Danny Schechter - ColdType

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fundraiser, “This is an impressive crowd – the haves and
the have-mores. Some people call you the elites; I call you
my base.”
• With personal wealth as its goal, these self-conscious professionals
learned to get along by going along, to cut corners
in an already de-regulated environment. Military metaphors
abounded – kill or be killed, wipe out the competition. The
bottom line became their only line. They read about satirical
labels like “Masters of The Universe” invented by writer
Tom Wolf and took it literally, as if that was a status to
aspire to in an ethics-challenged environment.
• Inequality mounted as these magicians of mega-wealth
creation did their thing. Wealth was transferred from working
people and the middle class to the rich. It was vacuumed
in one direction – up! One impact: according to a
Wall Street Journal analysis of Social Security Administration
data, more than one-third of all pay in the U.S. now
goes to executives and other highly-paid employees.
• As the crisis worsened, Curtis Lang wrote on the Satya
Center website in March 2008 that the coming subprime
meltdown would also bring down globalization. “It is worth
noting that the Bush years also saw a resurgence of leveraged
buy-outs (LBOs) financed with junk bonds, a kind
of financial 80s retro chic moment, and these junk bonds
were fashioned into high performance financial instruments
that pieced together bits and parcels of many, many LBOs
that were then ‘insured’ and given a AAA investment rating.
There is every reason to believe that these LBOs created
companies loaded with debt that are unlikely to meet
their financial obligations. The junk bonds and junk financial
instruments created to finance their operations are also
surely worth much less than face value. This will certainly
lead to corporate bankruptcies and further ugly problems
for big banks and other big holders of corporate junk.
“More ominous are the problems in the esoteric mar-