Quote of the day goes either to Bloomberg or The Epicurean Dealmaker. It’s a tough one.
Bloomberg finds Morgan Stanley CEO James Gorman saying this about Greg Smith’s famous Goldman Sachs kissoff in The New York Times:
Morgan Stanley’s Gorman said he told staff not to circulate the op-ed.
“I was surprised that anyone would run an op-ed piece based upon the view of a single employee,” Gorman said today at an event in New York hosted by Fortune magazine.
Right. Gorman would never question giving a senior executive a platform to pop off about anything. But a worker’s viewpoint doesn’t count, even when it’s been fact-checked.
The Epicurean Dealmaker says this on Twitter:
All this circling of wagons around Goldman and Blankfein by fellow plutocrats reveals the real threat is from within: the 0.99% vs the 0.01%
It’s close, but I’ll go with TED.
— With the stunning news that This American Life is retracting its episode on Apple and Foxconn after finding that Mike Daisey misled them about fabrications in his story, it’s worth noting that Ira Glass and TAL are showing how a news organization should act when hit with a scandal like this.
Jack Shafer writes that “It’s almost impossible for an editor to fact-check a contributor who lies.”
Particularly when those lies are about things that have actually taken place—just not in Daisey’s presence, as he had claimed.
Marketplace’s Rob Schmitz, the reporter who uncovered the problems in Daisey’s story (and deserves much praise for it), tells the NYT’s Brian Stelter that:
“What makes this a little complicated is that the things Daisey lied about are things that have actually happened in China: Workers making Apple products have been poisoned by hexane. Apple’s own audits show the company has caught underage workers at a handful of its suppliers. These things are rare, but together, they form an easy-to-understand narrative about Apple.”
— David Carr writes that Apple is now worth more than the entire U.S. retail sector, although the sourcing is enough to strike fear into the heart of a business editor (emphasis mine):
According to a post on Wednesday in Zero Hedge, Apple’s market capitalization, about $550 billion, now tops the entire combined market cap of retail in America as measured by Standard and Poor’s.
Carr points to Alan Mutter in noting that the advertising revenue of the entire newspaper industry is just two-thirds that of Google alone:
Sort of a moment, when you think about it. It wasn’t that long ago when Web-based enterprises were considered an ancillary extension of brick-and-mortar franchises. Now they seem to be taking apart legacy businesses, brick by brick.
I just listened to TAL's retraction of Mike Daisey and unless it was mentioned during the first 5 mins that I missed, there was no mention about the timing of the exposé coinciding with the exact same day as Apple's release of the new iPad. It seems like a coincidence, but an uncomfortable one, that Apple's most persuasive critic was publicly discredited on the same day as Apple's major release of an upgrade of the very product featured in the exposé of the exposé. Not sure how to regard it.
#1 Posted by MB, CJR on Sun 18 Mar 2012 at 01:36 PM
The interesting thing about the Smith op-ed is that there's not much disputing the nature of the vampire bank beasts. There's an attitude of "Well yeah, everybody knows the banks rip off their clients, that's what we call making money. Capitalism b*tches!" Or as the guy on cnbc put it on Charlie Pierce's tv:
http://www.esquire.com/blogs/politics/goldman-sachs-op-ed-daily-rundown-7358893
""If the headline is that Wall Street is greedy, Chuck, that's not much of a headline, is it? Goldman or any other Wall Street firm is not running a charity or a civic organization. They're in the business of making money. The details of how they do it may be unpleasant to many people, but it shouldn't be news that there's greed on Wall Street."
Well, thanks, "Willie." Apparently, any organization except the Red Cross and the Knights of Columbus can swindle as many people as possible, bankrupting small businesses, wrecking half of the economy while stealing most of the rest and do so full in the knowledge that what they are doing is "not news." Some of the people who found the way Goldman made its money "unpleasant" were congressional investigators but that wasn't news, either.""
And then there's Becky.
"And I hate to say that this is just a disgruntled employee, because I don't know enough about it. I wish I knew more about it. I wish I could tell you about what was happening on the inside."
Yes, if this country only had, say, a television network the sole function of which was to, you know, report on the financial industry, we would be much better off."
Oh those terrible
whistleblowersdisgruntled employees. So what's going on? Why is the media and the government basically allowing the banks to claim "Crime does pay, clients should lose money, and that's all a good thing. These banks aren't charities, you know."Here's Kevin Drum riffing on Felix Salmon:
http://m.motherjones.com/kevin-drum/2012/03/our-financial-stockholm-syndrome
"[The story of the finance lobby is] about the way that lobby—with the eager support of a resurgent conservative movement and a handful of powerful backers—was able to fundamentally change the way we think about the world. Call it a virus. Call it a meme. Call it the power of a big idea. Whatever you call it, for three decades they had us convinced that the success of the financial sector should be measured not by how well it provides financial services to actual consumers and corporations, but by how effectively financial firms make money for themselves. It sounds crazy when you put it that way, but stripped to its bones, that's what they pulled off...
the finance industry successfully convinced everyone that deregulating finance was not only safe, but self-evidently good for the entire economy, Wall Street and Main Street alike. It's what Simon Johnson, an MIT economics professor and former chief economist for the IMF, calls "intellectual capture." Considering what's happened over the past couple of years, we might better call it Stockholm syndrome."
Goldman Sachs and others can do no wrong because if Goldman Sachs does it, it must not be wrong. Scarey times folks. Scarey times.
#2 Posted by Thimbles, CJR on Sun 18 Mar 2012 at 02:10 PM
Another day... Another commie Fairy Tale evaporating in the face of prevarication.
#3 Posted by padikiller, CJR on Mon 19 Mar 2012 at 01:08 PM