For all their equivocating, the reporters, supervisors and public editor of The New York Times know better. Or at least they should.
Certain guidelines are standard in journalism ethics codes.
1. Plagiarism, the lifting of someone else's words without crediting them, is a cardinal journalistic sin, one that The Times own ethics' code suggests can result in dismissal.
2. Reporters should never take gifts from or be paid by those they cover. (The implication, if they do, is that the news and opinion can be bought. For readers, the appearance of conflict is self-evident whether or not the journalist has actually been influenced.)
3, It's a clear conflict of interest for reporters to cover an issue in which they are deeply enmeshed.
So what happened in the last couple of weeks? A prominent Times reporter and two star columnists violated all three. That's breathtaking at a newspaper that positions itself as the standard bearer of journalistic integrity, as the brand that cradles credibility instead of celebrity, the broadsheet that stands for T-R-A-D-I-T-I-O-N and standards in the face of a blogosphere it views as filled with poseurs and shoot-from-the-hip opinion mongers.
And how did The Times handle these three blatant infractions of journalistic ethics? Again, it equivocated.
Let's take them one at a time. The plagiarism reportedly led to a correction and the late addition of web attribution in a column Maureen Dowd wrote about Dick Cheney and torture. She told Times public editor Clark Hoyt that she lifted a paragraph nearly verbatim from the blog of Josh Marshall of Talking Points Memo repute because -- get this -- she was in Hoyt's words "talking with a friend who suggested the wording without telling her where it came from."
Pardon me. But as they said in the Long Island neighborhood in which I grew up, "Get real." First it turns out the "conversation" with Dowd's friend was an email message. Secondly, since when do columnists turn to friends not merely for inspiration but for the actual wording of their columns? Does Dowd write columns by committee? I submit, ladies and gentlemen, that this is horse manure.
How Dowd picked up Marshall's wording is unclear. The fact that she did is unequivocal. If The Times really gives a hoot about the dozens of pages of ethics codes it prints, Dowd at minimum should be required to give a credible explanation, should publicly apologize to Marshall and her readers, should be suspended from the column without pay for a significant period of time and should be directly questioned about whether this ever happened before.
Case No. 2 centers on a $75,000 speaker's fee that Times columnist Thomas Friedman accepted, according to Hoyt, from a "regional government agency" in Oakland, Calif. Now one might wonder how and why, in the midst of a recession that has nearly bankrupted the state of California, any government agency in that state has an extra 75K to hand out for a speech. Friedman told Hoyt that his agent had presented him with an opportunity to talk at a "climate protection summit," a subject about which Friedman has developed much passion in his columns over the last year or so.
Friedman, at least, returned the speaking fee -- considerably more than the average annual U.S. individual income -- without dispute. But then, he can afford to. Hoyt reports that Friedman gives "15 or more" paid lectures a year and that he charges $75,000 as his standard fee. If you quickly do the math, that means Thomas Friedman makes more than $1 million a year in speaker's fees.
One has to wonder: Does that influence the choice of topics he covers? Should journalists be making that kind of money to make public speeches? Hoyt reports that The Times has a policy that requires staff members earning more than $5,000 a year in such fees to file an itemized annual accounting of their appearances. (He does not explain why, but one might surmise it is to guard against influence and potential conflict of interest). But Hoyt further notes that "almost no one has been doing so." This policy, it turns out, is not enforced.
Case No. 3 is perhaps the most complex. It has to do with economics writer Edmund Andrews.
It turns out that Andrews, who offers Times readers expert information and analysis about the pressing economic issues of our time, was himself so careless about his finances that he risks losing his home. He wrote a book (after informing his editors, according to Hoyt) that tells the story of how he took out sub-prime mortgages that he had no hope of repaying. Hoyt reports that Andrews is still seven months behind in his mortgage payments. He also says Andrews best bet for getting out of economic quicksand is to make lots of money on that book.
The Times helped a bit last week by running a excerpt in its Sunday Magazine. But that's not the big problem here. The problem is that Times editors have continued to allow Andrews to cover stories that deal with America's sub-prime mortgage mess. That is simply inexcusable. Why? Because clearly Edmund Andrews has an enormous vested interest in the outcome of any governmental action on sub-prime mortages. As a result, every word he writes about the subject has to be suspect to readers -- or would be if in fact they were told of his conflict.
Power, it is said, corrupts. It does so by breeding arrogance -- the kind that allows The New York Times to allow a man who can't pay his own mortgage to continue reporting on government action on the sub-prime mortgage crisis, the kind that allows one high-profile columnist to take a sizable speaking fee from a public agency and another to at the very least carelessly use someone else's words off an email from an unidentified friend.
