Unbelievable. Not the news that Goldman Sachs used its no-strings-attached government money from Hank Paulson’s bank industry bailout last fall to earn inconceivable amounts of money in a titanically underhanded manner, but the fact that mainstream media heavyweight MSNBC would feature such a raw exposé as this one:
The quick version (quicker than watching the still-quick seven-minute video, that is) is this: The video shows Dylan Ratigan, the former host of MSNBC’s Fast Money, who prominently left the show last March in a very public and controversial row, and who announced right about the same time that he was planning to do some deep investigation of Goldman Sachs’s activities during the financial meltdown, appearing on the network’s Morning Meeting show about a week ago wearing a cape and top hat and bearing a magic wand, and presenting a segment titled “Do you believe in magic?” in which he explains how Goldman Sachs performed the “magic trick” of making over three billion dollars in three months.
He opens by announcing, “What we are going to attempt to do today, through magic, is to show how a single investment bank can make three billion dollars in cash in three months’ time and create absolutely no value as unemployment skyrockets, foreclosures soar, and the dollar collapses.”
Near the end he paints Goldman Sachs and also the U.S. government in explicitly criminal terms when he describes last year’s $700 billion bank bailout by saying, “The crime that was committed was committed, in my opinion, by Treasury Secretary Paulson and then-Fed Governor Geithner, who as custodians of America’s wealth made the decision to allow the use of that wealth, the gift of that wealth, to one investment bank, so that that investment bank could accumulate power over all the assets in America, and they themselves could perpetuate the system that they benefit from. . . . It is black magic. That’s how they did it. And we can stop it by simply distributing the truth to everybody in this country and demanding clawbacks for the money that has been stolen from us.”
Yes, this distinctly echoes Michael Moore’s Capitalism: A Love Story, and also, in its hints of an economically promethean motivation behind Goldman Sachs’s actions, Rolling Stone‘s astonishing takedown of the bank earlier this year. But I’m still reeling from having heard such sentiments expressed so forcefully on MSNBC.
I’m also grateful for it, and am hoping that this televised channeling of the real truth and its proper attendant outrage doesn’t prove to be just another helping of bread and circuses courtesy of the Great American Spectacle Machine.