloth and greed of the Wall Street crowd. What bothers me is the respect they are treated with by the journalists covering them. Corporate Media Journalists Just Love Rich GuysBy Dave Lindorff The people who pose as journalists in today’s corporate media are in awe and in love with the rich. How else to explain their fatuous praise for the likes of Warren Buffett, who on one hand bets $5 billion on Goldman Sachs shares, and on the other, posing as a disinterested wise man and patriot, publicly advises Congress to go along with Treasury Secretary Hank Paulson’s and Fed Chairman Ben Bernanke’s $700-$1-trillion bailout of Goldman and the rest of Wall Street? Buffett, whatever else he is, is no fool. He looks at Goldman Sachs, its shares knocked for a loop by the current crisis, but about to become a merged entity—bank and investment bank combined—with government backing to unload its bad credit risks—and he buys $5 billion worth of it, and then turns around and tells Congress to step up and vote for a bailout which would double his money almost instantly. What a guy! A true hero. And then the corporate media praises the man for his “courage” and his “faith in the markets.” But that’s only one guy. We also have the panic among Wall Street industry lobbyists, working overtime to make sure that nobody in Congress seriously tries to limit executive compensation in the financial sector. As one lobbyist put it today, “If you limit the amount a bank or investment bank can pay for talented people, they won’t be able to hire them.” Wait a minute. Wasn’t America famous for the “work ethic” of its people? We’re always told that Americans want the “dignity” of a job, and that we Americans have this wonderful “work ethic.” Give us a job—any job—and, whatever the pay, we’ll buckle down and do it to the best of our ability. That apparently doesn’t apply to the upper ranks of the banking elite, though. If they can “only” earn $400,000, instead of $40 million a year, they’re not going to lift a goddam finger. Smart guys like John Thain, chief of Merrill Lynch, and Kenneth Lewis, head of Bank America, or Dick Fuld, head of now bankrupt Lehman Brothers, would never do a lick of work in the Wall Street mines if they could only earn a few hundred grand for their efforts. If that was all they could earn, they’d rather stay home and clip coupons. There’s your “work ethic” for you. I’m not so bothered by the sloth and greed of the Wall Street crowd. What bothers me is the respect they are treated with by the journalists covering them. I mean, come on. These are just greedy people who got where they got because they went to the right schools, made the right connections, and checked their principles and morals at the door when they entered the building. Their sole motivation in life is making money—as much as they can possibly hoard. The truth is it’s pretty easy to get rich if you’re willing to screw the public to do it, and it’s a pretty safe bet that that’s what’s been going on with Wall Street, especially over the last two decades of deregulated boom times. By the way, as Congress zips through a bill giving $25 billion in loan guarantees to Ford and GM "to develop fuel efficient cars," why is nobody asking about the $7 billion the government gave to GM back in the late 1990s to develop a hybrid diesel engine? GM took the money, and then failed to deliver. "Sorry" was about all the taxpayers got from that boondoggle. And what will we get for this latest handover of an amount equal to half the annual federal budget for education? At best we'll get some GM cars that get an extra 20 mpg. But there's no guarantee it'll happen, and the past record of GM, Ford and the auto industry is it won't. The money will just be forgotten, like the last $7 billion. In fact, the car companies are lobbying to get the 20 mpg target eliminated from the bill before Congress. For that matter, Chrysler, whose owners are planning to end car production in the US and just make the company an importer of Japanese and Chinese cars, is trying to get in on the deal. The bill actually says the money is for "retooling" old factories to accomodate newer high-mileage-getting cars. It's easy to see how that will end up being spent on a lot of things that don't have anything to do with higher gas mileage. Here's another stupid throwaway to shareholders of taxpayer money, only, as in the case of the $700 billion Wall Street bailout, it's not current taxpayers who will foot the bill, since nobody's talking about raising taxes, but rather about lowering them. It's future taxpayers, like our kids, who'll be paying through the nose. It looks to me like Congress and the president have simply given up on the whole idea of governing, and have decided that their job is simply to shovel money as fast as they can to the rich and hope they themselves get out before the whole system collapses in rubble and chaos. |
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