So Much Good News on The Times Front Page! If You’re Really, Really Rich.
by tristero
Ever since Marie Corfield’s confrontation with Gov. Chris Christie this fall over the state’s education cuts became a YouTube classic, she has received a stream of vituperative e-mails and Facebook postings.
“People I don’t even know are calling me horrible names,” said Ms. Corfield, an art teacher who had pleaded the case of struggling teachers. “The mantra is that the problem is the unions, the unions, the unions.”
Across the nation, a rising irritation with public employee unions is palpable, as a wounded economy has blown gaping holes in state, city and town budgets, and revealed that some public pension funds dangle perilously close to bankruptcy. In California, New York, Michigan and New Jersey, states where public unions wield much power and the culture historically tends to be pro-labor, even longtime liberal political leaders have demanded concessions — wage freezes, benefit cuts and tougher work rules.
Page 1, Column 1, directly underneath the previous article:
…the truth is that there have been surprisingly few career fatalities among New York developers, even though they have lost billions of investor dollars on overpriced real estate and have littered the city with unfinished apartment buildings. While a homeowner who lost a house to foreclosure would find it difficult to borrow for years, developers who defaulted on enormous loans have still been able to attract money.
The reasons, experts say, are that there is still plenty of money floating around and that the market has a very short memory.
Now, an editorial board that was awake would put these two stories together and pen a fiery screed pointing out that the good citizens of these United States need, at the very least, to express the same amount of outrage at the disgraceful coddling of these Trumped up real estate scuzzballs as they do at the occasional excesses of public employee unions.
A responsible editorial board would also speculate as to the reasons why Marie Corfield is the object of such vituperation while the sleazy land moguls are wasting time, natural resources, taxpayer dollars, and valuable real estate without suffering many consequences, either publicly or financially. Especially financially.
So I’m taking bets. Do you think the Times will put it together and write such an editorial? Often, they have been extremely good in the past few years about mincing no words when it came to the criminal abuses of the Bush administration, the madness of the teabaggers, and similar issues.
My answer: No. Consciously or unconsciously, it is in the Times’ financial interest – at least at the executive level – to bust unions and stroke real estate developers. So I think the Times editorial board and all its op-ed commentators – with the possible exception of Paul Krugman, who has bigger things to worry about and bring to our attention – will ignore this striking juxtaposition of news stories.
By the way, the full stories are worth a read, especially for the striking differences in style. The one on the unions is standard he said/she said, with a carefully hedged sympathy for the union employees, at least in spots. The real estate article was almost entirely written from the standpoint of the moguls; one of these guys describes himself as a “victim” of the economy, the poor fellow. One question never gets asked or answered in the article: Where did all that “blind” capital come from that the banks, are lending to these creeps, following capitalism’s natural laws? My understanding is that, just a couple years ago, the banks had nary a cent to lend. Now they have oodles of dough to blow. Where’d it come from? Did someone, you, know, give the banks a zillion dollars or something with virtually no strings attached, or even public oversight?