Wednesday, September 24, 2008

A Free Market Wall Street Creature His Whole Life


That's how Robert Gross describes Henry Paulson for NPR on Tuesday's ATC. NPR seems to have scoured the landscape for someone with enough chutzpah to sing the praises of Czar Paulson. Voila, they found Gross of Newsweek who thinks Paulson is the "right man at the right time."

Here's Gross' Paulson (or maybe just gross Paulson):
  • "...he spent 32 years on Wall Street working for Goldman Sachs - which is really the elite among the elite of investment banks. So he understands the capital markets, what's going on on Wall Street."
  • "Paulson has the tools, the experience, the contacts, and the instincts to hammer out these kind of deals involving financial firms."
  • "...worked in the Nixon whitehouse...Harvard MBA...investment banker..."
  • "...very disciplined, hard working, hard charging...focused on execution, details, getting deals done."
  • "...has a great amount of stamina."
Compare this homage to Salon Radio's interview with Richard Sheehan, who tells Glenn Greenwald,
"Paulson was among those that were creating the problem, rather than warning about the problem. In his role as CEO of Goldman Sachs, Goldman -- under his watch -- created a whole lot of CDOs [collateralized debt obligations] that now are under the heading of 'toxic waste.'"

8 comments:

Anonymous said...

It's actually much worse than simply slanting things to make Paulson's experience on Wall Street sound like a positive.

Paulson has a clear conflict of interest in making decisions regarding bailouts in this case.
NPR is completely mum about that.

Propaganda comes in many different forms. Some of it involves mis- and dis-information. But failure to disclose relevant information when that information is readily available is also propaganda.

The critical thing that people have to bear in mind about all this stuff is that, unlike FOX, NPR is forbidden from propagandizing, since part of their budget still comes from Congress.

So when they fail to disclose information that is readily available (from a 2-second internet search) they are breaking the law, plain and simple.

Anonymous said...

Paulson's conflict of interest

Anonymous said...

Try that again
Paulson's conflict of interest

Porter Melmoth said...

The current highway robbery in broad daylight now going on couldn't have been entrusted to a more worthy highwayman than H. Paulson & Co.

(Notice how these guys all have the archaic 'power' names from the past: Henry, George, Richard, Kenny-Boy...)

Anonymous said...

Before last week, probably like a lot of other people, I thought Paulson's first name was "Pat", who was on the Smothers Brothers Comedy Hour.

If this did not have the potential to cause a recession, it certainly would be comical, what with all these Wall Street "Free marketeers" running around the streets of DC looking for a handout.

Porter Melmoth said...

Indeed, if only Pat Paulson HAD been elected, the world would now be a perpetually happier place...

This morning NPR actually allowed a (conservative) economist to say that he didn't like Paulson's No-Strings Plan (TM) one bit, and if Wall Street gets to enjoy their profits, they should also be responsible for the mistakes they make. Not rocket science to those of us who are paying attention, but rather radical of NPR to let someone say it.

Like all the other cowardly media outlets though, NPR's playing it safe so that their asses will be covered in the event of any surprise.

Porter Melmoth said...

PS: Thanks for the link to that great Jim Shea story.

Anonymous said...

Perhaps they should call it the "G-Strings Plan", because that's where all our $1 trillion tax dollars will undoubtedly end up if we give them to these Wall Street clowns.

And I'd have to say that the only reason NPR allowed comments that criticized the Paulson plan was that there are LOTS of (real) Conservatives saying the same thing right now (more Conservatives, it seems, than liberals, at least in Congress).

If it had been just one guy saying it, they would never have allowed it. In fact, they would never have had him on the program in the first place.

They certainly never covered (not in any detail, at least) the Conservatives opposed to the invasion of Iraq (yes, there were some, in my own family in fact)

But they were all too happy to cover the cheerleaders (both liberal and conservative)

That's really the biggest problem with ALL the mainstream media today (of which NPR has become a part).

They are not willing to allow any viewpoints that lie outside the "mainstream" -- for fear of offending their corporate sponsors.

That those viewpoints may actually be correct, as they were on Iraq, does not even enter into the decision about whether to cover them.

If they are too hot to handle (eg, Downing Street Minutes), they are simply banned from the airwaves.

"let someone else cover it. We need those corporate dollars to pay our $200K+ per year salaries".