It is this same arrogance that ultimately undermines the powerful, that makes them blind to how they are perceived by others. As the elite news media in this country wring their hands about declining readership and their eroding advertising base, perhaps it is time for them to look at themselves as one of the prime causes of the crisis in which they find themselves.
Elite journalism has become the domain of upper-middle to upper-class reporters and editors. They are educated at America's elite institutions and they expend more ink on hedge funds, derivatives and health spas than on the erosion of health care, the exploitation of immigrant labor, and the struggles of the average working man and woman.
Perhaps when journalists rub elbows too often with the rich and powerful, they see no real problem adapting their values, their sense of entitlement or their ethics. And perhaps the American public has turned away from traditional media because they figure the people writing for those publications as well as those running them no longer cares about average people's problems, no longer do more than give lip service to "afflicting the comfortable and comforting the afflicted."
This is the overriding context of The Times ethics trifecta this month. If America's most powerful and influential paper can shrug off such shabby ethics with half-cocked explanations and a public editor's carefully parsed criticism, then our great newspapers -- and the role in democracy that they represent -- are in much deeper trouble than their sinking balance sheets suggest.
Sunday, May 24, 2009
Monday, May 18, 2009
On moral issues of war, seeking consensus falls short
Although Barack Obama is barely four months into his freshman year as president, he's already proven to be a political leader of eloquence, reason and considerable adeptness.
America is still mired in a deep recession yet the near panic that seemed to mark its inception has receded. There are signs in some of the hardest-hit markets that housing prices have turned or at least hit bottom. And we've weathered to first round of swine flu without succumbing to the media hysteria that marked its onset.
"No drama, Obama" has set a tone of reasonable discourse, whether the topic be health care or abortion, which he took on at a graduation speech this week at the University of Notre Dame, calling for common ground in efforts to tackle abortion's root causes.
Yet there are signs that the calm and largely transparent course that the Obama Administration has set could be heading toward a squall on an issue that has shipwrecked more than one American presidency. Ironically, it's the very issue that first thrust him to prominence: War.
And his fiercest opposition could come from his strongest, earliest supporters: the Left.
One by one, the president has slowly backed away from positions he articulated during his campaign and even at the outset of his presidency. He extended his deadline for extricating American troops from Iraq. He reversed his position on ending military tribunals for Guantanamo detainees. And now he's backed away from a promise to release damning pictures of American abuse of prisoners.
Barack Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to look forward. Yet the Iraq War and the escalating conflict in Aghanistan continue to pull him backwards. He says he does not want to be mired in recrimination and investigation of the Bush years. Yet by failing to investigate and reveal American violation of international law and fundamental norms of moral behavior, he is assuring that these transgressions continue to drip out, leaving him buffeted by attacks and counterattacks between left and right.
Rep. John Lewis, the Civil Rights leader and Georgia Democrat, said at Emerson's graduation dinner last night that Congress is growing restless over the open-ended cost of the Iraq war. It surpassed $1 trillion this month and it's drives America further into unsustainable debt as services to America's poor, its unemployed and its vulnerable stagger under the growing weight of recession.
This contradiction in expenditures cannot be sustained for four more years -- perhaps not even for one. I believe it has has become untenable to send desparately needed tax dollars overseas to fund a war effort that will never succeed and can at best allow us to save face by withdrawing gracefully.
If Obama seems to be waffling on his commitment to end the Iraq War, he also walking a wobbly line on his promise to bring "change you can believe in" to government in its War on Terror.
After eight years of watching the principles on which the United States of America was founded erode in the post 9/11 era, liberal Democrats quite rightly see no compromise on issues of Civil Liberties and torture.
The Obama presidency began by offering transparency on the issue of torture but rebuffed calls for accountability of those responsible. Now, it is showing signs of retreating on its promise of transparency, too.
Like most Americans, I genuinely like our president. He seems a fundamentally decent and highly intelligent man. But my support, like many others, won't sustain itself through another administration of war without end and without principles. It won't stand for another administration that equivocates on torture or once again twists5 the principles of democracy in the name of democracy. Certain issues cannot be resolved through compromise. This is one.
Perhaps we can learn from the truth commissions established in South Africa after apartheid.
They did not seek retribution, just honest disclosure. America needs at least as much.
It is time for President Obama to appoint a special commission to look at where and how the Bush Administration violated laws that are the basis of our Constitution. If such a commission were set up not to build evidence for prosecution but to provide the world and the American people with both a basis for apology and commitment to change, it could do much more to move this country forward than simply allowing the wounds of the past to ooze.
