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Wall Street's Economic Crimes Against Humanity

By refusing to consider the consequences of their actions, those who created the financial crisis exemplify the banality of evil, writes Shoshana Zuboff

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Loose lips

My mother drilled the basics of English grammar into me and my sister growing up. And I was really lucky to have a fantastic English lit professor in College. I'm also one who thinks that journalism, at it's best, needs to be about delivering a public service as much as it is about "ratings."

And so I must say that I am quite disappointed to see very reputable outfits like Business Week resort to lowly hyperbole when discussing the current economic slowdown. Take this headline from today's Businessweek.com for instance: "London's Commercial Real Estate Freeze."

Freeze - that's a pretty serious word. It means locked up, not moving, not available, shut down, etc. Some markets today are frozen, and so it's well within the realm of possibility that London's commercial real estate market could also be. But it's not, not according to the article anyway. No, the article offers a different, more nuanced, story that's less, shall we say, sensationalist: "...with funding increasingly hard to come by and fears that demand for office space will continue to drop, many ... projects have now been delayed or shelved." Many projects delayed, meaning some have not been delayed, which is hardly consistent with the notion of something being "frozen," and some shelved.

I titled this entry "loose lips" because, as the famous saying goes, they sink ships. We are all in the same boat, and the media, especially leading outlets like Business Week, have a responsibility to not add unnecessarily to people's fears. Wouldn't a more responsible title be something like "London's Commercial Real Estate Hit by Economic Downturn"?

Gmail down - oh stop whining

Remember the saying "you get what you pay for." Well, Gmail (and Google) have trashed that. I've been using the service for years, and can only remember 2 outages that lasted more than a couple minutes, which is one heck of a lot better than most providers, free or otherwise.

So all y'all (yeah, this transplanted Yankee called you "y'all" - you got a problem with that?) that are giving Google crap over this latest outage (which, btw, is over for me at 9:14 EST) maybe you just need to simmer down. Everyone loves to laugh when the giant stumbles, but any reasonable look at Google's service availability puts them at the top of the heap. AND it's free - so please callate.

Please, lordy, let GM and Chrysler go into Bankruptcy

I find it amazingly bazaar and absurd to see this government waste such immense resources - in money and time - trying to "save" GM and Chrysler. If I had a nickel for every time I've heard a politician pontificate on how "we are a nation of laws," I'd be rich. But when the rubber hits the road (sorry), we chuck the laws and reinvent the wheel (hey, not bad, two crappy puns in one sentence).

Why, lord, please tell me, if the bankruptcy laws are good enough for Enron, and WorldCom and Nortel, Conseco, Texaco and United Airlines and so on and so on, why are they not sufficient for GM and Chrysler? This is such a WTF moment. It's mind-boggling. And it's also totally different from Lehman, whose bankruptcy caused banks to stop lending to one another (although, I have to say that a big part of me wonders why, after Lehman went down, the government didn't round up all the GOOD banks and hand them a few billion to lend to one another, and let all the crazy-risk-taking bone-headed Wall Street banks go under).

I really love AdFreak

I love AdFreak

This is too funny...