Business reporter Leela de Kretser heaps scorn on Matt Taibbi for telling people things that were already common knowledge in the financial press about the Goldman Sachs vampire squid (never going to get tired of that phrase):
... Thanks to reporters at The Wall Street Journal, New York Times and the New York Post, we already knew Goldman Sachs alumni had positions in governments and influential bodies around the world.
[We knew they were] the biggest contributor to Barack Obama's presidential run ... profited more than any other bank during the sub-prime mortgage mess ... been part of talks about whether to keep its competitor Lehman Brothers afloat ...
Unlike Mr Taibbi, we knew all of this - and didn't think it amounted to sinister conspiracy. Instead we thought this is what the biggest guy on The Street does.
The word 'conspiracy' doesn't appear in the original piece, The Great American Bubble Machine. It's just that when you describe it like this, all the greed and influence-peddling and market manipulation sounds bad to the masses:
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... The collective message of all of this - the AIG bailout, the swift approval for its bank-holding conversion, the TARP funds - is that when it comes to Goldman Sachs, there isn't a free market at all. The government might let other players on the market die, but it simply will not allow Goldman to fail under any circumstances. Its edge in the market has suddenly become an open declaration of supreme privilege. "In the past it was an implicit advantage," says Simon Johnson, an economics professor at MIT and former official at the International Monetary Fund, who compares the bailout to the crony capitalism he has seen in Third World countries. "Now it's more of an explicit advantage." ...
It sounds particularly bad when all of Goldman Sachs' banker buddies won't modify mortgages to help people stay in their homes, which probably won't sell after they get foreclosed on, anyway.
It sounds worse when our state governments are collapsing because of their screwups, cutting back when we need them to spend, and throwing their citizens to the loan sharks and leaving us to fight to be most deserving of the scraps.
It sounds appalling when ordinary people's budgets are stretched for basic necessities to the point where some families are in desperate need of free school breakfasts and lunches for their children's growing minds and bodies.
In fact, it sounds so godsawful put all together in a coherent narrative like Taibbi did, even if it is the natural and heaven-ordained state of the market, that the miserable peons might demand things be done differently.
Because de Kretser, like Goldman Sachs' offended spokespeople, isn't challenging Taibbi because of the facts of the case. She seems upset because he made the financial markets' head honchos look bad to all the people who don't spend their whole lives reading business and financial news. She seems proud of them, and if it weren't Goldman Sachs, she'd probably be proud of whoever else was in charge of the looting. Some people are more equal than others.
Also, without a steady, greedy, unprincipled hand on the tiller, one worries, people might start asking dangerous questions. |
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