South Africa emerged stronger from its self-exploration.The United State would do the same.
Poison can't be allowed to fester in the corpse of our politics. Showing our ugly self-inflicted wounds in the War on Terror will cause pain. No country likes to admit that it broke the law. But airing the truth in the clear air of open disclosure is also the only way for the United States government and we, the people, to heal.
America is still mired in a deep recession yet the near panic that seemed to mark its inception has receded. There are signs in some of the hardest-hit markets that housing prices have turned or at least hit bottom. And we've weathered to first round of swine flu without succumbing to the media hysteria that marked its onset.
"No drama, Obama" has set a tone of reasonable discourse, whether the topic be health care or abortion, which he took on at a graduation speech this week at the University of Notre Dame, calling for common ground in efforts to tackle abortion's root causes.
Yet there are signs that the calm and largely transparent course that the Obama Administration has set could be heading toward a squall on an issue that has shipwrecked more than one American presidency. Ironically, it's the very issue that first thrust him to prominence: War.
And his fiercest opposition could come from his strongest, earliest supporters: the Left.
One by one, the president has slowly backed away from positions he articulated during his campaign and even at the outset of his presidency. He extended his deadline for extricating American troops from Iraq. He reversed his position on ending military tribunals for Guantanamo detainees. And now he's backed away from a promise to release damning pictures of American abuse of prisoners.
Barack Obama has said repeatedly that he wants to look forward. Yet the Iraq War and the escalating conflict in Aghanistan continue to pull him backwards. He says he does not want to be mired in recrimination and investigation of the Bush years. Yet by failing to investigate and reveal American violation of international law and fundamental norms of moral behavior, he is assuring that these transgressions continue to drip out, leaving him buffeted by attacks and counterattacks between left and right.
Rep. John Lewis, the Civil Rights leader and Georgia Democrat, said at Emerson's graduation dinner last night that Congress is growing restless over the open-ended cost of the Iraq war. It surpassed $1 trillion this month and it's drives America further into unsustainable debt as services to America's poor, its unemployed and its vulnerable stagger under the growing weight of recession.
This contradiction in expenditures cannot be sustained for four more years -- perhaps not even for one. I believe it has has become untenable to send desparately needed tax dollars overseas to fund a war effort that will never succeed and can at best allow us to save face by withdrawing gracefully.
If Obama seems to be waffling on his commitment to end the Iraq War, he also walking a wobbly line on his promise to bring "change you can believe in" to government in its War on Terror.
After eight years of watching the principles on which the United States of America was founded erode in the post 9/11 era, liberal Democrats quite rightly see no compromise on issues of Civil Liberties and torture.
The Obama presidency began by offering transparency on the issue of torture but rebuffed calls for accountability of those responsible. Now, it is showing signs of retreating on its promise of transparency, too.
Like most Americans, I genuinely like our president. He seems a fundamentally decent and highly intelligent man. But my support, like many others, won't sustain itself through another administration of war without end and without principles. It won't stand for another administration that equivocates on torture or once again twists5 the principles of democracy in the name of democracy. Certain issues cannot be resolved through compromise. This is one.
Perhaps we can learn from the truth commissions established in South Africa after apartheid.
They did not seek retribution, just honest disclosure. America needs at least as much.
It is time for President Obama to appoint a special commission to look at where and how the Bush Administration violated laws that are the basis of our Constitution. If such a commission were set up not to build evidence for prosecution but to provide the world and the American people with both a basis for apology and commitment to change, it could do much more to move this country forward than simply allowing the wounds of the past to ooze.
South Africa emerged stronger from its self-exploration.The United State would do the same.
Poison can't be allowed to fester in the corpse of our politics. Showing our ugly self-inflicted wounds in the War on Terror will cause pain. No country likes to admit that it broke the law. But airing the truth in the clear air of open disclosure is also the only way for the United States government and we, the people, to heal.
Monday, March 9, 2009
Remembering the old days (good, bad or indifferent)
A year's tuition at Harvard University cost $600 back then. The average rent was $70 a month, a postage stamp cost 3 cents and the average new house sold for $7,450.
No. I'm not talking about 1929, the year of the Great Crash and an oft-mentioned reference point to the economic tailispin we're in. I'm talking 20 years later, the year of my birth, 1949. Which means on March 17, in approximately seven days, 11 hours and 24 minutes (who is counting?), there will be no denying I am officially old.
Ah, the good old days. Or were they? I have to confess I can't recall much -- well, actually, anything -- about 1949. At this point I'm not sure I know much about 1959 either. It was a long time ago. But, compliments of brother, Dennis, Seek Publishing's, "1949, Remember When" is bringing me up to speed.
