And David Gregory is a massive tool.
I have never been a fan of NBC’s Meet the Press. Very few novel or insightful statements have ever been made on that program because of the nature of the guests. When Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner or Joint Chiefs Chairman Mike Mullen appear (as the latter did today) one can pretty much anticipate every canned-sounding response to come out of their mouths. Such is the business of interviewing members of presidential administrations who are essentially cogs in a well-oiled public relations machine. Even when opponents of the administration or ruling party are featured, their criticisms are also frustratingly platitudinous. You see it in the back-and-forth between Democratic and Republican politicians and liberal and conservative pundits which are fraught with shallow exchanges that reflect the impoverished nature of the political discourse. And it’s even worse when the moderator is in on it.
During the latter half of today’s show, there was former Fed Chair Alan Greenspan, New York City Mayor Michael Bloomberg, and Pennsylvania Governor Ed Rendell. David Gregory was hosting. (I’m not one of those people who believes in a global Zionist banking and media conspiracy, but when you have four Jews and only four Jews talking about the economy on the major American Sunday news talk show, you can’t act surprised when those people come out of the woodwork.)
At one point Gregory quoted David Brooks’ most recent column in the New York Times:
The psychological war between business and the Obama administration also is taking a toll. Business types think the administration is stuffed with clueless professors. Some administration officials think corporate honchos are free-market hypocrites prowling for corporate welfare.
Gregory then added his own bullshit:
How did things get so bad? Because a lot of people in the business community say a big part of the problem is there's nobody who works in the administration that’s actually run anything, that's actually run a business, and that's contributing to their attitude and their policies.
The idea that’s circulating in the press these days is that the Obama administration is anti-business. It’s a crazy idea, but it’s out there. And not only is it out there, but here’s David Gregory repeating this garbage with an assist from David Brooks. Who but the American media or a deranged conservative could look at Obama’s multi-trillion dollar giveaway of taxpayer money to the private sector in the form of loans with 0% interest, loan guarantees, straight subsidies, stimulus spending, and a health care reform act that will necessitate a massive of transferal of wealth from the public to private HMOs, and conclude that this is anti-business activity? I suppose it could be said that the recently enacted financial reform legislation qualifies as “anti-business,” but when one considers the watered down nature of that pathetic bill, it is immediately realized that overcoming its constraints will be no great trial for the criminal bankster assholes who run this country by proxy. That’s the problem with the media: they are easily manipulated into false narratives that corrupt the public debate, so that when something or crazy is alleged by enough politicians or government officials (e.g., “death panels”), it suddenly becomes a serious claim dutifully repeated by media puppets pundits.
Let’s see what Alan Greenspeen had to say in response:
I can’t answer that question, and the reason I can’t is I've never seen anything like this. I’ve been in and out of Wall Street since 1949, and I’ve never seen the type of animosity between government and Wall Street. And I’m not sure where it comes from, but I suspect it’s got to do with a general schism in this society which is really becoming ever more destructive. We’ve got to change it.
Is Greenspan for real? So the animosity people have toward Wall Street has nothing to do with the financial crisis, but “a general schism” between Americans? How does that even make sense? If there’s anything that unites people on the left and right, it’s blaming the fucking banks and Greenspan himself who are the ones actually responsible for this mess. What’s that? Mayor Bloomberg wants to correct me?
The public is upset. If they haven’t lost their job, they know somebody that has. If they haven't lost their house, they know somebody that has. What do you do? When something’s wrong, it’s government’s job to fix it, it must be government that’s responsible for causing it. Government wants to stay in office, they look for somebody else to blame. And it's much too simplistic to say the banks did everything wrong. We all wanted to expand the economy, we all wanted to expand home ownership. We all wanted Wall Street to create the money so we could have all these mortgages. And then invariably that leads to excess, and then invariably that leads to a correction, more violent with time. And then we have to look for villains. And we’ve got to stop all this. One of government’s jobs is to promote the economy and to promote American commerce and finance and the arts around the world. And this constant tearing each other apart—we can sit down and we can say, “What did we do wrong?” and “How are we going to fix it?” But always pointing fingers and finding fault with everybody, we need to find solutions.
You have to give Michael Bloomberg some major credit here. The man has balls. Balls he should be strung up by for even making these remarks, but balls nonetheless. Here’s the eighth richest guy in America whose net worth as of 2008 was $20 billion, who founded a news organization that caters to big business essentially saying that we have to stop pointing fingers at the big banks because there’s plenty of blame to go around. And David Gregory just sat there like the douche he is, when he could’ve turned to Alan Greenspan and asked, “What about lowering interest rates to less than two percent for a prolonged period of time after 9/11, Mr. Chairman? How much responsibility do you personally bear for the creation of the housing (debt) bubble and its subsequent bursting?” That would’ve been the greatest question in the history of the show and David Gregory had a prime opportunity to ask it. But he didn’t, because he’s a big pussy and isn’t interested in catching the purveyors of conventional wisdom off-guard.
But I must admit, the words of conventional wisdom do have a relaxing quality about them. Maybe that’s why Americans are so tamed by it. See, the American people are like a fat person’s stomach. A stomach doesn’t like food that’s bad for the body, but very often it’s expected to digest it anyway because the person calling the shots likes three-bean burritos, nachos with a seven-layer dip, jalapenos, and beer (in that order). So the person in charge really does a number on the stomach by eating all this crap and the stomach gets uneasy and angry and rumbles on occasion. Whenever corrective action is needed, the fatty takes a big swig out of a pink bottle to force some conventional wisdom on the restless mass to sooth it temporarily. But rather than learn the lesson that one ought not to force feed the stomach in that way, he figures that as long as he has that pink bottle in his medicine cabinet, he can always calm the rumblings when they arise. Problem is, you can only wail away on your stomach for so long until you shit your guts out.
- Max
