If you don’t know, it’s you
Dan Gillmor had a great column in the San Jose Mercury News about how businessmen and politicians continue to demonstrate just how great their contempt for the unwashed masses is with their unbelievable insistence that nothing is wrong in the business world and that it’s just a coincidence that insiders made huge fortunes while the investor-on-the-street (as opposed to the investor-on-the-Street) got fleeced. The whole thing stinks to high heaven, and politicians and pundits can jawbone all they want to about investor confidence returning and the market finally hitting bottom, but as long as they treat the common investor like the only poker player who doesn’t know who the sucker at the table is, we’re not coming back.
Meanwhile, evidence mounts that the Resident is part of the problem, not part of the solution. For weeks, administration officials have been berating companies that move offshore to avoid tax liabilities, as much as calling them traitors. Eric Alterman’s MSNBC blog points to a story on the New York Daily News site about how Harken Energy, Dubya’s cash register, set up a subsidiary in the Cayman Islands to shelter the money they expected to flow from their dalliance with Bahrain while Dubya was a director. Impeachment, anyone?
Posted at 12:01 AM