Danny Schechter - ColdType

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victims. Financial crimes, despite their size and volume of
damage didn’t make the list.
Yet, you would think that a crime of this proportion would
not escape media attention.
It didn’t, at least in the eyes of one editor of a slick upscale
monthly that covers the elite, and which carried many articles
on aspects of this crime. Vanity Fair’s Graydon Carter wound
up and pitched this “j’accuse” down the middle but few of his
colleagues swung at it.
This quote deserves to be etched on the wall of the wellprotected
New York Stock Exchange (NYSE).
It can fairly be said that the chain of catastrophic
bets made over the past decade by a few hundred
bankers may well turn out to be the greatest nonviolent
crime against humanity in history. They’ve
brought the world’s economy to its knees, lost tens
of millions of people their jobs and their homes,
and trashed the retirement plans of a generation,
and they could drive an estimated 200 million people
worldwide into dire poverty.
In other words, never before have so few, done
so much, to so many. [Emphasis mine.]
Harvard Business School Professor, Shoshanna Zuboff,
goes even further comparing some Wall Street financiers to the
Third Reich’s Adolph Eichmann in the sense that there was a
“banality of evil” in both eras.
“The economic crisis is not the Holocaust,” she writes, “but
I would argue it derives from the same business model that
routinely produced a similar kind of remoteness and thoughtlessness
by a widespread abrogation of individual moral judgment.
As we learn more about the behavior within our financial
institutions, we see that just about everybody accepted a
reckless system that rewards transactions but rejects responsibility
for the consequences of those transactions.”