This was the year the first VW Beetle was sold in the United States, a big deal to me since it was the college car of choice for my generation. "Give 'em Hell" Harry Truman was still president. Lousi "Satchmo" Armstrong was the toast of Paris. And, along with me, out popped Bruce Springsteen, Meryl Streep, Billy Joel and Jessica Lange. Let it be noted that I came first.
It's true. This was the year that Ronald Reagan co-started in Warner Bros, "The Girl from Jones Beach," a real place on Long Island where we'd do more cruising for sand crabs than babes as kids. But no one said 1949 was perfect
It was, in fact, like every year, a mix of some good and some bad. Harvard Law School enrolled its first woman students. The first African American, William Hastie, was appointed to a judgeship on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Geneva Conventions, among other things, set standards of humane treatment for prisoners of war.
But Soviet A-bomb tests heated up the Cold War. And the New York Yankees won the World Series (forgive me, I'm from Boston now).
The biggest downer: average lifespan. Back then it was 62.9 years, which gives me just 2.9 to get deep into my Bucket List. But that was then. Now, every one keeps telling me, 60 is the new 40
I'm not sure I believe them, but then, we've got little choice. Who can afford to retire these days anyway?
No. I'm not talking about 1929, the year of the Great Crash and an oft-mentioned reference point to the economic tailispin we're in. I'm talking 20 years later, the year of my birth, 1949. Which means on March 17, in approximately seven days, 11 hours and 24 minutes (who is counting?), there will be no denying I am officially old.
Ah, the good old days. Or were they? I have to confess I can't recall much -- well, actually, anything -- about 1949. At this point I'm not sure I know much about 1959 either. It was a long time ago. But, compliments of brother, Dennis, Seek Publishing's, "1949, Remember When" is bringing me up to speed.
This was the year the first VW Beetle was sold in the United States, a big deal to me since it was the college car of choice for my generation. "Give 'em Hell" Harry Truman was still president. Lousi "Satchmo" Armstrong was the toast of Paris. And, along with me, out popped Bruce Springsteen, Meryl Streep, Billy Joel and Jessica Lange. Let it be noted that I came first.
It's true. This was the year that Ronald Reagan co-started in Warner Bros, "The Girl from Jones Beach," a real place on Long Island where we'd do more cruising for sand crabs than babes as kids. But no one said 1949 was perfect
It was, in fact, like every year, a mix of some good and some bad. Harvard Law School enrolled its first woman students. The first African American, William Hastie, was appointed to a judgeship on the U.S. Circuit Court of Appeals. The Geneva Conventions, among other things, set standards of humane treatment for prisoners of war.
But Soviet A-bomb tests heated up the Cold War. And the New York Yankees won the World Series (forgive me, I'm from Boston now).
The biggest downer: average lifespan. Back then it was 62.9 years, which gives me just 2.9 to get deep into my Bucket List. But that was then. Now, every one keeps telling me, 60 is the new 40
I'm not sure I believe them, but then, we've got little choice. Who can afford to retire these days anyway?
Sunday, March 1, 2009
Smallish signs of a really big recession
We Americans are hunkering down.
Sort of.
Cars no longer spill onto the adjacent street from the parking lot at my Lexington, Mass., farm stand each weekend. Business seems to have slowed sharply. A few weeks ago, Kathy and I walked without reservation into a popular Waltham restaurant on Saturday night and had our choice of tables. And this weekend, the news over dinner at the home of friends was uneasy if not downright scary. He works for a well-known Silicon Valley high-tech company. It's frozen all travel in favor of teleconferencing. Recently it announced it was eliminating the annual bonuses that traditionally make up a fifth of his income. And the worst may lie ahead. He's bracing for increasingly likely company layoffs in April. The problem: Business customers are putting off technology upgrades that used to be standard.
The signs that Americans, individuals and businesses, are spending less and staying home more ripple through the news, the stories of friends and scenes of daily life. Television viewership is up. Air travel is down. National Public Radio tells the story of a shoemaker who can't keep up with demand for new heels, soles and zippers. The venerable Rocky Mountain News, a Denver daily, shut its doors days short of its 150th birthday.
