Danny Schechter - ColdType

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morality confrontation that he was trying to ignite when he
wrote this denunciation in the Washington Post:
When history tells the story of the subprime lending crisis
and recounts its devastating effects on the lives of so many
innocent homeowners, the Bush administration will not be
judged favorably. The tale is still unfolding, but when the dust
settles, it will be judged as a willing accomplice to the lenders
who went to any lengths in their quest for profits.
A few journalists like Greg Palast went after the media’s
hypocrisy on his website, but to no effect, writing:
While New York Governor Eliot Spitzer was paying an ‘escort’
$4,300 in a hotel room in Washington, just down the road,
George Bush’s new Federal Reserve Board Chairman, Ben
Bernanke, was secretly handing over $200 billion in a tryst
with mortgage bank industry speculators. Both acts were
wanton, wicked and lewd. But there’s a BIG difference. The
Governor was using his own checkbook. Bush’s man Bernanke
was using ours.
In the same way that Spitzer was able to go after Wall Street
because he had been part of that world, working in a corporate
law firm as well as a local prosecutor’s office and knew it
well, his sexual appetites may have been an extension of that
very same high stress culture. Illegal sex and Wall Street has
long been linked, writes Heidi Moore:
This is all a reminder that the financial district hasn’t always
been gleaming skyscrapers and Starbucks. Consider this
passage from City of Eros: New York City, Prostitution, and
the Commercialization of Sex, 1790-1920: “Adjacent to the
Wall Street business district, prostitutes worked in saloons
along Greenwich Street, taking men upstairs. In addition,
immediately south of Wall Street was the Battery Tenderloin,
on Whitehall Street. The Water Street area, however,
remained the most significant and poorest waterfront zone
of prostitution. Amid the rookeries, rat pits and dance halls,