Saturday, April 11, 2009

She Watch Channel Zero

By Restless [Originally on goofyblog 4.30.07]

With good reason, Danny Schechter writes in A Media Scandal a Day Keeps the Ratings in Play, here, that there is wayyyyyyyy too much coverage on which prositute which official met last night and no coverage on what really counts — wide-spread corruption and incompetence in our institutions that can and will affect millions of us.

Who cares about the sex and these guys??? Here’s just a sample of what you need to care about:

Who is looking into the real accounting of our ever expanding wars of terror, with the ongoing squandering of government resources and the transfer of billions from the public treasury into private hands? We know that war profiteers are greedy, but who is supposed to be watching the public purse?

Even when the Feds are paying attention, the agencies they monitor resist efforts at accountability and transparency. The scammers at Homeland Security are particularly egregious in this regard. The GAO, the agency charged with overseeing government spending complains that they get a runaround and resistance when they try to track their expenditures.

And what about the larger manipulations of the stock market? Bloomberg reported the other day about trading of upwards of $6 BILLION in PHANTOM shares that don’t exist. Companies are being allowed to buy back their shares with debt at record levels.

The American dollar has been depressed in value to help big companies sell worldwide. Its drop in value may drive overseas tourists to the poor house but it enriches those who make stuff in low wage countries. It’s also a factor in inflating the market and driving up the Dow to ever higher levels.

The Street.com recently carried an interview with money maestro Jeremy Grantham who manages Dick Cheney’s portfolios and worries that all the debt that’s also driving up the Dow can trigger a worldwide bust, “The more leverage you take, the better you do; the better you do, the more leverage you take. A critical part of a bubble is the reinforcement you get for your very optimistic view from those around you.”

This delusion fed by euphoria and media hype is precarious to say the least reports Brett Arends, “Grantham says we are now seeing the first worldwide bubble in history covering all asset classes.

Everything is in bubble territory, he says.”

And bubbles can be counted on to burst. That’s what bubbles do. And when they do, there will be hell to pay. That’s history, not a mystery. But this, at least for now, is NOT a scandal since everyone is doing it and few in the media are treating it as a massive mess in the making.

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