But a closer look around suggests that many if not most of us have yet to fully come to terms with the rapid unraveling of the American economic engine. On Friday night, we headed to the chain restaurant Chili's, not known for its gourmet delicacies, to cash in a gift card. The place was packed and by 7 p.m., the hostess was stacking up the names on a waiting list like air traffic controllers used to line up planes on busy big city runways. Across the street, at The Burlington Mall, cars stretched across the acres of parking lot as they have every weekend when we drive by. It could be, of course, that window-shopping-til-you-drop has replaced actual buying on the vapors of diminishing credit. But if wanna-be-shoppers weren't able to at least delude themselves into believing that things will soon get better why would they torture themselves by looking at what they clearly can't afford to buy? Then, this morning, my Sunday New York Times told me that Americans are flocking to the movies again. ("The movie industry has been startled by a box-office surge that has little precedent in the modern era," The Times intoned.).
OK, so much for the theory we're all huddling in front of the TV at home.
That Americans still are spending money isn't something to be outraged about in an economy that relies on consumer spending for more than 70 percent of its gross domestic product. Put another way, if we all got really frugal at the same time, this 15-month downturn could only get worse.
Yet there is a flipside, notes James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, in one of a page full of short essays in Sunday's Times under the headline "When will this recession be over?"
"Hope," he writes, "sustains life, but misplaced hope prolongs recessions."
Maybe if we all admit just how bad things are, we can all roll up our sleeves, eat the spinach of sacrifice so few politicians are afraid to ask for and volunteer in ways that begin to make all of us better and richer as a community. The movie industry may not like it. But in the end, there may be better ways to spend our money and our time than in what what one Times source described as that very dark place of escapism.
Sort of.
Cars no longer spill onto the adjacent street from the parking lot at my Lexington, Mass., farm stand each weekend. Business seems to have slowed sharply. A few weeks ago, Kathy and I walked without reservation into a popular Waltham restaurant on Saturday night and had our choice of tables. And this weekend, the news over dinner at the home of friends was uneasy if not downright scary. He works for a well-known Silicon Valley high-tech company. It's frozen all travel in favor of teleconferencing. Recently it announced it was eliminating the annual bonuses that traditionally make up a fifth of his income. And the worst may lie ahead. He's bracing for increasingly likely company layoffs in April. The problem: Business customers are putting off technology upgrades that used to be standard.
The signs that Americans, individuals and businesses, are spending less and staying home more ripple through the news, the stories of friends and scenes of daily life. Television viewership is up. Air travel is down. National Public Radio tells the story of a shoemaker who can't keep up with demand for new heels, soles and zippers. The venerable Rocky Mountain News, a Denver daily, shut its doors days short of its 150th birthday.
But a closer look around suggests that many if not most of us have yet to fully come to terms with the rapid unraveling of the American economic engine. On Friday night, we headed to the chain restaurant Chili's, not known for its gourmet delicacies, to cash in a gift card. The place was packed and by 7 p.m., the hostess was stacking up the names on a waiting list like air traffic controllers used to line up planes on busy big city runways. Across the street, at The Burlington Mall, cars stretched across the acres of parking lot as they have every weekend when we drive by. It could be, of course, that window-shopping-til-you-drop has replaced actual buying on the vapors of diminishing credit. But if wanna-be-shoppers weren't able to at least delude themselves into believing that things will soon get better why would they torture themselves by looking at what they clearly can't afford to buy? Then, this morning, my Sunday New York Times told me that Americans are flocking to the movies again. ("The movie industry has been startled by a box-office surge that has little precedent in the modern era," The Times intoned.).
OK, so much for the theory we're all huddling in front of the TV at home.
That Americans still are spending money isn't something to be outraged about in an economy that relies on consumer spending for more than 70 percent of its gross domestic product. Put another way, if we all got really frugal at the same time, this 15-month downturn could only get worse.
Yet there is a flipside, notes James Grant, editor of Grant's Interest Rate Observer, in one of a page full of short essays in Sunday's Times under the headline "When will this recession be over?"
"Hope," he writes, "sustains life, but misplaced hope prolongs recessions."
Maybe if we all admit just how bad things are, we can all roll up our sleeves, eat the spinach of sacrifice so few politicians are afraid to ask for and volunteer in ways that begin to make all of us better and richer as a community. The movie industry may not like it. But in the end, there may be better ways to spend our money and our time than in what what one Times source described as that very dark place of escapism.
Saturday, February 14, 2009
Hypocrits to the hilt
By the measure of nearly any presidency, the passage of a massive, $787 billion stimulus bill three weeks into the Obama administration is a remarkable achievement. The economic analysts I read and listen to say (a) it probably won't prove enough in the long run but (b) it'll certainly help and may at least keep unemployment below 10 percent in what will be a very painful year.
Republicans, meanwhile, are yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. The measure they say will "mortgage our children's future." They repeat this mantra in lockstep on TV talks shows, at press confeerences, and, ultimately, on the news. They also wag a finger and somberly note that they want bipartisanship, but that it has failed here because of Democrats desire to distribute pork back home.
