http://narcosphere.narconews.com/thefield/banality-outrageEverybody’s "outraged," the media tells us, except that, um… we’re not.
The latest outrage-du-jour, we are told by a very loud chorus of powerful media and politicians, is the revelation that the troubled financial giant AIG - recipient of $170 billion in bailout funds and loans – has devoted 0.1 percent of that amount to $165 million in previously contracted bonuses for its executives.
Yes, it's wrong. And like most of capitalism, it's unfair. But does it surprise, or represent anything different than what has been happening for decades? Ask yourself: "Am I really 'outraged' by this piece of news?"
To note that corporate culture’s longstanding overpayment to executives, and the corresponding disparity with the pay for those who do the heavy lifting in the workplace, has ill-served society (I remember writing a paper on it in high school in the 1970s as it pertained to excessive oil company executive salaries) is not exactly a new or novel concept.
This is a brilliant discussion of how highly educated and wealthy media elite
think they know what working class and poor people think, but really have no clue. Then a nice smackdown of the liberal blogger elite, along with the best defense of Secretary Geithner I have seen:
The usual gaggle of bloggers that describe themselves as “progressive” have the nobs turned up to eleven on the AIG bonuses, and for them – in tandem with the big media correspondents – they want a scapegoat and are calling for the head of Treasury Secretary Tim Geithner – who was confirmed for that post on January 26, just fifty days ago. Chris Bowers at Open Left ended a blog entry this afternoon instructing the President: “Fire Geithner.” (I don’t mean to pick on Chris – he should take it as a kind of compliment that I still do peruse his headlines and read some of his posts long after I have given up on bothering with the predictable screeds of the Hamshers and Sirotas and Krugmans out there in whose tar pit he wades.)
When Obama nominated Geithner to Treasury I was glad for two main reasons: One, if not him, it would have likely been Larry Summers and, two, Geithner – despite his evident talents – never personally chose the big money corporate jobs offered him throughout his career. He’s always worked outside of the private sector, for less than his pay scale. He’s a public servant by nature, not a revolving door type (see Rubin, Robert, Secretary of Treasury under Clinton, Bill, for an example of the latter).
And I don’t see how anybody can make an accurate judgment on the job Geithner has done so far just 50 days into a flight that must cover a distance of 18 months to two years before you or they or I will know whether the moves he’s been making now will land the airplane in the terrain of economic turnaround.
And I can’t honestly say that I respect anybody that does claim to know that, because of the complexity of the problem created not just by George W. Bush’s policies, but by those of Reagan, Bush I and Clinton, too.
God, ain't that the truth. Finally, I thought everyone should know what truly outrages Al:
I have felt outraged at key moments in recent years by various human events: Like learning, in 1999, that President Bill Clinton, when he came to Mexico for an “anti-drug” summit, stayed in the mansion of a drug trafficking banker (some similar outrage seems to be sweeping France right now over the same thing). But when something outrages me, I try to do something about it that goes beyond mere expressions of my angst via public tantrum (as I did then). Other things that have outraged me in recent years were the march to war after September 11, 2001, and the subsequent revelations that torture was suddenly back in the Pentagon’s playbook… I was outraged by the US complicity in the attempted 2002 coup d’etat against an elected government in Venezuela and continue to experience outrage that 12 million undocumented immigrants in the United States are kept under inhumane conditions by the refusal of Republicans and Democrats in Congress, as recently as 2007, to gather up enough votes to put them on a path to citizenship. We all encounter matters that shock our consciences.
Indeed.
Oh, and one more addition, FULL of irony:
Nope, this is no more than the daily poutrage given an extra echo chamber by the very same corporate media that also overpays its executives while underpaying everyone else. Next week they’ll all be expressing their “outrage” about something else, and assigning it to the rest of us that simply aren’t shocked nor surprised nor blaming those that didn’t cause it – and are in fact acting to do something about it – for a bad situation that has been decades in the making.
For the rest of us, life and organizing go on. And we’ll look back at all this talk about our supposed “outrage” just as we have throughout the past year at the other manifestations of Chicken Littledom and faux-progressivism: just another tantrum by the usual suspects that got a day or two of news cycle from the corporate media led, itself, by greedy and overpaid executives.
Now, what was it that we are supposed to be outraged about today?
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