Danny Schechter - ColdType

word to Baker’s book on the crisis, Plunder and Blunder – sound
familiar? – “the history of the last decade is a history of asset
bubbles. The pattern repeats itself again and again, the same
millennial rhetoric, the same crooked insider behavior…”
In this book anyway, I won’t be glossing over that “same
crooked insider behavior” but spelling it out with as many
dirty details as I can assemble. It will take others to fill in the
many blanks. Reporters on the outside can only do so much.
5. Insiders wanted
We need investigations by insiders who know where the bodies
are buried, and in many cases, not yet buried. We need to
engage professionals like former New York State’s Attorney
General, turned Governor, Eliot Spitzer who had denounced
predatory lending crimes just before he was outed in a sex
scandal. It seems clear that you need people who have been on
Wall Street to see through the tricks on Wall Street.
We need to know which politicians took their payoffs and
did/do Wall Street’s bidding.
We need details, documents and proof.
Then, we need a jailout, not just a bailout.
We need to remember Balzac’s insight: “Behind every great
fortune lies a great crime.” But he was not the only great
thinker with insight.
“In a closed society where everybody’s guilty, the only crime
is getting caught,” wrote Hunter S. Thompson, “In a world of
thieves, the only final sin is stupidity.” And that does not just
apply to the perpetrators.
We need, most of all, a sense of outrage. I am hoping that
this own work will help build that sense of outrage with this
crime of all time.
As Robert Johnson of the Roosevelt Institute argues, we
need outrage if the financial system is to be reformed, and if
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