No House Republicans voted for the stimulus. Three blue state Senate Republicans assured passage by giving the measure their support: Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Susan Collins and Olympia Stowe, both of Maine. And self-proclaimed "Mr. Maverick," John McCain? He's leading the sanctimonious Republican hand-wringing accusing the Democrats of selling our children's future.
So let's set the record straight. Yes, bipartisanship failed but not for lack of trying by President Obama and not because the measure was laden with pork. I hope the president doesn't waste his time trying too hard to wine and dine the GOP in the future. There is too much work to be done to waste a lot of energy on the party of non-regulation and non-responsiveness.
This is the crowd, after all, that under W. ran up the largest deficit in American history and left the country in the shambles we now find ourselves digging out of. Somehow Republicans didn't worry too much about our children's future when they passed $1.2 trillion in tax cuts while increasing federal spending. They didn't worry about our children's future when they poured upwards of another trillion dollars into waging and supporting a war in Iraq started to stop phantom weapons of mass destruction. They didn't worry about our children's future when they allowed crooks like Bernard Madoff to rip off his clients of $50 billion in the world's biggest Ponzi Scheme or when they stood by while executives at Merrill Lynch awarded themselves 700 $1- million-plus salaries in a year in which the company lost $27 billion.
When the same folks who brought us bankrupting tax policies, the albatross of an unwinnable war and an ethic of unregulated greed now wag a finger of coordinated righteousness, it strikes me as the ultimate act of hypocrisy.
Republicans, meanwhile, are yelling "fire" in a crowded theater. The measure they say will "mortgage our children's future." They repeat this mantra in lockstep on TV talks shows, at press confeerences, and, ultimately, on the news. They also wag a finger and somberly note that they want bipartisanship, but that it has failed here because of Democrats desire to distribute pork back home.
No House Republicans voted for the stimulus. Three blue state Senate Republicans assured passage by giving the measure their support: Arlen Specter of Pennsylvania and Susan Collins and Olympia Stowe, both of Maine. And self-proclaimed "Mr. Maverick," John McCain? He's leading the sanctimonious Republican hand-wringing accusing the Democrats of selling our children's future.
So let's set the record straight. Yes, bipartisanship failed but not for lack of trying by President Obama and not because the measure was laden with pork. I hope the president doesn't waste his time trying too hard to wine and dine the GOP in the future. There is too much work to be done to waste a lot of energy on the party of non-regulation and non-responsiveness.
This is the crowd, after all, that under W. ran up the largest deficit in American history and left the country in the shambles we now find ourselves digging out of. Somehow Republicans didn't worry too much about our children's future when they passed $1.2 trillion in tax cuts while increasing federal spending. They didn't worry about our children's future when they poured upwards of another trillion dollars into waging and supporting a war in Iraq started to stop phantom weapons of mass destruction. They didn't worry about our children's future when they allowed crooks like Bernard Madoff to rip off his clients of $50 billion in the world's biggest Ponzi Scheme or when they stood by while executives at Merrill Lynch awarded themselves 700 $1- million-plus salaries in a year in which the company lost $27 billion.
When the same folks who brought us bankrupting tax policies, the albatross of an unwinnable war and an ethic of unregulated greed now wag a finger of coordinated righteousness, it strikes me as the ultimate act of hypocrisy.
Wednesday, February 11, 2009
It's time to bail out Americans, not their bankers
Would you invest your children’s inheritance in a new-fangled investment scheme on the basis of nothing but talking points? Would you invest your life savings in a mansion after seeing nothing but an architect’s sketch? And, in both cases, would you entrust the supervision of these funds to men and women who had lost oodles of their own and other people’s money already?
That’s sort of what Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the Obama administration seemed to be asking the American public to do on Tuesday. It’s insulting and, frankly, somewhat frightening. From what I read, while we awaited leadership, Geithner trotted out a tweaked version of his predecessor, Hank Paulson’s, reality. While we needed a fresh start, Geithner not only made it easy for the same failed bank officers to stay in place but pushed back efforts to limit their compensation. While we pined for money at the grass roots, to keep banks from foreclosing on American homes at a rate of 10,000 a day, Geithner put off to some undefined future time a plan to help homeowners restructure loans.
Surely, the Obama administration, must grasp this: The American people are not interested in propping up the fat cats of American finance. Nor will they be fooled with smoke and mirrors. Obama was elected to change business as usual. And it sure doesn’t look like TARP2 does.
I’ve always wondered about this “Troubled Asset Relief Program.” Even the name bothers me. Are we relieving the “troubled assets” – and the bankers who made a mess of them? Or are we relieving troubled Americans, lured into bad loans and worse debt by mortgage brokers and bankers who in some cases must have known darn well that the money they handing out could never be repaid in the manner it was supposed to be. If America needs a bailout, why not let Americans have a bailout?
Let’s stop to consider what $700 billion, the amount Congress voted for the financial bailout program during the campaign season, can buy. Using a ballpark figure of 100 million U.S. households, $700 billion is the equivalent of giving every homeowner or apartment renter $7,000. Per family or household. If every American household actually had been given that kind of money, I suspect it would have gone quite a ways toward stimulating the economy. Instead, half that money went to banks, which have hoarded the money. Geithner’s press conference was the roll out how the second half of that installment would be spent. And now there are suggestions the final figure could balloon above $2 trillion. If the United States is going to live off the largesse of Chinese loans – until they’re called due -- can the rest of us enjoy the respite and pay off some bills?
More of the same won’t work. Americans are still waiting for a real plan, with real oversight, real regulation and real chance of some of that money flowing downhill to strapped and increasing desperate citizens. We don’t need trickle down economics 2 -- without the trickle. We’re not economists but we do have a sense of smell. And something still stinks here.
That’s sort of what Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner and the Obama administration seemed to be asking the American public to do on Tuesday. It’s insulting and, frankly, somewhat frightening. From what I read, while we awaited leadership, Geithner trotted out a tweaked version of his predecessor, Hank Paulson’s, reality. While we needed a fresh start, Geithner not only made it easy for the same failed bank officers to stay in place but pushed back efforts to limit their compensation. While we pined for money at the grass roots, to keep banks from foreclosing on American homes at a rate of 10,000 a day, Geithner put off to some undefined future time a plan to help homeowners restructure loans.
Surely, the Obama administration, must grasp this: The American people are not interested in propping up the fat cats of American finance. Nor will they be fooled with smoke and mirrors. Obama was elected to change business as usual. And it sure doesn’t look like TARP2 does.
I’ve always wondered about this “Troubled Asset Relief Program.” Even the name bothers me. Are we relieving the “troubled assets” – and the bankers who made a mess of them? Or are we relieving troubled Americans, lured into bad loans and worse debt by mortgage brokers and bankers who in some cases must have known darn well that the money they handing out could never be repaid in the manner it was supposed to be. If America needs a bailout, why not let Americans have a bailout?
Let’s stop to consider what $700 billion, the amount Congress voted for the financial bailout program during the campaign season, can buy. Using a ballpark figure of 100 million U.S. households, $700 billion is the equivalent of giving every homeowner or apartment renter $7,000. Per family or household. If every American household actually had been given that kind of money, I suspect it would have gone quite a ways toward stimulating the economy. Instead, half that money went to banks, which have hoarded the money. Geithner’s press conference was the roll out how the second half of that installment would be spent. And now there are suggestions the final figure could balloon above $2 trillion. If the United States is going to live off the largesse of Chinese loans – until they’re called due -- can the rest of us enjoy the respite and pay off some bills?
More of the same won’t work. Americans are still waiting for a real plan, with real oversight, real regulation and real chance of some of that money flowing downhill to strapped and increasing desperate citizens. We don’t need trickle down economics 2 -- without the trickle. We’re not economists but we do have a sense of smell. And something still stinks here.
Tuesday, February 10, 2009
Mr. President: Let's clear out the banking dead wood
Let's hope the banking lobbyists aren't still working their magic in Washington. There certainly are signs they could be.
A fascinating story in Tuesday's New York Times suggests that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner prevailed over other high-ranking Obama aides who wanted to impose tougher sanctions on banks and bankers seeking more federal bailout money. On the oped pages of the same paper, conservative columnist David Brooks, an opponent of the stimulus plan, praises this bank bailout.
I consider that a bad sign.
I am no economist and the multiplex of multi-billion-dollar numbers thrown around these days often leaves me dizzy. But I do have common sense, and I have always lived within my means. I play my mortgage on time. I don't load up my credit cards. I defer purchases that I don't have the money to make.
That's why I'm angry -- really angry -- at the profligate SOB's of the financial world who seem to think it's their right to drain my children's future and then have the government run to the rescue, no strings attached. And that's why I'm getting equally angry at the government's unwillingness to punish them for their utter irresponsibility.
OK. So the new plan, as President Obama announced last week, will cap top executive salaries at rescued financial institutions at $500,000 a year until these rescued institutions can again stand on their own feet. Now there is tough love -- not.
I'm sure some of these guys will have to sell a yacht or two -- maybe a home or two -- at a loss to get by on a mere $500,000 a year. But I'll be damned if I can understand why the U.S. government is concerned about keeping their stockholders whole. Or why the salary cap doesn't extend beyond the top executives to all executives. Or why Geithner is loathe to clean house and bring in executives and boards not tainted by a run-up in our national debt that could surpass $1 trillion eventually just to keep the banks afloat.
Change, Mr. President, doesn't mean keeping the same shysters at a half mil. Change means doing something different. Free enterprise doesn't mean that if bank executives act like irresponsible fools, they, along with their banks, get a bailout. It means if they are fools, they should be fired.
The crisis we are in was no accident. Banks began giving mortgages with no downpayments and no credible requirements for lenders to show they could ever repay their mortgages. The banks would then sell these loans to bigger banks, who would sell them to Wall Street and so on. I guess it was all legal, but it sure sounds to a layman a lot like Bernard Madoff's Ponzi Scheme. So why then is the government so concerned about keeping these executives and their boards intact and in place?
I smell a rat, or at least a lobbyist.
Yes, I can, though grudgingly, understand why the Obama administration wants to keep the banks from going under. That would pull us down with them. But I cannot understand why the Obama administration continues to protect the self-centered, arrogant, unethical and unbowed executives who have beaten these banks and this country into the ground. (If they haven't exactly fiddled while Rome burns, they have thrown six-figure luxury "retreats" with taxpayer money that was supposed to open up credit markets, but has not.)
President Obama, your popularity remains strong. You should use it to lead the people - and to leave the Republican Party and the lobbyists behind if they choose not to follow. Splitting the difference in an economic crisis is no solution. As you said yourself Monday night, catastrophe could be close behind. This is no time for subtle shifts in a failed system. It is time to be bold.
A fascinating story in Tuesday's New York Times suggests that Treasury Secretary Timothy Geithner prevailed over other high-ranking Obama aides who wanted to impose tougher sanctions on banks and bankers seeking more federal bailout money. On the oped pages of the same paper, conservative columnist David Brooks, an opponent of the stimulus plan, praises this bank bailout.
I consider that a bad sign.
I am no economist and the multiplex of multi-billion-dollar numbers thrown around these days often leaves me dizzy. But I do have common sense, and I have always lived within my means. I play my mortgage on time. I don't load up my credit cards. I defer purchases that I don't have the money to make.
That's why I'm angry -- really angry -- at the profligate SOB's of the financial world who seem to think it's their right to drain my children's future and then have the government run to the rescue, no strings attached. And that's why I'm getting equally angry at the government's unwillingness to punish them for their utter irresponsibility.
OK. So the new plan, as President Obama announced last week, will cap top executive salaries at rescued financial institutions at $500,000 a year until these rescued institutions can again stand on their own feet. Now there is tough love -- not.
I'm sure some of these guys will have to sell a yacht or two -- maybe a home or two -- at a loss to get by on a mere $500,000 a year. But I'll be damned if I can understand why the U.S. government is concerned about keeping their stockholders whole. Or why the salary cap doesn't extend beyond the top executives to all executives. Or why Geithner is loathe to clean house and bring in executives and boards not tainted by a run-up in our national debt that could surpass $1 trillion eventually just to keep the banks afloat.
Change, Mr. President, doesn't mean keeping the same shysters at a half mil. Change means doing something different. Free enterprise doesn't mean that if bank executives act like irresponsible fools, they, along with their banks, get a bailout. It means if they are fools, they should be fired.
The crisis we are in was no accident. Banks began giving mortgages with no downpayments and no credible requirements for lenders to show they could ever repay their mortgages. The banks would then sell these loans to bigger banks, who would sell them to Wall Street and so on. I guess it was all legal, but it sure sounds to a layman a lot like Bernard Madoff's Ponzi Scheme. So why then is the government so concerned about keeping these executives and their boards intact and in place?
I smell a rat, or at least a lobbyist.
Yes, I can, though grudgingly, understand why the Obama administration wants to keep the banks from going under. That would pull us down with them. But I cannot understand why the Obama administration continues to protect the self-centered, arrogant, unethical and unbowed executives who have beaten these banks and this country into the ground. (If they haven't exactly fiddled while Rome burns, they have thrown six-figure luxury "retreats" with taxpayer money that was supposed to open up credit markets, but has not.)
President Obama, your popularity remains strong. You should use it to lead the people - and to leave the Republican Party and the lobbyists behind if they choose not to follow. Splitting the difference in an economic crisis is no solution. As you said yourself Monday night, catastrophe could be close behind. This is no time for subtle shifts in a failed system. It is time to be bold.
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